I am very pleased to announce that he’s excelled himself this time, and decided to double or even triple disk space and bandwidth on plans. Effective February 12th, 2008 all new accounts will include increased disk space and additional bandwidth. These increases vary by plan but some are 200% more resources than current values. Some examples of the new plans are:

• Our new Starter Plan will feature 40GB of Bandwidth and 1400MB of space!
• Our new Simple Reseller Plan will feature 75GB of Bandwidth and 3000MB of space!

We will be phasing these increases into effect over the next couple of weeks to our entire current client base. Please be patient with us, we will be working through the servers as fast as possible.

For our dedicated clients, we will be increasing your bandwidth resources to 2000GB

Happy Hosting!

 To modify your MX records with TotalChoice:

1. Log in to your cPanel account.
2. Under Mail options Select the MX Entry icon. A list of your current MX records will appear.
     If using the X2 theme click Mail then Click Modify Mail Exchanger (MX Entry).
3. Click Change an MX Entry.
4. In the Change MX for… field, enter ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
    If you wish to add additional MX entries for your domain you will need to set them with a lower priority than the primary MX entry. For example, to add the entry ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM just set the priority field to 1.  Please be aware that 0 is the highest priority and 10 is the lowest.
5. Click Change. 

It’s that simple and you should start receiving your mail via Google Apps in a few minutes.

Please note that the above instructions are specific to Google Apps but the basic steps are the same for any MX record modifications. You will  still need to open a support request if you wish to use any of the Google Apps features that require CNAME changes.

I am sure the Anti Trust lobby will have a word or two regarding this deal, if it goes through.

What is your take on the whole episode ?

The count as of today is up to 5. That’s right the latest cable cut affected 1.7m Internet users in UAE.

Internet as well as voice data has been affected.

A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each.

These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria.

The first cut in the undersea Internet cable occurred on January 23, in the Flag Telcoms FALCON submarine cable which was not reported. This has not been repaired yet and the cause remains unknown, explained Jaishanker.

A major cut affecting the UAE occurred on January 30 in the SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4). “This was followed by another cut on February 1 which was on the same cable (FALCON). This affected the du network majorly as connections from the Gulf were severed while there was limited connectivity within the region,” said Khaled Tabbara, executive director, Carrier Relations, du.

He explained that the network was re-routed through Al Khobar in Saudi Arabia and was near normal now.

Almost 90 per cent of Internet traffic is routed through undersea cables and only 10 per cent is done through the satellite.

The experts also suggested that the cause of damage could have been a ship’s anchor that was dragging due to inclement weather conditions in the region during that particular period. “About 60-80 per cent of damages to undersea cable are due to external factors and only 10 per cent on an average can be classified as component failure,” said Tabbara.

Khaleej Times

A ship’s anchor? Really? Five cables? Don’t these ships know where the cables are? Curious minds want to know.

The feedback system in my view is a very important part of the bidding system on ebay, I guess only time will tell.

Details can be found here

Last month word had come to us of a new and emerging trend that was resulting in the compromise of tens-of-thousands of web sites hosted in similar environments to that of TCH, no doubt very concerning to us at first glance. Naturally our first course of action was to research this issue as much as possible to ferret out all the facts of who, what and how this issue was propagating itself across so many web hosts (see the referenced articles at the bottom of this blog entry for more details).

After an evening of wall-to-wall red-eyed trolling across industry news & security sites, IRC chat rooms, and forums of all kinds, the real danger of this new trend roared it ugly head; nobody knew exactly who was responsible for these incidents but most importantly and startling is that nobody had any concrete facts on just how exactly systems were being compromised. So with only a few facts in hand while being mindful of the speculation out there, we set out to combat this threat head on.

The first step was to take what we knew, or to put it more bluntly, what we didn’t know to use. This lead us on a vigilant path to review all servers for available updates for both the control panel and operating system along with ensuring they were consistently installed. Once that task had been completed it left us a bit more reassured on the state of our servers.

Next up was a review of what security practices are in place on our servers, although this is not something I can go into specifics about it is sufficient to say that this review was quickly put behind us as we emphasize on multiple layers of server security from the moment a server is configured & prepared for production use by our techs.

Finally came the most important aspect, actively defending ourself against an attack we know little about. This is where our intrusion detection system (IDS) comes into the fold, we took some of the few facts we had which included the naming scheme for the infected .js files and created a pattern based rule for our IDS. This allows our IDS, which sits on the border of our network between our core router and switching hardware, to scrutinize all traffic coming and going across the network looking for any signs of compromise from the “random .js” exploit toolkit. In turn if any matches in traffic are found, our IDS prompts an alert on our management interface which we can then promptly act on to combat the situation.

So far we have not seen any indication both from our IDS or reported web site issues to indicate attempts against TCH servers but by being mindful of the risks while taking proactive measures - we strive to be one step ahead of the curve on this and other emerging threats.

References:
Linux.com
ComputerWorld

So what went wrong?

We have been kicking around the idea of a corporate blog for some time. However, between all the new server builds and our Troy, Michigan data center build out we have continually been placing the blog idea on the back burner. However, there is no time like the present. So off to the races we go with blogging.

You can expect to find posts here from our entire staff. When we set out to make the corporate blog our first intention was to create a medium that would allow us to better communicate the behind the scene efforts that make TotalChoice Hosting a leader in the hosting business. After many meetings and several pots of coffee we finally choose to make this blog more than that. You can expect to see ramblings from all our staff about a wide variety of issues.

Bill