HostedFX Now Offers Domain Registration

Posted on July 26, 2007 by admin

As of 26-Jul-07 HostedFX Web Hosting now offers domain name registration for the small cost of $8.95/year. All domains can be easily managed via our customer control panel – you have complete control of any domain registered through HostedFX.

For New Clients
New clients may register a domain name with HostedFX when ordering any hosting package. Even if you do not wish to purchase hosting, you may just to order a <a href=”http://www.hostedfx.com/clients/order.php?step=2&domainonly=true” target=”_blank”>domain only</a>. Please note that all clients will receive a free domain name with any hosting package that is paid annually.

For Exisiting Clients
Existing clients may make use of our domain registration services to transfer their existing domain to HostedFX. This way, you may control all aspects of your domain name and your web hosting package in one place. Domain transfers cost just $8.95. As with new clients, you may also make use of our domain only order process if you wish to register additional domains.

This is a big step forward for HostedFX that displays our desire to constantly progress and evolve as a web hosting company in order to provide our customers with the best possible experience.

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General Security/Performance Upgrades

Posted on July 24, 2007 by admin

Over the past 24 hours we have added some extra safety precautions to our server in order to secure the protection and integrity of all our clients and their websites. In addition, we have made a few tweaks to ensure the performance of our server is as high as possible. The measures taken are as follows.

- CHKRootKit – a simple program that detects and hacker software and notifies us if any has been detected via email.
- RootKit Hunter – scanning tool to ensure our system does not have any backdoors or exploits.
- Securing and Upgrading of SSH Server – increases security during ssh connections failures and automatically blocks the attackers ip in the firewall.
- System Integrity Monitor – 24×7 Internal Monitor that checks all services and restarts them if they are down.
- SPRI – changes the priority of different processes in accordance to level of importance, hence increasing server performance.
- Secure and Optimize Apache (HTTP)- tweaks apache to perform better, and prevent unnecessary information from being easily seen. Also installed mod_security to restrict web attacks.
- MySQL optimization – increases performance of MySQL.
- host.conf hardenening – prevent dns lookup poisoning & spoofing protection.
- nsswitch.conf modification – secure and optimize DNS lookups.
- sysctl.conf hardening – helps prevent TCP/IP stack from syn-flood attacks and other network abuses.
- Shell Fork Bomb/Memory Hog Protection – prevents a user logged into a shell from consuming all the resources on the server.
- TMP Directory hardening ( /tmp, /var/tmp, /dev/shm) – helps prevents execution of malicious scripts.

As always, HostedFX is always striving to provide the best service possible for you.

Posted in Security, Software, Upgrades | 6 Comments

cPanel 11 Stable Release Schedule

Posted on June 26, 2007 by admin

As some of you may or may not know, we here at HostedFX are eagerly awaiting the stable release of cPanel 11. The latest version of cPanel is going to bring a lot of great new features as well as better security and functionality.

All things being well, we should be looking at around early August for the stable upgrade to cPanel 11 :)

Posted in Software | 1 Comment

MySQL Issue

Posted on June 20, 2007 by admin

Over the last 24 hours we have been testing the newest version of cPanel – cPanel 11. During this time we found a number of bugs, and security problems, not to mention the 505 errors displayed across the server. We have reported our findings to cPanel themselves, and await a response. Due to this we have delayed our upgrade until cPanel fixes all known bugs.

This time of testing has essentially only been carried out in order to improve your experience as a customer and we thank you for your patience during this time. You may view the new features that will be available when we do upgrade to a stable release of cPanel 11 here:
- http://www.cpanel.net/products/cPanelandWH…11/security.htm

We have now downgraded back to cPanel 10, and all should be working as normal. We had an unfortunate MySQL error which has now been resolved.

Once again, thank you for your patience,
Gareth

Posted in Issues, Software | 1 Comment

[Warning] TopSites

Posted on June 12, 2007 by admin

In the past week there have been issues on several servers which point back to TopSites installations. TopSites is a popular site ranking script which you may be familiar with.

The problem we see is that many different IPs (most are hijacked PCs located in Turkey, used as bot networks) are hammering these TopSites directories, acting as mini DoS attacks against those servers. The last security advisory for TopSites was last year, but apparently it remains unpatched. This does not give us much faith in the developers – it could have been fixed a long time ago, then we would not be dealing with this problem now.

The bottomline is that we are forced to disable the affected directories as we find them. We do recommend replacing this script with a similar one. We are likely disabling TopSites in all Fantastico panels.

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