TCH-Blog

We are happy to introduce a new service offered by TotalChoice Hosting! Dedicated IP addresses are now available to all clients on shared servers. Rather than sharing the same IP address with other websites on the same server, a dedicated IP will give your website and e-mail a unique IP address, adding an extra layer of security. With your own IP address you will not have to worry about someone else's blacklisting affecting you. The cost of this new service will be only $1 per month. For more information please visit: http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/dedicated-ip-address.html View the full article

Hello TCH Gurus! I would like to update everyone on the current status of our network upgrade announcement noted here. http://blog.totalchoicehosting.com/?p=816 We are proud to say that we have completed an estimated 60% of all our planned upgrades. There was a brief pause in our upgrade path as we stumbled on a coding issue with our internal software. The nasty critter has been fixed and we are going to start rolling out upgrades effective next weekend. Once we determine the next upgrades, you can be assured we will follow our protocols and make the proper announcements. Thank you for your support and it is a great day to be a TCH Guru! View the full article

Last week, on the same day that we blogged about what CISPA is, The House Of Representatives passed the bill (288-127) for the second time. Because of the huge amounts of lobbying money thrown at congress by corporations in favor of this bill, such as Google, it was expected to pass in The Senate. After it passed The House, CISPA was expected to go to the Senate, however to the surprise of most, The Senate said that they will not even consider voting on CISPA which dealt a huge blow to the bill and its supporters. However, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, left us with this statement: “We are currently drafting a bipartisan information sharing bill and will proceed as soon as we come to an agreement.” As we mentioned in our last CISPA blog post, TotalChoice Hosting is against CISPA and all related bills because they would forever change the internet for the worse. This is why people need to continue to fight for internet freedoms without opposition and bills like PIPA and SOPA. Such bills would infringe on not only our rights, but our privacy. For everyone that advocated against the bill, whether it was through signing a petition, calling your local congressman, or spreading awareness, we here at TCH would like to thank you for protecting the internet as we know it! Through the power of the internet and by strength of numbers, we the people can be heard! View the full article

CISPA (pronounced “sis-puh”) also known as “The Cyber Intelligence” and “Sharing Act” may sound familiar, and that’s because it’s been the center of a huge debate on Internet freedoms and privacy in the past months. CISPA was first introduced to the house on November 30th, 2011 by republican Michigan house representative Mike Rogers. On April 26th, 2012 it passed the house (248-168). However, the senate vetoed it and thus it didn’t become a law. But, it saw the floor of the house once again when on February 12th 2013, Mike Rogers reintroduced it to the house. Following suit, it was put up for vote late last Thursday night, early Friday morning. As expected, it passed the house and now it is getting ready to be voted on in the senate. Many are conflicted on this matter, on the good side it could be a big help to investigating cyber crimes and cyber attacks on companies from groups of malicious hackers. But with the good, there’s always the bad, and in this case very bad. Essentially, the main problem with CISPA is that it not only allows for the government to monitor Internet activity without permission or a warrant, it also allows for search and seizure without a warrant if you are under suspicion of cyber crimes without hard evidence. Many also will tell you that it plainly violates Internet privacy because provisions in this bill will allow for companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo to track and sell your information without your permission. Most also see this bill as the second attempt at increasing digital piracy laws after SOPA (stop online piracy act) and PIPA (protect intellectual property act) largely met vicious opposition from groups on the Internet such as Reddit, 4chan, and even communities on YouTube. If this bill is passed, internet privacy as we know it will change forever, unfortunately adversely. TotalChoice Hosting takes our customers privacy very seriously. When CISPA was first introduced we were against it because of the blatant disregard for privacy. Not much has changed, we are still against CISPA and would like to spread awareness to our clients that this bill is on our doorstep and we, regular users of the internet, have a voice. Let’s stand together against CISPA and tell the US government that we value our privacy and do not want our information readily available to any individual, corporation or conglomerate. Our privacy cannot and will not be sold and TCH does not support any internet bill that will erode our internet freedom! Use the links below to be heard! Links: Tell your local senator that you are against CISPA!! Sign a petition to protect your internet freedoms and privacy. See which companies support CISPA . View the full article

Hello TCH’ers, I would like to inform everyone that a large distributed brute force attack against sites running WordPress is occurring throughout the entire internet. There are dozens of reports coming from various web hosts, both large and small, that a very large botnet with close to 90,000 servers is trying to log into random WordPress Dashboards by cycling through various usernames and passwords, otherwise known as a Brute Force attack. Here’s What We Are Doing: We have been battling this attack for the past 3 days and have had to block all requests to wp-login.php. We realize this may cause minor inconveniences for some clients, but we ensure you that we feel it is in the best interest of keeping your site and our servers safe. We also see that this is the current recommended solution throughout the internet for this issue. Edit: April 12, 2013 – 5:10 PM (EST) – We have now enabled access to wp-login.php. If you are currently having issues accessing your WordPress site, please submit a support ticket at our help desk so our technicians may investigate it further. You can access the help desk at http://support.totalchoicehosting.com Here’s What You Can Do: We would like to remind you how important it is to use strong passwords throughout all of your accounts. It is very important to change your password regularly to help protect yourself against these sort of attacks. We also urge you to make sure you are using the latest and most updated stable scripts available. If you are using an older version of WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc., you should update immediately. Limit Login Attempt: We recommend limiting login attempts to your WordPress Dashboard. There are various plugins that can help accomplish this. Here is an example of one: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/limit-login-attempts/ Install Google Authenticator: Thanks to a fellow TCH’er, we can recommend installing Google Authenticator. It enables a 2 part authentication process to add an extra layer of security to your blog. Thank you for your patience and understanding and remember, don’t hesitate to create a support ticket if you need help! View the full article

Hello TCH Family! This past month was a busy one for everyone at TCH, most notably our techs and CEO. Part of our continued goal is to provide you with the fastest, most reliable service possible, while staying current with the latest technology. Over the course of the past month, Bill, TCH’s CEO, spent countless days and nights at the Data Center replacing Distribution Switches, upgrading routers, building new servers and more. Below is a summary of what’s been going on lately here at TCH! We Hired a New Tech! We are happy to announce that we have hired a new, full time support tech! After many interviews and much consideration, we welcome Deepak to the team! He comes to the team with experience and knowledge and is excited to work with you, our clients. See full thread here. Network Upgrades / Maintenance We first sent out an e-mail to certain clients regarding mass hardware upgrades that were coming soon. Aside from adding another layer of redundancy to our network, we also have been swapping out Distribution Switches with new Cisco Switches and installed an additional fiber drop from our upstream provider. We also migrated four shared servers to new servers with new hardware. During upgrades we try to maintain as much communication between the TCH team and our clients. Over the past several weeks you may have seen various blog posts like The upgrades are coming, Network Maintenance!, Round One Complete and Round 2 is done! Shortly after we performed more maintenance and posted Scheduled maintenance Starting Now and Scheduled Maintenance Complete. TCH Blog App! In an effort to continue to push as much information and news to everyone we have developed a free Android app dedicated to our blog. Get notified and read our latest blog posts right from your Android device! You may download the app in the Google Play store or scan the QR code below from your Android device. Google Nexus 7 Tablet Winner! We are very pleased to announce that the re-birth of TCH’s Family contest was a complete success! Congratulations to Irene from NJ for winning herself a brand new Google Nexus 7 tablet! Our Facebook Page received and overwhelming amount of likes and we are excited to keep giving things away on it! Irene will be posting a picture of her new tablet on the page soon, so make sure to check it daily. Who Wants More Free Stuff? This month we want to switch up the contest a bit. Simply ‘Follow’ our blog via the ‘Follow’ tab on the bottom right hand side of this page. All you have to do is follow our blog by entering your e-mail address and you will be entered into this month’s family contest! The winner of this months contest will receive a brand new Kindle Fire HD Tablet and a TCH T-Shirt! A winner will be picked at the end of April. You can see complete details here. DDOS Attack On March 7, 2013 at approximately 3:20PM our network monitoring system detected a large amount of inbound traffic to several segments of our public facing network. This prompted our alerting system and we started to investigate. The attack was large but nothing our tech team couldn’t handle! You can see all details here. New IP Addresses! TotalChoice Hosting has been granted by ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers) additional IPv4 Allocation. In other words we will be adding a pool of IP addresses which will be available to our clients! You can see our complete blog post about it here. Remdiner: Change Your Passwords & Update Your Scripts! We would like to remind you how important it is to change your passwords regularly and to always keep all of your scripts / software up to date on your web site. Read the entire article here. Has It Been A Decade Already? On behalf of the entire TotalChoice Hosting team, I would like to extend a very big congratulations to our General Manager, Dick DeVance and our Technical Support Manager, Balakrishnan, for providing 10 years of exemplary service right here at TotalChoice Hosting. Dick and Bala have become staples here at TCH and have gone above and beyond over the past decade. Thank you Dick and Bala for all of the great service. I look forward to posting a 15 and 20 year anniversary post as well Misc. We posted a couple of how to’s that may interest you. Check out our recent article on how to add your TCH hosted e-mail to an Android device and also our article on popular Mac OSX FTP clients. It’s been a great month here at TCH and we are excited about things to come. Thanks again for choosing TotalChoice Hosting! View the full article

Thank you to everyone who participated in the re-birth of TCH’s Family Contests! It turned out to be very popular and we would like to congratulate Irene from New Jersey for winning a brand new Google Nexus 7 Tablet! It’s time again to give some more free stuff away! We had so much fun giving Irene the Google Nexus 7 tablet that we want to give another person the opportunity to win a tablet! This time we are giving away a brand new Kindle Fire HD! The Kindle Fire HD features a 7″ HD screen, 16 GB of storage space, ultra-fast wifi and access to Amazon’s vast library of apps, movies, books, music and more. Powered by Android, the Kindle Fire HD is a great reader and tablet all in one. This month the contest is just as simple. To enter all you have to do is ‘Follow’ our blog. On the bottom right hand of every page on our blog you will see a tab / button that says ‘Follow’. Simply click it, enter your e-mail address and click ‘Sign me up!’ to subscribe to our blog and newsletter. Aside from entering into this contest you will also automatically be entered into future contests as long as you are following the blog. A random person will be picked during the last week of April and the Kindle Fire HD and TCH T-Shirt will be mailed to you soon after. We ask that the winner take a picture wearing the TCH shirt while holding the tablet and post it on the forum and/or our Facebook page. We will cover shipping to the continental United States only. Best of luck to everyone! View the full article

This is a friendly reminder to change your passwords regularly and make sure all your software / scripts are up to date. Outdated versions of software, such as WordPress, Joomla, osCommerce, etc., can open vulnerabilities allowing hackers to compromise your website and / or server. Simply updating to the latest version as they become available is a good way to help keep such vulnerabilities and attacks down. You may update most scripts via the Administrative Control Panel / Dashboard of the script. If you are unfamiliar with how to do this please check the documentation for said script. Here are a few links to help you update some popular software. Please feel free to comment if you would like me to add more to this post. Thanks. Updating WordPress Updating Joomla Updating Drupal Updating osCommerce Updating ZenCart Did you know that weak passwords account for nearly 60% of all account level compromises? Please make sure you're using strong passwords for everything you do online with both upper and lower case letters, numbers and a few special characters. The simple step of using strong passwords can go a long way to providing you with the security you deserve. You may change your cPanel and e-mail passwords via cPanel (yourdomain . com/cpanel). Here are a few links to update your TCH passwords: Update TCH Billing Password Update TCH Domain Management Password: After logging in, click My Account then Settings, then Account Security Settings. Update TCH Forum Password Our Help Desk is open 24/7 and our technicians will be more than happy to assist you with any issues or concerns you may have. You can create a support ticket at https://support.totalchoicehosting.com. Please feel free to post a comment below as well. Thanks. View the full article

We’re excited to introduce our blog Android app! The app will bring the latest TCH news, updates, contests and more to your Android powered device. The free app is available in the Google Play store or by scanning the QR code below from your Android device. If you have a chance and feel like leaving a positive review in the Play Store we would really appreciate it Thanks. View the full article

And we’re done! We’re happy to say that we are done with this round of network maintenance! Everything went smoothly with no issues, just as we expected. Thank you everyone for bearing with us while we performed this maintenance! View the full article

Hello everyone, We are about to begin our aforementioned network maintenance. If you received an e-mail regarding this maintenance affecting you then please expect brief downtime. We will post an update when the maintenance is complete! Thanks. View the full article

Hello TCH Family! I would like to announce that the following policies have been chosen on upgrading to PHP 5.4 and beyond. Currently we have nearly our entire server farm running on dual PHP setups of: 5.3.x 5.2.3 Some of our newer servers in fact are running on dual PHP setups of: 5.4.x 5.3.x Migration paths for PHP 5.4 will only come to your server if and when the server has been set to EOL (end of life) or upon emergency restoration of server hardware. We will also be retroactively adding PHP 5.4.x to servers in these two categories, which are currently running only PHP 5.3.x. If you would like to utilize PHP 5.4 and do not need the use of PHP 5.2.3, you have the following options as more PHP 5.4 servers become available: Contact support and ask to be moved to a PHP 5.4 Server. This should not include any down time and our techs will do the entire move for you! You should be utilizing TCH DNS for a easy transition. I hope this clears up any questions on our PHP Policy. View the full article

Hello TCH Family! I am pleased to announce that we have completed our scheduled maintenance for this evening. If you have been effected with this welcome to your new network device, for those not yet upgraded please be patient. Thank you for your business and its a great day to be a TCH GURU! View the full article

We are about to start our announced Network Maintenance. If you received an email notice this maintenance effects you. I do not expect to exceed our announced downtime. We will post updates as we move thru the upgrade. This is only effecting a small segment of the network and is mostly dedicated clients. Therefore, I will not be announcing what servers are effected. Just now that if your server goes offline, that it is due to maintenance. Thank you View the full article

On March 7, 2013 at approximately 3:20PM our network monitoring detected a large amount of inbound traffic to several segments of our public facing network. This large inbound traffic tripped our alerting system and we started to investigate. Within just a few moments we watched a large Distributed Denial of Service attack unfold upon our network. The attack was a targeted UDP attack at our edge. Typically we can quickly identify and null route these types of attacks, however this attack was very large and coming from thousands of sources. The above network graph represents just one port on a switch that was targeted. As you can see the 100mbps port was 100% saturated. You can also see when the attack was stopped by our network admin team. During the attack, I grabbed the above graph from one of our gigE switch fiber feeds, as I wanted to show the family just how large of an attack this was. It was a very short sampling but shows how much inbound we were taking. At one point the attack was pushing over 1.5Gbps of traffic into our network. This combined with such a large amount of packets per second simply overwhelmed our routers. The actions we were taking against the DDOS starting showing progress at around 4:15:20PM EST and complete network stability was returned at 5:39:10 EST. While we never like to endure such events, every provider on the internet faces these issues and it is just part of doing business online. I am sorry for the network instability from yesterday. Thank you for your business. View the full article

We recently showed you How To: Add Your Website’s E-mail To Your Apple Device so we figured now we would show you how to add your e-mail to your Android device! The screen shots and directions are from Android 4.1.1 but should be similar on most versions of Android. 1. First, open the Email app (Note: Icon may look different on your device). 1A. If a screen similar to this one comes up, select “Others.” 2. A screen will open that looks like this: Select whether you would like to access your e-mail via POP3 or IMAP. The main difference is that IMAP (Internet Messaged Access Protocol) syncs with your email server so that any changes you make will appear anywhere you access your e-mail via IMAP (Inbox, Drafts, Sent Mail, etc. will be synced across all devices). POP (Post Office Protocol) is different in that your mail client and mail server are not synced. Any changes you make in your mail client will not be anywhere else except that particular client on that device. My personal preference is IMAP but you may use whichever one you like. 3. Enter your e-mail address and password, then click the “Manual Setup.” 4. Input your e-mail address as the “User name” and your password where it says “Password”. Change the IMAP or POP3 server to yourdomain . com (substituting yourdomain . com with your actual domain and no space). The Security type should be ‘None’ and if you are using IMAP, the port should 143 (unless you have an SSL certificate). If you are using POP3, the port should be 110. Click the ‘Next’ button. IMAP Port is 143. POP3 Port is 110. 5. Input yourdomain . com as the SMTP server (substituting ****** with your actual domain and no space). Select None as the Security Type and 587 for the port (if you don’t have an SSL certificate). Enter your username and password. 587 is the same port for both IMAP and POP3 but if 587 does not work, please try port # 26. 6. Next, select your update frequency and whether or not you would like to be notified when email arrives. Click Next. 7. Name the account whatever you would like and fill in your name. Click Done and you’re done! If you have any questions just post a comment here and I’ll be more than happy to assist you. View Complete Article / Comment

We have completed our network maintenance for tonight. All servers are back online and responding to services. To those who effected, enjoy the new hardware. To those not, stay tuned! Thank you View the full article

Hello TCH Family! We have completed our first round of network hardware maintenance. The next round is starting in a few moments and will effect the following servers: coruscant kamino kalee dagobah naboo yavin r2d2 danuta abraxas tarvis tyson plavin korriban geonosis bespin ossus endor ansek harbinger luke dantooine byss ambria View the full article

We are starting the aforementioned network maintenance window. We are starting the Maintenance and the following servers will be effected: jandoon cathar gryphon ophideran ukatis fresia quanton ithor felucia saijo vortex widek xerxes zeltros elom inysh madalore utapau kashyk darthvader nubia almania We will update this when this first round is completed. Thank you! View the full article

We are very excited to announce that the re-birth of TCH’s family contests has been successful and fun and the winner of a brand new Nexus 7 Android tablet has been picked and notified! You can see the contest post here – http://blog.totalchoicehosting.com/2013/02/re-introducing-tch-family-contests/ Thank you to everyone who participated in the contest, we appreciate your support! We had so much fun that we want to continue to give away free stuff via social media regularly and randomly. All you have to do is ‘Like’ (or continue to ‘Like’) our Facebook page and stay as active on it as possible. Winners won’t necessarily be picked solely on ‘Liking’ the page, the winner can be someone who shares a story, comments on a post or picture, etc. So continue to spread the word to your friends and family. Tell them we want to give them some free stuff! https://www.facebook.com/TotalChoice View the full article

Early this afternoon we sent Maintenance Announcement’s out to a select group of clients. On Saturday March 2, 2013 we will begin with our network upgrade initiative. This is the first step in our earlier announcement concerning Network Upgrades. If you have not received this email then the rack your server resides on has not been selected for this first round of upgrades (or you opted out of such e-mails). I have chosen to upgrade two server racks per Maintenance Window. This plan will take us a little longer, but will also allow us to work any bugs out as we move along. We have tested this upgrade on a rack of internal servers, and I am very very excited to roll this out to everyone. I am confident everyone will be blown away with this network improvement. Thank you for your business and it is a great day to be a TCH GURU! View the full article

One of the selling points for many people when choosing TotalChoice, is that we are Family owned and operated. Yes, we host over 50,000 web sites and yes, we are a large provider, however we are still family owned and operated. Last night Billy and myself headed in to the Data Center to get some work done. I snapped a couple of photos of the junior Head Guru in action. He still needs to finish the 10th grade, but one day he hopes to work at TCH Full time. View the full article

The above photo was taken last night. I don’t know how everyone else feels but seeing that stack of Cisco Switches gave me goose bumps, so I was inclined to include the photo with this blog post. Over the next few weeks, TotalChoice will begin a mass upgrade to much of its network hardware. We have been busy negotiating with our vendors and have taken delivery of all the gear needed to make the upgrades that our customers deserve! We will start by replacing every Rack Distribution Switch with new Cisco Switches. These switches are a large upgrade from our current switches and will give us a nice boost in performance and should provide years of reliable service. A rack by rack announcement will be made via our Social Media outlets and via email to affected clients. We anticipate very little downtime per rack as we work our way thru the switch replacements. In addition , we are adding another layer of redundancy to our network. We are in the process of adding additional up-links to each distribution switch from a redundant secondary gigE line card. This means we will be able to sustain a line card outage on our router without any downtime to the switches. Over the past few days we have been installing the secondary up-links from the routers to the distribution switches. So as we put up new the switches we will bundle the secondary redundant link to the new switch. Last week we installed an additional fiber drop from our upstream providers. This installation is part of our bigger plan for increased fiber redundancy and an improved automatic fail over system. Automatic fail over occurs when loss of connectivity occurs from our main fiber connection. We had a brief network outage a few weeks ago and when the system automatically failed over to our redundant fiber path the fail over simply did not work. After some investigation this failure was determined to be caused by a bad optical device at our upstream provider. The optical device has since been replaced and lessons learned. However, by adding this third fiber it gives us another path to our upstream and gives us more redundancy in our network and that means better uptime for everyone. We have also set up a monthly test that will be conducted to test our redundant/backup fiber connections. I will be posting more about these upgrades as we progress along. I know this was a long, technically winded post. If you got this far in reading it, thank you. Happy Hosting! View the full article

In a never ending quest to improve the reliability and quality of services that we provide to our clients, TotalChoice has expanded its number of available Internal Backup Servers. Over the past few weeks we have been tracking a slight degradation in the level of services provided to our clients from R1 Backup Software. This was tracked down to the current cluster of backup servers simply becoming to busy with traffic. It was decided to add another 64GB RAM, 50TB of RAID drive space and 16 CPU’s to the cluster. The parts were ordered and the additional capacity was brought online over this past weekend. Services were never interrupted, the TCH team did a really nice job. Specifically have to thank TCH-Bala for his endless push for new backup resources and all the hard work he did once he was given the resources he asked for. View Full Article

Today the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) granted a request from TotalChoice Hosting for additional IPv4 address space. This new pool of IP’s will be made available to our clients within the next 72 hours, as we need to get the block advertised to the internet and routed within our network. With the pool of available IP addresses dwindling at a very fast rate, it has become increasingly difficult for providers to obtain new allocations directly from ARIN. As of this posting there are 2.69 /8′s in aggregate available for allocation from ARIN. We are very pleased to have accomplished this. Happy Hosting! View the full article