Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Slow or Offline Websites/Email ** UPDATED **

Hi folks

You may have noticed that your website or email have been fairly frequently going down the past few weeks. We have been investigating and attempting to correct as soon as we become aware of it (which has been sometimes nearly instantly). The hosting company has also been very quick to respond, and has assured me every time that the culprit is not a BWD-hosted account. (All BWD-hosted accounts are on a shared hosting server, meaning there are other "accounts" on the same machine. That's where the problem was originating.)

The culprit appears to be some malicious (and over-active) scripts on another account on the server. They've been deleting/removing them as soon as they discover them, but they have not successfully removed all of them until (they are fairly certain) today. Here's the message from the hosting company.

There have been so many script problems on your server recently. I see that we disabled one script on the 13th and two scripts yesterday. I was seeing a higher than normal load on your server right now and I contacted one of our team of experts that monitor your server. They found yet another script to disable. The load average is coming down and things appear to be getting back to normal. He is not seeing any other problems at this time.

I'm very sorry that you are having to deal with other users' script problems. Our team of monitors are viewing our shared servers around the clock, making sure that all services are running and users are "playing nice". Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you.


Sorry for the inconvenience. I know that some of you have had trouble sending email (hitting the mail server at one of the times it was overloaded/down). Hopefully the problem has been (finally) completely corrected.

Thanks,
Greg Campbell
BWD-Graphics.com

UPDATE: Issue Re-Opened


The issues are apparently not completely resolved. I am working directly with level II tech support with the hosting company to resolve this as quickly as possible. Again, the issue is not with any BWD-hosted account, but with a handful of other accounts hosted on the server. When the source is discovered it is immediately disabled, but the original source has not yet been discovered as new scripts are constantly surfacing and bogging down the server, at least hourly or more! Will update again when a final resolution has been reached.

UPDATE Jun 23 10:55am ET: The server was down AGAIN today... this issue has obviously not been corrected. Working on it again with the hosting company. Very sorry for the inconvenience.

Friday, April 8, 2011

Security Issues = Password Changes

Three times in the past month or two I have spent DAYS cleaning up from compromised websites (even using fairly secure passwords) so over the next couple days I am going to be changing everyone's master account passwords to 20-character, very secure passwords. I will email each of you with the updated password. Please email me if you don't get an email, or if you just need it before I can email everyone.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but the alternative is DEFINITELY not fun. (I know first-hand!)

Thanks for your patience,
Greg Campbell
BWD

Saturday, January 22, 2011

High Server Load - Resolved

The server that hosts all BWD-hosted accounts was experiencing unusually high loads over the past few days. This was causing at least slowness, and sometimes websites and email were intermittently down. After investigation, the cause seems to be an account owned by another reseller on the same server. The account has been brought under control now, and you should not have any further downtime for your websites or email.

Please contact us if you are still having trouble connecting to the server for either.

Thanks,
Greg Campbell
BWD-Graphics