Additonal upgrades taking place here at TCH

Hello TCH Family,

Just a brief notice about continued infrastructure upgrades here at TCH:

We will be upgrading our Intrusion Detection System (IDS) hardware on Friday 1/27/2012. This hardware is dedicated to behind the scenes work that reviews all inbound traffic to our entire server farm and helps us sanitize bad or unwanted traffic to our servers. As our network traffic increases, so has the requirements of the IDS system, this is why we are upgrading the hardware. We do not anticipate any network downtime during this upgradation to our IDS hardware. This is simply a notice of our continued improvements to the services we provide to our clients.

In addition, on 1/27/2012 we will be performing upgrades to our private network switching hardware. This will be a multi-step process and will take us several maintenance windows to complete. If your servers are relying on our private network, you should receive an email from us with the maintenance window for your servers. In this process we will be replacing each distribution switch with new units. These new switches will feature the same 1Gbps server to switch speed but will feature a 10Gbps switch to switch speed. We will also be upgrading our backup server’s network interfaces to 10gbps.

There are many more improvements coming, but the above are the issues we have on the planning board for this week.

Today is a great day to be a TCH GURU!

Totalchoice Infrastructure Improvements

Hello TCH Family,

Over the past 6 months TCH has experienced some really amazing growth. In the last two months alone we have shattered month to month sales records! November 2011 marked our best all time month in the company’s history. We ended 2011 with our best December in over ten years. Even more amazing is the fact that we just broke our best 15 day period for new sales records. Thousands of new TCH family members have joined us in the past few months and we are very proud to have them in our family.

We owe this all to our clients and staff. I wanted to personally thank everyone that has made TCH such an amazing company.
With this explosion in growth we are making some changes to our internal infrastructure. All of these changes are happening behind the scenes and should be totally transparent to our clients.

This morning around 6am EST, we brought on a new cluster of servers to handle our support desk. We have never had the need for such dedicated hardware to handle our support system, however with all the growth we started to notice a decline in the performance of our help desk and decided to take action. This new boost in speed also translates into allowing our desk to handle a larger volume of clients help requests per day.

Over the past few days we have also brought on new cluster of DNS servers to handle our new clients Domain Name Resolution. This allows us to not overload our existing DNS Servers and most importantly allows us to continue to grow and not affect the performance of our current hosted domains.

We are also bringing on new servers at an amazing rate. Just this past week we added several more servers to our growing server farm. Unlike other small hosts, we actually own and operate all our own hardware. We have our own IP allocations and maintain our very own Data Center Presence. We do not rent servers from other providers and resell other providers servers. We are truly independent and rely on only ourselves to reboot your servers or upgrade your servers ram. If our tech team sees a server that needs more ram, we just take action and do not have to sit around and wait for our vendor to send a technician to work on our rented server.

We have much more to announce and will be doing so right here in our family forums. Many of you have been asking for a new web site with improved services and we are very close to doing so. Please stay tuned for more announcements and in the meantime enjoy the improved infrastructure here at TCH.

Thank you again for all your support.

It’s a great day to be a TCH GURU!

Password Rotation Policy Reverted

Dear TCH Family,

As many of you are aware, we started enforcing a new policy for password rotation.  In theory this was a splendid idea from both a security and administrative view point.  Over the past 24 hours we have had a wide range of customer comments regarding this new policy.  These have ranged from this is the best new policy ever all the way to TotalChoice has gone to the dogs.

The largest concern about this new policy came from our reseller client base.  This is due to the fact that the new password change can not be effected from WHM.  It can only be effected from cPanel logins.  This is a flaw or bug that we did not realize was present in cPanel until our reseller clients started running into it.  We are working with cPanel in an effort to correct this issue.

As many of you are aware I take customer service very serious and I also do not beat around the bush with my clients.   It appears that this policy has become more of a nuisance for clients and that is something I would never want to promote.  It is with that in mind that I have chosen to revert this change and forgo this new policy.

I would like to thank all the clients that have reached out in both support of and against this issue.

As always thank you all for making TCH what it is today and most importantly….

Happy Hosting!

New Password Rotation Polices

UPDATE:

I would like to thank all the clients that have reached out in both support of and against this issue. Please review the latest update concerning this policy.

Dear TCH Family,

TCH takes security very seriously and we are always looking at ways to improve the security for our internal infrastructure and for our client’s web presence. In an ongoing effort to provide our clients with the most secure environment possible we are enforcing the following new password rotation rules.

Effective immediately, every shared and reseller hosting client upon their next login to cPanel will be prompted to change/update their user passwords.  You will not be able to utilize your old password during this new password update.  Once this is completed, users will then be prompted every 180 days to once again rotate their passwords.

We would suggest you implement at a minimum, an 8 character long password with combinations of upper/lowercase, number and special characters.

We believe this new policy will insure that the hosting environment provided to our clients will become more secure.  This will also promote password security that will hopefully pass down to the way all users handle their passwords not only here at TCH but overall.

As always we appreciate your business and look forward to providing our clients many more years of happy hosting!

Thank you

Bill Kish
TotalChoice Hosting

Database issue corrected..

The issues with our internal databases have been corrected and we are back online without any issues to report.