XILO News and Status

Customers that currently pay using their Maestro (Switch) automatically each month will no longer be able to do so from 1 July 2008.

This morning we received notice from our merchant account provider that due to payment card industry rules and to remain compliant with Mastercard’s requirements on accepting their debit brand, Maestro, we will no longer be able to process recurring (automatic) payments when invoices become due without authentication*.

The technical reason for this is that the CVV code must be entered on each transaction. We are not allowed to store this on file as it is illegal to do so.

*You will be able to continue to use your Maestro card for payments by means of manually making a payment for each invoice raised or completing the ‘Authentication’ of your card before the invoice would normally be automatically debited from your account. More information on the ‘Authentication’ method will follow to all customers with current, active Maestro cards on their account.

At this time, Visa, MasterCard, Visa Debit, Delta and Solo cards are unaffected by this change but when adding a new Visa or MasterCard credit card for the first time after 1 July 2008, you may be asked to enter your PIN as part of the Verified by Visa (VbV) or MasterCard Secure Code (MSC) schemes. This will be in a popup window branded in that of your issuing bank. If you do have an alternate, non-Maestro card that you can use for automatic payments of your account, we strongly suggest that you update this as soon as possible.

We’d like to apologise for the short notice given to all customers about this change and have also made an official complaint to our merchant provider for the amount of notice they have also given us.

If you have any questions regarding this, please do raise a ticket for the billing department via http://my.xilo.net.

After a systems upgrade by our card processor this weekend, some customers regular payments were not debited correctly resulting in a decline message being sent via email.

This issue was raised with the card processor who investigated the issue and re-configured our account correctly which appears to have resolved the problem.

Please contact billing via my.xilo.net if you are having continued problems in making payment.

We’d like to remind all our customers about using secure passwords on their hosting accounts. This includes FTP, mail box and MySQL (database) accounts. Also, for our resellers, creating accounts for your clients.

We’re seeing more and more clients and resellers using simple passwords similar to the below;

• 123456
• test
• password1
• testtest
• 123

This can lead to serious security issues on your account which may lead to the suspension of your account(s) if the password is guessed or brute forced.

We’ll be activating a new feature in cPanel that will only allow the creation of slightly harder password combinations to prevent any accounts being accessed without authorisation.  This is in addition to the brute force detection that we currently have in place which blocks most attacks.

If you feel you are having problems changing your password, please contact support via my.xilo.net.

We’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a happy new year as we say good bye to 2007 and welcome 2008 with open arms.

Business will be as normal from Wednesday 2nd Januaury 2008

It’s that time of year again when we all put on abit extra around the waist, have reams of Christmas wrapping paper spread all over the house and watch Bond repeats on the television..

As normal, we will be here to ensure that all of your websites and services run smoothly but would like to remind you that we will have limited telephone coverage over the festive season and will still be constantly monitoring the helpdesk.

*Closed = Telephone support will be offered to any customer with an emergency. Please ensure that any problem you have is related to our service and not with any equipment on your end (Computer, Router etc.). To get in contact over the period below - please call 0845 034 6444 and press 9 when prompted.

23rd December - Closed*
24th December - 12am - 1pm
25th December - Closed*
26th December - Closed*

31st December - 12am - 1pm
1st January - Closed*

All other dates we are open our standard 10am - 5pm, Monday - Friday.

We’d like to take this opportunity to wish all of our customers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The XILO Team.

We are currently running a promotion on .info domains allowing you to register your choice of domain for £1.

This offer runs until the end of December 2007 so there has never been a better time to pickup your own .info domain name.

Up until the 27 December 2007, we are lowering the price of all .net registrations and transfers to £2.50.

You can place any orders as normal through our website to receive the discounted price of £2.50. If you have any domains currently with us registered or transferred prior to October 2007, you are able to also benefit from this offer and extend your domain for another year for £2.50 (subject to normal ICANN rules).

For further information contact sales.

After continued requests from customers to be able to provide a simplified way to receive notifications regarding news, status issues, planned maintenance and updates - we have switched to a blog-style interface.

You are able to request email notifications that will be sent when a new post from XILO is made. The notification is only for the initial post and not subsequent updates. Please enter you email to the right to receive these updates. (You are able to un-subscribe at any time)

For those more tech-savvy customers, you are able to use your XML reader for updates on a specific category. You can combine this with FeedBurner so that you receive updates as soon as we post any.

As from today, any domain transfer for one of the following TLDs have been reduced to £3.50 until the end of December 2007.

.com
.net
.org
.info
.us
.biz
.name

Also, any domains registered or transfered to XILO before October 2007 can take advantage of this offer to extend the expiry date of your domain for an extra year which would normally cost £7.

Contact support if you have an existing domain you wish to renew for another year early.

In the past few weeks - we have been contacted by ex-Refresh Hosting customers.Mainly to ask what has happened to them and/or why the customers site is down. Unfortunately, Refresh Hosting decided to cease trading and their servers with us were shutdown as requested by Refresh Hosting.

We would still like to help any customers that currently are offline or have domains with Refresh Hosting. Please contact our support team giving as much detail as possible about your domain and/or account.

You may also like to call us to discuss how we can help you get back online as soon as possible.