As we roll into the new year, we are proud to announce some exciting changes to the services that we provide to our clients.

Today we are rolling out changes to our Billing, Support and Sales process maps. These changes will provide our clients streamlined access to support tickets, billing and sales all in one portal.

Effective immediately you will only need to utilize your billing login to access our new portal. 

From the new portal you will be able to gain instant access to the vast majority of our products and services.

The new portal can be found here:

https://my.totalchoicehosting.com

Happy Hosting!

We have been tracking an issue with outbound email from our server farm for the past couple hours and we believe that we have tracked down the issue. It appears an cPanel update has made some changes to our custom email configurations and has interrupted the outbound email.

Our server engineers have made changes to the servers that should correct this issue. Any email that you sent should be in the servers email queue and we are pushing out the queues from each server now.

Please accept our sincere apologizes for this issue and know that our entire staff has been working with this issue since it first was presented to us.

If you have a help desk ticket open, and we are currently flooded with tickets, we are doing our best to reply to each ticket.

Please be patient with us as we work on the replies.

We will post further updates to this issue and please keep tuned here on this forum thread for more updates.

Also, please note this has not effected any inbound email.

I would like to welcome Martin Reese to our Data Center Operations Team. Martin brings over 15 years of working within Data Center environment.

I am excited to work with Martin and wish him many years of happy family fun here at TCH.

I am very pleased to announce the addition of our latest TCH guru.

Mike Johnson has been hired as our new Network Administrator. Mike brings years of Cisco background to TCH and I am VERY pleased to have him on board with us.

Please welcome him to our Family and lets all say a good word for his success with our baby.

Welcome to the team Mike!

On Friday May 6, 2011 at 9:PM EST, we are beginning phase one of our planned upgrade to PHP 5.3 on all shared/reseller servers. As always we are selecting one server for this upgrade, we then expect to complete a full roll out before the end of May. I will be updating the forum for the selected server shortly and Ryan will be updating this notice later tonight with some technical insight into this planned upgrade. Please see Ryan's follow up concerning the details of this update.

We will post in the Server Forum for each individual server at least one day in advance of any PHP updates. We will also post any relevant information via twitter.

Thanks for your time and let us know if you have any questions.

Thomas Joy has years of experience in the web hosting field and I am sure he will be an excellent addition to our outstanding support crew. He will be starting today and is already looking over our operational procedures.

Welcome to the family Thomas !!

I am very pleased to make the following announcements.

After many years of loyal and faithful service Carl Noonan has been promoted to our Corporate Sales Team. I am very excited to work close with Carl to promote our products to corporate clients and the like. This is a well earned promotion that Carl has been asking about for some time now. Way to go Carl. To be frank the reason we have been holding back on this promotion was our inability to clone Carl.

whilst we still have not been able to master the art of cloning we have hired a most excellent staff member to replace Carl as our support manager.

I would like to officially welcome our new Support Manager to the TCH Family.

Balakrishnan U brings nearly a decade of Web Hosting Support to the table. He has a wife and daughter and enjoys Sunday drives. (I sound like the host of a dating show). Bala has been working at TCH for the past few weeks and has learned as much as I think he can learn before we set him loose.

So to all the TCH family, we are setting Bala loose. Please give him a big welcome here at TCH and I am very confident everyone will come to love bala just as much as we have.

Congrats to Carl and Bala both!

We are now in the process of updating all shared/reseller to PHP 5.2.14, however, there are some major changes being made to our setup. The primary change being that we are migrating our PHP Handler setup from DSO to SuPHP for added security and to make the use of PHP more user friendly.

So what does all this mean for you?

• PHP scripts will no longer be ran or owned by the user "nobody", you will now own all of your files and those created by your scripts.
   
  
• File & Folder Permissions are now easier to work with and more secure. You no longer need to have directories or files set to 777 and there is maximum supported permission of 755.
  
  • Any scripts that require 777 should use 755 instead.
    
  • Generally, set folders to 755.
    
  • Generally, set files to 644.
    

   

  [*]php_value and php_flag options no longer work in .htaccess files NO! While this is standard for SuPHP, we found it to be an unacceptable compromise and have implemented an additional option to allow continued use of these options. To use these options they must be enclosed in the container element.

  Example:

  php_value register_globals 0

We plan to complete these updates by the end of the month, however, there are no specific dates set per server. Since the downtime will minimal or not all, we will announce each update in the appropriate server thread once completed.

As with any server updates, we do expect a small of amount of accounts to have issues. We will do all we can to mitigate any issues, but should they occur we will be here to assist and correct.

Thanks your for time and please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

This update also includes an increase in the number of tutorials we offer from 47 to over 100 and will be adding more over time to help you find answers quickly. So please check out the new tutorials and let us know what you think.

We have been evaluating the roll out of Apache 2.2 on TotalChoice servers. At the present time, we do not have a roll out date as we are still finishing up testing with various software and php modules.

Apache2 will provide TCH customers benefits in performance and security while still providing the reliability that everyone expects from Apache 1. Along with Apache2, we will be enabling new features such as MySQL PDO and SOAP that have been the most requested features thus far. During the rollout we will also be updating servers to the latest PHP5 revision which is mainly a security release.

As we finish up testing I wanted to solicit feedback from any customers looking to utilize features specific to the latest version of Apache2 or the new modules. Good, bad or indifferent to Apache2 I'd like to hear your opinion.

We have constantly been managing the balance between those of you who have been asking us for PHP5 and those of you who have older scripts that would be broken by PHP5 asking to maintain PHP4. It is due to these compatibility issues with various PHP scripts we held off on doing so. However, all major scripts have now been upgraded to work with PHP5, and hence the time is right for us to upgrade. This server will be left online with php4 until the first of 2008 at which time we will need to have all accounts moved to PHP5.

Before those of you with older scripts begin to panic, we will be here to help throughout the process, and we are looking to leave one server using PHP4 for those cases which cannot be upgraded in a hurry.

Many of you may be asking "What does this mean to me and my website". Quite simply in most cases the upgrade to the server hosting your web site will be seamless. There should be no changes in the way your static web pages load and operate. If your using web pages built on php code this upgrade "may" effect your site. Some of the code used in PHP 4 may not function in the same manner running under php5. In the cases of scripts you have purchased or installed, most vendors have their code PHP5 compliant now. If you have custom written your code, then you may need to revamp certain sections of it to run properly under php5.

As stated earlier, we will be upgrading to the latest stable builds of PHP 5 and MySQL5.

We will begin a limited roll out of the new versions on 11/13/2007. This roll out will be limited to our servers located in our Troy, MI Data center and the upgrades will take place on 11/13/2007 starting @ 12:01am The first roll out effects the following servers:

abraxas

almania

ambria

ansek

applecore

bespin

byss

cathar

coruscant

dagobah

dantooine

danuta

darthvader

elom

endor

felucia

fresia

geonosis

grievous

gryphon

hansolo

hapes

hoth

inysh

ithor

jandoon

jendar

kalee

kamino

kashyk

korriban

lando

luke

mandalore

naboo

nubia

ophideran

ossus

palpatine

plavin

quanton

r2d2

revan

saijo

sidious

tarvis

ukatis

utapau

vortex

widek

xerxes

yavin

zeltros

We will begin our second roll out one week later. The following servers will be upgraded starting at 12:01am on 11/21/2007:

4

6

8

10

11

12

14

21

24

31

32

39

40

43

46

47

49

52

54

60

61

67

70

76

78

83

89

92

93

94

98

101

102

103

104

Finally, we will complete the roll out on 11/28/2007 ( again starting at 12:01am) by upgrading the following servers:

105

108

117

118

119

120

121

123

124

125

126

300

302

315

316

317

319

320

329

335

345

364

366

369

379

384

386

387

390

I am so very proud to announce that our long time level 1 tech Alex Spafford has been promoted to our newest Level 2 Administrator.

When alex comes on shift tomorrow he will be TCH Level 2 Administrator.

Congratulations Alex you earned this promotion.

Now, will you buy me a beer with your raise in salary?

Bill

I have had enough, so I set out to hire a Administrative Assistant.

After looking thru resumes and listening to applicants jabber jaw about this or that, I have settled on a new hire.

Please everyone welcome TCH's latest staff member.

Bonnie Lee Richards.

Bonnie will be working side by side with Dick Devance and myself tidying up all these loose ends we seem to leave laying around.

Please everyone welcome her aboard.

Forwards to Yahoo! have resulted in several blacklisted servers over the past two months. In all cases I have resolved so far, the server was blacklisted by Yahoo! because their system doesn’t make any distinction between forwarded mail and mail sent directly to a Yahoo! address.

Fighting SPAM and keeping our servers off of any blacklists is a never ending battle. We understand that some of our customers wont be very happy with this choice but we feel it is in the best interest of TCH and our servers, and will help us to continue to provide the best service we possibly can.

Thank you for your continued support

Effective last monday Ryan MacDonald is our new Data Center Operations Manager. Ryan brings many years of background to the table. As some of you know, Ryan MacDonald is the founder of R-FX Networks (www.r-fx.ca). R-FX is responsible for some of the most widely used Linux products on the GNU market today. Tools such as APF (advanced policy firewall) and BFD (brute force detection) all come from the team at R-FX. I had to do some serious talking to get Ryan on our team full time, but he has accepted the challenge and has taken on the full time job as of last monday, and things are already moving fast at our Troy, MI facility.

Changes have already started to take form at the Data Center. Ryan just completed a large scale automation utility for monitoring our power distribution and is working on a program to better assist with new server rollouts and hardware tracking. Some longer term projects he has outlined to me already included automated OS reloads, better tracking of core network devices and man is he spending my money. Today we took delivery of new Cisco Equipment. Ryan determined that some of our current switching devices could use upgrades and also our core routers could use some memory upgrades.

Long story short, things are moving very well under Ryan's direction.

Also, effective last monday Jesse Salens is no longer employed with TCH.

Happy Surfing!

Bill

We will begin a limited roll out of the new versions on 11/13/2007. This roll out will be limited to our servers located in our Troy, MI Data center and the upgrades will take place on 11/13/2007 starting @ 12:01am The first roll out effects the following servers:

abraxas

almania

ambria

ansek

applecore

bespin

byss

cathar

coruscant

dagobah

dantooine

danuta

darthvader

elom

endor

felucia

fresia

geonosis

grievous

gryphon

hansolo

hapes

hoth

inysh

ithor

jandoon

jendar

kalee

kamino

kashyk

korriban

lando

luke

mandalore

naboo

nubia

ophideran

ossus

palpatine

plavin

quanton

r2d2

revan

saijo

sidious

tarvis

ukatis

utapau

vortex

widek

xerxes

yavin

zeltros

Carl will be starting his traning for the Abuse Department tomorrow and we expect him to be fully up to speed within a week or so.

Congrats to CARL!

All accounts have been migrated to the new theme to take advantage of the new features and the most notably change you will see is the new AJAX based interface for the cPanel theme. This AJAX based interface is also carried over to the new File Manager for easier navigation and editing. Some of the other notable features are the integrated help/wizards, user level email filtering(multiple actions), web disk, and the Perl module/Pear package installers.

If you are receiving an error when accessing cPanel you are most likely using a direct bookmark to an old them. You will need to access your cPanel at:

http://your-tch-site.com/cpanel

or

http://your-tch-site.com:2082

Dedicated customers may contact the help desk if you would like us to complete this upgrade for you,

Enjoy and if you have any concerns or issues due to the changes please contact us via the help desk at https://tchhelp.com

Maildir is a widely used format for storing e-mail that does not require application-level file locking to maintain message integrity as messages are added, moved and deleted. Unlike the current Mbox format which stores emails in one large single file, Maildir stores each message in a separate file with a unique name. This format will be less resource intensive and prevent issues such as locked in-boxes and duplicate messages from failed downloads.

When the conversion process begins all mail services will be stopped until the conversion is completed. There will be no loss of mail, as any mail sent to your domain will be queued and then delivered once the conversion is complete.

After the conversion has completed you will find several new directories in /home/~username~/mail/, which contain information specific to your mail account. These new directories (tmp, new, and cur) are where incoming messages are processed by the system and should not be removed.

Due to the conversion , anyone using an IMAP client or webmail will need to resubscribe to their folders before those folders will be visible. The easiest method to resubscribe your folders is to log in to SquirrelMail and select the folders you wish to subscribe to.

**NOTE: If you store your mail only on the server, we recommend you make a local copy to be safe.

We will not be converting all servers at once and will post here as we begin processing a server.

If you have any questions concerning this conversion please feel free to post here or contact us via the help desk at https://tchhelp.com

UPDATE: Just an note that when resubscribing folders or viewing email via SquirrelMail, you most log in with your actual email address not your cpanel username.

The most noticeable change you will see is that the network status and uptime stats have been combined into one page. You can view our entire server farm on this page or select only your server for more information.

If you are unsure what server you are hosted you can check that at http://www.tchstatus.com/whatsmyserver.php

Thanks

Welcome to the team Matt!

Forwards to Hotmail / MSN accounts have resulted in several blacklisted servers over the past two months. In all cases I have resolved so far, the server was blacklisted by Hotmail / MSN because their system doesn’t make any distinction between forwarded mail and mail sent directly to a Hotmail / MSN address.

Fighting SPAM and keeping our servers off of any blacklists is a never ending battle. We understand that some of our customers wont be very happy with this choice but we feel it is in the best interest of TCH and our servers, and will help us to continue to provide the best service we possibly can.

Thank you for your continued support

Level 3 Technical Support Job Description.

Technical support representative monitoring our help desk and helping clients with troubleshooting problems that they may be having on their servers.

The successful candidates should be proficient in one or more of the following areas:

* Independent thinker with solid problem solving skills

* Good computer skills (typing, data entry)

* Professional communication skills

* Ability to be a team player with a positive attitude

* Excellent customer service skills

Desired Skills:

Extensive Linux experience (3+ years preferred), Windows 2003 Server, Web Hosting.

Control Panels (cPanel, Plesk), Apache, MySQL, Bind, Sendmail, Qmail, shell scripting, php.

Position Requirements:

* Excellent problem solving skills and knowledge of PC hardware troubleshooting

issues

* Ability to configure and troubleshoot apache, sendmail, qmail and MySQL

* Previous experience with some or all of these control panels, cPanel, and

* Working knowledge of the Linux command line

* Customer focused attitude with some previous customer service experience

* Ability to effectively present information and respond to questions

* Thoroughly describe and document work using trouble ticketing system

* Handle escalations of unhappy or irate customers; escalate issues to management when necessary Manager.

* Good network knowledge with an excellent understanding of the Windows Server

environment including IIS

* Understanding of DNS

* Software installation experience

* Thorough knowledge of the processes and procedures used for all aspects of the job posting supporting role.

* Program and project management skills

Please contact Dick DeVance, Andy Beckett or Bill Kish for details.

Mike Miller joins our Level 2 administration team effective 12/2/2006

Mike brings 14 years of Linux Administration to our team and will be a great addition to our already robust team.

Welcome to the team Mike!

Welcome to the team Peter!

Please welcome our two newest team members.

Harry Wentworth will be joining our team as a level 2 Tech. He brings many years of exp and hard work to us. I look forward to working with him.

Tina Garrison will be joining our team as a level 1 Tech. She brings many years of exp and hard work to us. I look forward to working with her.

Good luck to both.

Forwards to Comcast accounts have resulted in several blacklisted servers over the past two months. Often times a server is blacklisted by Comcast because their system doesn’t make any distinction between forwarded mail and mail sent directly to a Comcast address.

We have worked with Comcast's Customer Security Assurance department to resolve this issue. They have requested that Comcast subscribers keep their TotalChoice email separate from their Comcast email by not forwarding from TotalChoice to Comcast.

Fighting SPAM and keeping our servers off of any blacklists is a never ending battle. We understand that some of our customers wont be very happy with this choice but we feel it is in the best interest of TCH and our servers, and will help us to continue to provide the best service we possibly can.

Thank you for your continued support

If you have scripts installed through the scripts library they will continue to work without issue - you will just not be able to remove them or upgrade them through cPanel. Future upgrades or removal will need to be done manually. This process varies by script, but there is plenty of help here in the TCH forums for whatever task it is you need to take on.

Some users may notice that the removal of the cPanel scripts library also means the removal of one-click phpBB installation as we don't offer phpBB through Fantastico. phpBB is a constant target of unsavory types and updates are constantly being released. Neither cPanel nor Fantastico release updates to phpBB fast enough and it is our feeling that phpBB installations need to be updated with the latest security patches immediately after their release. We are asking site administrators to take responsibility for their phpBB installations and upgrade as updates are released.

If you don´t know how to maintain your phpBB forum, or you just don't want to do it manually, may we suggest that you convert to SMF which is upgraded easily through the one-click install in the SMF admin area. You can install SMF through Fantastico, and converting your phpBB board to SMF can be done using the converter found here.

Of course if you ever need any help updating or installing your scripts, the forums are here for exactly that purpose. We have plenty of friendly people ready to help, so by no means should you feel that you are being left in the dark with this move.

If you are having an issue with the server you are on please open a ticket with the help desk. The moderators of the forums are volunteers and cannot help you. They do not have access to the servers or your account information.

If threads are started with server XX down they will be deleted. The servers are monitored. If they happen to go down or a service on them go down the tech staff receives an alert that there is something wrong.

You may want to post a message to the help desk to ease your mind that someone is looking into it and will receive a reply.

Thank you

This is very simple stuff such as editing graphics, changing text, adding and or deleting content.

If anyone is interested in joining our growing TCH team, please drop Tim Hodge a email.

Thanks!

Tim will be joining us as a Support Manager.

Please give him a warm welcome.

Tom Dunacan and Alex Spaford will be coming on board with us effective this weekend.

Please give these two gentlemen a warm round of welcomes and take it easy on them in the help desk.

Welcome aboard guys.

Help Desk Technician

If you feel you are ready to take on a rewarding career then please contact us thru our help wanted e-mail address.

helpwanted[at]totalchoicehosting.com

We are having some techincal issues with our DNS servers. This only effects NS1 and NS2.

There has been some corruption in the NAMED database on our DNS clustering servers. Due to this we are restoring our hourly backups from 10:01AM EST.

This has effected very few sites, however we wanted to let everyone know that the issue with DNS has been corrected.

The bottom line is our DNS database reverted several domains back to old IP allocations. We are unsure exactly how this occured, however we have pinpointed the exact time of when the issue started to occur and have rolled back to our backups timestamped just before the event occured.

It is my view that this was a Level 2 admin error of some sort, however we have not been able to track this down as of yet. Rest assured we will figure this out and I will post a full detailed reason of why this occured.

All DNS zones are back to normal and all sites are resolving. If you did run into a issue, you will need to clear your cache and try your site again.

I am pleased to announce that Carl Noonan has joined our support team as a Level 1 / Level 2 technician.

Carl brings many years of experiance to us and I am very excited to have him on board.

Effective as of this post, Robert Mcilroy will be joining our crew full time as Help Desk Manager.

Please give Robert a big warm welcome to our crew.

Bill

We just have to do a simple apache restart when the new cert is ready.

Should be a flash.

Just letting everyone know.

Please take a moment to welcome TCH-JimE (Jim Eatwell) as the latest member of the moderator team, he will also be helping to make sure things stay in order.

Jim used to help out here at TCH and has graciously agreed to do so again.

Please take a moment to welcome TCH-Mark (Mark Goodwin) as the newest member of the moderator team, he will also be helping to make sure things stay in order.

Mark used to work the help desk here at TCH.

I will post updates when I know more.

I would like to take a moment to make a big announcement.

Effective Monday 12/12/2005 Vivek Bhatia will be promoted to our "Special Projects Manager".

Congrats Viv!!!!

Some of you may ask, what the $#@% is a Special Projects Manager.

Please stay tuned for another BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!!!

Web Designer / Content Creator

Level 1 & Level 2 Technicians

Administrative Assistant

All of these positions are full time opportunities within the company.

If you feel you are ready to take on a rewarding career then please contact us thru our help wanted e-mail address.

helpwanted[at]totalchoicehosting.com

If you are viewing the ticket from within the help desk itself, you will now see a link at the bottom of each ticket. Simply stating:

"Not happy with the level of service provided to you in this ticket, click here to escalate this issue to a manager."

Clicking the link will take the user directly to a form that they can complete to have their ticket escalated to a manager. Basically what will happen is one of our on call managers will be paged and will be required to review the ticket and offer a resolution to the customer that was not obtainable with the first levels of support.

Furthermore, the emails sent from the help desk will contain a link at the end of each e-mail allowing the customer to escalate issues.

One thing I would like to point out, is please do not abuse this resource.

We are upgrading the backed server hardware that runs our help desk.

I will update this thread once the Help Desk is back online.

Any emergencies please just post here and we will get on top of them for you.

Thanks

The largest impact to customers will be that access to the status pages will now be protected. We have setup a customer verification process that will allow you to obtain full access to the server status pages.

*Changing policy on how we will get customers access to pages*.

The new status pages will be very nice.

I expect to have the new pages ready to roll out in the next 30 days.

Bill

As of this week Michelle has left the company to pursue other opportunities and Bill Hermonat has been promoted to our new Billing Manager.

So please wish them both luck.

Starting today, Kevin Westgate is the newest member of our support team.

He will be handling Level-1 support and Customer Service on our help desk.

Welcome to the family Kevin and good luck!