Head Guru

TCH Family, The Network Infrastructure Upgrades that have been taking place over the past two months have been completed! The final phase being completed this weekend with the project being closed as of 5pm EST on 4.26.2020 We did not expect any outages during the final phase of the rollout, however due to a firmware bug, we did experience an outage to one rack of servers early Sunday Morning. The issue was corrected approximately two hours later and was actually very difficult to track down. After consulting with Arista's 24/7/365 Technical Support Team (Switch Vendor) it was thought that there was a possible bug in the firmware version of the software running on Rack 22's Top of Rack Switching Gear. A software downgrade was completed and the switching gear rebooted and this brought the switch back online and has been running without issue since. This upgrade brings additional transit carriers, more bandwidth, additional layers of redundancy and all new Routers, Aggregation and Top of Rack Switching Gear to our network! This was the largest network project that we have ever done. I am very pleased to announce that our network is now stronger then ever and will serve us for many years to come! Please feel free to test our network by downloading any of these test files : http://totalchoicehosting.com/speed/1gb.zip http://totalchoicehosting.com/speed/5gb.zip http://totalchoicehosting.com/speed/10gb.zip If you require any further explanations or assistance please feel free to reach out to me at any time. Thank you for your continued business. Bill Kish TotalChoice Hosting

If your account has been effected by the cPanel Price Increase, you will be notified by email.

Greetings TCH family: As some of you have heard, cPanel announced a dramatic pricing structure change that has caused waves around the hosting industry. While they gloated about never having increased their pricing, cPanel has implemented both a significant price increase as well as an additional price/tax on user accounts. Their announcement and follow-up update can be found here. Their forum post can be found here as well. To be clear, TotalChoice has never made a profit on the sale of a license. It is a little known secret that some providers, such as ourselves, subsidize the cost of the license with the price of the server; effectively selling cPanel licenses at a loss. Unfortunately, this means we cannot absorb the cost of this price change and must pass it on to the end user. That said, we're still absorbing a small portion of the increase while still keeping the previous subsidy in place. We will be announcing new cPanel product pricing towards the middle of next week, please stay tuned. For some end users the price increase will be relativity small, however for users with oversold dedicated servers, VPS servers and or reseller accounts the increase may be dramatic. Please know that this is happening across the hosting industry, and is not specific to TotalChoice. Price increases will be levied on invoices with due dates on or after October 1st. As you can imagine, there has been a huge backlash in the forums and social media against this drastic change. For example, their Facebook rating went from 4.6 to 2.1 within a week! I personally find it appalling what they are doing! Some users may consider migrating to alternative control panels. cPanel is not the only player in the Web Hosting control panel market. We do not plan on moving away from cPanel for any of our shared platforms, however if you are using a dedicated server or VPS, there may be less expensive control panels on the market. So if your control panel invoice is something you can not absorb, we would be more than happy to help you transition to a new panel. Thank you for your continued business!

Hello, This issue was caused by a failure in our DC Power Plant. This is the source that feeds all our Core Routing gear. The problem was identified as a faulty Capacitor and shorted fail over switch. This should of never happened and we still do no fully understand what series of events caused the DC generating plant to fail. The system is designed with dual redundant plants and a 3rd failover is UPS Battery Backup. It appears when the Capacitor blew it sent a spike across to the fail over switch and nothing failed over. What we really do not yet understand is why the UPS Battery system did take over the load. During the entire out the UPS bank never showed more than a 13% load and was sitting in ready mode but never deployed. The reason our entire network did not go down all at once was because certain routing gear requires 20V and some other gear need 30V or 40V or 40-48V. When the generation of DC power stooped the internal batteries stopped getting continuous charge. So we watched in horror as the battery voltage started dropping from 48V. When we were able to restore DC operations, our internal DC power plant was producing 18Vs. I am thankful we were able to restore services so quickly. This was a very large issue, that my team handled with passion and safety. When we are dealing with 408V of power, it gets a little scary. But the electrical team did an great job. We do not expect this to occur again, however we have contracted with outside independent DC power plant specialty company to review. Any upcoming maintenance on this unit will be advised on our forums. Thank you for your understanding and I am really sorry this has happened. In regards to uptime i would like to offer this, I have been using this reply to clients about this outage and felt it appropriate to include here. ==================================================== " We contract with an outside, 3rd party and independent monitoring company to track our uptime. You can review their full report for our network uptime at the following link : If you take a close look you can see we have never ended our yearly uptime with anything less than 99.99%. You can also note that we have never fallen below 99.95% uptime. Most likely 2019 will be another 99.99+% uptime track record for us. Please note we purge uptime records every 3 years. http://www.uptimedoctor.com/publicreport/hmpxpe8z/113178/2/342159 Downtime is an unfortunate part of this business and we strive to do our best. However, every host on every platform will have downtime. Facebook, Amazon and all the other large companies. Even, yes Google and Yahoo have outages. https://www.uptrends.com/news/Google-and-Yahoo-services-have-the-same-uptime I am truly sorry this outage occurred and please know that I was on site at the Data Center within 30 minutes of the outage start and stayed onsite and guided all operations to restore service as quickly as possible. "

Hello, We have completed our work on the network at DC2. Thank you for your patience and business. Any questions, please just let us know!

Good Evening TCH World! We are about to begin the maintenance window.

Hello, We will be performing network maintenance at our DC2 location. We do not expect any issues and have set the following maintenance window. 9PM - 11PM EST 5/29/2018 We will be conducting firmware updates on our routing and switching gear. We do not expect any issue to arise from this update and the entire process should not be longer than 10 minutes.. However, we have set a 2 hour window. During this window you can expect brief outages and network slow downs. We will update this notice once we have started and will provide updates during the maintenance window. Thank you for you understanding and support.

Just open a ticket and we would be glad to go over everything with you.

Hello, Send me an email and please reference this post and the domain name you would like whitelistd. If the domain looks good and it wont be spamming our members, I will add to whitelist.

The internet

open a ticket with our help desk and we can get it setup for you

Thank you for the business, if and when you are ready to make the jump into a dedicated server please contact me personally. I will dig out a special price just for you!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Years!

Agree with Marshal.. These normally end up being a local DNS issue or Firewall Block on our end. Drop us a ticket and of course if you want to speak to any of us directly you can contact us at any time.

You can always access your cpanel account thru the servers https page. Like this :: https://crooked.tchmachines.com:2083/ Then just enter your cpanel username and password.