XILO News and Status

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.

The phpBB group have announced the gold release of phpBB3, the first new major version release in 5 years.

This release represents a huge step for the phpBB project with its features once again able to rival those of competing proprietary bulletin board systems. If you are currently using the stable legacy version of phpBB (2.0.22) then upgrading is easy and is sure to bring you many useful new features.

All those running the latest phpBB3 RC are encouraged to upgrade to the gold release as soon as possible due to some major bug fixes that are present in the final release. Details on some of these fixes are provided on the forum posts linked to above.

If you need any help upgrading, help will be available in the XILO forums.

Due to an attack on a hosted customer, echo is having issues with the amount of connections directed to the server.

We are trying to block this attack but as the source of the traffic is from multiple locations, it is difficult to contain.

Updates will be posted as soon as we have further information.

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.

We’re currently observing a network issue that is causing certain hosts to appear offline.

Our engineers are investigating this issue and also speaking with our transit partners.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

This a maintenance notification for the services listed below which may affect you.

Services:
vps-core, vps-1, cluster-1
delta, charlie
xilo.net, My XILO, Community Forum

Date:
9 December 2007

Time:
12:00am - 1:00am.

Comments:
The services above will encounter one short reboot after a software upgrade is applied. This affects several services including our clustered cPanel hosting.

As from 31 December 2007, support from PHP.net for version 4 of PHP will cease.We are now planning on upgrading all servers (excluding H-Sphere) to PHP5 as the default version of PHP.

This means that any scripts with the extension .php5 or .php will automatically load within PHP5.

Most popular scripts that are commonly used today (Wordpress, Gallery/G2, Wiki, Joomla, OSC) have all been updated to work with PHP5 and we would suggest that all clients and resellers ensure that these are up to date as soon as possible.

PHP4 will be loaded into the config as a fall back using the .php4 file extension. However, this will not remain in place permanently and is only provided to allow you further time to debug and correct any scripts that you may have that do not work correctly with PHP5 on the switch over date.

We will conduct these upgrades starting Saturday 8th December 2007 and ending Sunday 9th December 2007. There will be no downtime associated with these upgrades.

If you have any questions regarding the upgrade, please contact support.

We have received notification in relation to maintenance work. During this time, the network is considered at risk but due to our network configuration, no downtime is expected.

AT RISK NOTIFICATION:: Datahop AS6908 Network

At risk Window Commences: 2007-11-28 23:00:00 GMT (UTC + 0)

At risk Window Concludes: 2007-11-29 04:00:00 GMT (UTC + 0)

Reason for notification:

During the above window we will undertake maintenance to move all
customer gateways to a set of new Cisco routers in a controlled
manner.

Datahop have made a significant investment in new routing equipment
to enable us to:

- Provision additional upstream capacity

- Provision IPv6 services required by customers

- Ensure continued stability regardless of routing table size

Contingency plan:

Should the above maintenance fail to be successful as planned then
the network topology will be restored to its prior state from
backups.

We have received many tickets this morning relating to a possible outage where customers are not able to view (or resolve) any domains that currently point to our hosting platform but where 123-Reg host the DNS.

After testing the DNS servers that 123-Reg assign their customers, no records were returned which indicate a fault at their end.

We would suggest any affected customers to contact 123-Reg as soon as possible. In the interim, you are able to update your nameservers in the 123-Reg to those on your XILO account.

H-Sphere Shared:

• ns1.xilo.net
• ns2.xilo.net
• ns3.xilo.net

cPanel Shared:

• ns4.xilo.net
• ns5.xilo.net
• ns6.xilo.net

cPanel Resellers:

• Please contact support.

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.