Originally posted by YUPAPA
We are pleased to announce that the new improved version of our control panel and hosting technologies are ready for release. This latest release has been built on the basis of knowledge that we have learnt over the past months and the valuable comments obtained from our customers. These changes will bring greater speed, resilience and functionality to our already feature rich hosting products.
The migration to the new system is scheduled for Sunday 19th August 2001. Web sites and incoming email will be unaffected during this upgrade and a non-working day has been chosen for the work to minimise disruption to other services.
Control panel and FTP access will cease in the early hours of Sunday morning. Whilst it is hoped that the upgrade will be complete by midday, customers are advised that these services at worst may be unavailable for up to 12 hours. The availability of POP3 mail collection will be intermittent. We stress that the availability of your web sites will not be affected in any way and that you will
not loose any email during these changes.
For your information detailed information of the upgrades due to be carried out can be found below.
NETWORK FORMAT
Each server will be equipped with two network interfaces, one carrying packets destined for the Internet and the other being connected to a private LAN. This will provide a highly secure network for inter server communication and ensure that full bandwidth for Internet traffic is always available to each server.
This private LAN will initially be operating only in Telehouse but will soon be extended to our facility via an encrypted VPN to provide secure communication.
A hardware based firewall will also be installed in Telehouse offering further enhanced security features.
SERVER FORMAT
The new system sees the implementation of separate FTP, mail, control panel and web servers. There will be a primary and backup incoming mail server, a dedicated POP3 server and a dedicated control panel server and FTP server.
The primary incoming mail server will be housed in our rack at Telehouse in London whilst the secondary incoming mail server will be hosted in our new data centre. This configuration ensures that mail sent to any domain on our network will never be rejected as there will always be a mail server available to service requests.
FTP, POP3, control panel and UNIX web servers will continue to be hosted in Telehouse where they can enjoy high capacity Internet connections and full network redundancy.
Each web server will be a self contained unit with its hosted sites residing on local hard disk drives. This ensures that each web server can continue to serve sites even if it looses contact with its control servers for any reason.
AUTHENTICATION
Our system currently uses standard UNIX password files to authenticate users for both FTP and POP3 mail accounts. As we have progressed and the number of accounts on the system has risen, the time is takes for these password files to be constructed has increased. The point was reached some weeks ago when it was
no longer practical or safe to rebuild the user database each time an account was added, rather the password database is built at set times. This translates to their being a delay in new accounts becoming active and accessible as well as for password changes to take effect.
The new system sees the introduction of a SQL based authentication scheme which will allow instant activation of newly created accounts as well as real time password updates. This method of authentication is also far more efficient in its use of system resources for authenticating users and so will reduce server load.
ERROR & PARK PAGES
Since each site will now be hosted on various different servers, it
is not possible to implement a reliable error page and park page system. It is with regret therefore that these vital improvements must come at the expense of the error page and park page features. Error and park pages will be set to the standard web server ones.
CONTROL PANEL SECURITY
The control panel has sophisticated inbuilt security features to protect it against attacks. It has however been learnt over time that the existing system is a little sensitive and some users have been locked out of their panels incorrectly. The new control panel sports a refined protection system which should put an end to these unexpected control panel lockouts.
MORE FLEXIBLE mySQL ADMINISTRATION
The mySQL administrator has been expanded to allow the use of SQL text files to import and export data into and out of databases.
NAME SERVERS
Personal name servers which work with .uk domain names are currently included in the account. However some top level domain names including .com, .net and .org cannot be used. This new system upgrade will see the provision on anonymous name servers.
SIMLIFIED SYSTEM PATHS
Customers are currently advised to use an environment variable to reference the path to their web space in scripts. This has many advantages for us but it has been noted that many customers find it confusing. We will therefore be moving away from this configuration and will release the real file system path to your web space. The existing environment variables will continue to work on existing
hosting accounts so you will not need to alter your existing scripts
In the weeks following these upgrades we will be conducting a customer survey.
The feedback we obtain from this will identify improvements to be made to the control panel and also finalise the format of our Windows 2000 hosting.
We thank you for your time and continued support.
Kind Regards,
Yupapa
Hope the new plans go down well.
