Hi,
Why do I seem to start so many newsletters with an apology? This one is an apology for the lack of newsletters recently (in fact it almost exactly a year since my last newsletter). A lot has happened since then!
Myself
First of all I must thank all the clients who’ve passed on their best wishes in the last year. It’s only looking back now that I realise that the last time I wrote to you, I was several days away from starting Chemotherapy. Thankfully I was able to stay pretty much in control of the business (with a lot of assistance from friends, family and understanding customers – you know who you are!!) it certainly slowed a few things down, changed a few priorities in my life, and gave me some new challenges!
I was given the all clear back in January (and promptly disappeared on holiday and got engaged!), and have spent the rest of the year getting back to full strength. Hopefully now that is on the way, more improvements and changes will appear at BetterWebSpace.
Server News
In the last year we’ve added more new servers to our range. We’re still growing day by day, with the assistance of some of our affiliates who are promoting us very aggressively, thank you to them!
We will be doing some more work on our affiliate system in the near future, and then we’d urge all ours users to sign up and earn from referring us (as we know so many of you do already!). Watch you inbox for the note to sign up!
Support
The new support helpdesk will be launched soon (I know it’s been a year since I last said that!), we’re still putting the finishing touches to the configuration (I’ve never seen so many options!!), and will be looking for beta testers in the near future (so if you fancy being a guinea pig let us know ASAP!).
Server Upgrade & Maintenance
Several of our servers are long overdue for a full security audit and kernel upgrade, we plan to schedule these for the coming week.
As such I’d like to schedule a maintenance window nightly during this week (16th – 20th October 0200-0400 GMT / 0300-0500 BST), short outages will be possible. Each server will be rebooted during this time and is only expected to be offline for 20 to 30 minutes, and not the entire duration.
Email from Nobody?
Every day we see hundreds of emails being returned which have been sent out from the user “nobody”. The user “nobody” sends out emails from PHP software when it hasn’t been configured correctly to give a correct return address. We’d like to stop this for two reasons:
- It clogs up the mail server as the mailbox “nobody” often gets filled up very quickly and mail sits on the queue.
- You don’t get your return emails to tell you whether an email address is invalid, often this results in the user being allowed to continue using your forum, or you emailing them in a mailing list when they aren’t a valid email address.
There are a few major culprits as far as software goes at the moment and these are:
- phpBB – Consider applying the following modification or asking us for a quote to get it done for you. phpBB Modification.
- Niche Portal Builder – We see many from this, We’re not sure if this one is incorrect configuration or a problem with the script. Please check with the vendor if you are using this software.
- Custom Scripts – If you are using the php mail() function please ensure you are setting a valid from address in the headers.
This is something we’ll be checking up on in the coming months. Please make sure your website is in order today!
Your Responsibility!
It is your responsibility to ensure that all the software on your website is kept updated with the necessary version(s). Where there are security fixes/upgrades available you should apply these ASAP. It is often worth visiting the writers of your software and signing up to their mailing lists, remember if your account is compromised in any way, you are accountable.
If you are unsure about doing your upgrades, contact us. Often we are happy to perform them for you as a custom job.
Member Spotlight
I’d like to get back to spotlights on our members in newsletters as well as necessary information, so if you’d like to tell us a bit about your website and services, and what you do – get in touch!
Until next time!
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