Over the last 3 months the amount of email handled by our mail system has increased by 720%.

More than 98% of this mail is unsolicited commercial email (spam). This is placing added preassure on our systems and causing our spam protection systems to become less effective.

One of the major contributing factors to this problem is the use of catch-all email accounts. This is where one email address will accept mail for anything sent to that domain.

To improve security on the network from 30th November 2006 external connections to MySQL will be blocked. You will only be able to connect to MySQL from the internal network and via PHPMyAdmin [ http://web.mysql1.netsvr.net ].

This has become necessary to ensure the integrity of our network is maintained. There are many unsuccessful attempts to connect to the MySQL database each day from suspicious sources. This can slow down the systems considerably. By blocking all external connections at firewall level we can reduce the threat and increase performance.

We will be upgrade PHP to version 5.1.6 on all servers during Saturday 23 September and Sunday 24 September.

During this time sites may go offline for a period of 10 to 15 minutes while PHP is updated and the site settings reconfigured.

We will be performing a software upgrade on the FTP server between 15:00GMT and 18:00GMT on the 18th August 2006. During this period there may be downtime of the FTP service.

To avoid any problems we request that customers do not attempt to log in to the FTP server during this time unless absolutely essential.

During the course of today we will be updating the SmarterStats server. This update will resolve some minor issues as below

In response to our Server Relocation Statement the other day we are currently making some changes to the mail server configuration and set-up to allow us to provide alternative access to mail in the event of a major outage of the main network.

This work should be transparent to users however there may at times be a slight delay in the delivery of received mail.

The reason the network had to be relocated was due to a change in ownership of RedBus Meridian Gate. RedBus was recently acquired by TeleCity and renamed to TelecityRedbus [TeleBus]. After the exchange TeleBus then proceeded to cancel all existing contracts and put new contracts in place.

The main routing equipment was relocated last night. This means that the majority of traffic is now currently going through IPHouse and then routed back to TeleBus (RedBus Meridian Gate). The actual servers remain in TeleBus and we will provide more details in the coming days as to when these will be relocated.

The advantage of now having the traffic re-routed means that when the actual servers are physically moved the downtime will be maintained to a minimum as the connectivity is already routed through IPHouse.

At approximately 14:30 today [13th June 2006] we began experiencing network connectivity problems and outages. This was identified as a problem with our IP range which had been re-routed in anticipation for the server relocation.

However the IP range was not announcing correctly causing connectivity issues and outages.

Engineers quickly worked on the problem to restore connectivity at 14:45 GMT

We have no planned the server relocation to take place between 17:00 today [13th June 2006] and 09:00 tomorrow [14th June 2006]. During this period users may experience 2-3 hours of complete downtime. There may also be intermittent outages between these times of a few minutes due to network configuration changes.

It was just 7 months ago that we originally moved our set-up to Redbus Meridian Gate. This move has brought faster connectivity and a much greater network reliability.

However in recent weeks Redbus has been purchased by Telecity a major European data centre provider. Since the buyout service levels at Redbus have dropped. There has also been an price increase of over 400% on contract renewals. It is my personal belief that the aim is to quickly increase profitability ready for a floatation and possible sale providing a big return on investment in a short space of time.