There have been several periodic downtimes lasting 5-15 minutes on Singapore VPS node "sgnode71" for the last few days. By investigating this issue, it has lead us to believe that there are any issues with the hardware itself. Though this motherboard model (SuperMicro X9DRI-LN4F) seems to have few known bugs in which the firmware may need to be upgraded and specific settings changed in the BIOS in order to prevent it from reducing the processor clock speed which can lead to odd issues or outages.

In order to correct these issues we have scheduled an emergency maintenance window of 30 minutes starting from Saturday, May 11, 2013 12:00 PM (SGT) .

Best Regards,

SkyNetHosting.Net Inc.

There has been an outrage in one of the major Singapore carrier. The effected Singapore Data Centers are SGDC2 and SGDC3. Servers in SGDC1 is NOT effected by this outrage. The effected data centers are currently routing traffic another carriers to bring the network online.

Update1: The network will be restored within 30 - 45 minutes.

Update2: The network is back online.

Best Regards,

SkyNetHosting.Net Inc.

As you may already aware, a brute force attack affected global WordPress installations. In order to protect your WordPress passwords being compromised we have added a human login verification for all WordPress login pages. This will act as an additional layer of security and will block all bots from reaching your WordPress login aria. To access your WordPress admin aria simply enter the mentioned username (skywp) and password (119wp) when prompted by your browser and then you will be able to access the normal WordPress admin login page without any issue. You can log in with your standard WordPress username and password to your WordPress account.

Best Regards,

SkyNetHosting.Net Inc.

On April 10th, our SEO servers that mainly hosting WordPress sites were subjected to a Brute Force Attack. Our System Administrations immediately started working on the affected servers and investigated the issue and became aware of potential brute-force attack on the default WordPress admin login pages.  A WordPress brute force attack is a method used to obtain the WordPress admin password by using automated software that generates a large number of multiple combinations of passwords to obtain the desired password.

We have already taken proactive steps to reduce the impact from these attacks by creating a custom security rules on our firewalls, however since there are thousands of IP's being used in the attack, the process of blocking attacker IP's have a direct impact on the performance all affected servers.

Your ongoing patience as our team finalizes the troubleshooting process is the best course of action, and is greatly appreciated.

Is there anything IP do?

Yes we need your help to resolve this issue. We strongly recommend that you proceed with the following with immediate effect :

1. Change your WordPress Password

Make passwords at least eight characters in length and make sure to use a mixture of upper and lower-case letters along with numbers and punctuation (such as $, &, !, etc.) added in between the letters. Having a strong password in place helps to protect against future brute-force attack attempts, and has the added benefit of significantly reducing the chances of malware being installed on your website or on our system.

You can also get a good idea on creating a strong password from www.howsecureismypassword.net (Use only dummy passwords to test - don't use your real passwords)

2. As the attack is targeted towards the WordPress sites that use admin as the username we would highly recommend you to change your admin username. Following url will explain you how to change your WordPress username

http://www.digitalkonline.com/blog/change-your-wordpress-admin-username/

3.  If you are unable to access your WordPress admin panel at this time to do the above changers, please remain patient as we have as we have disabled some WP admin url's for 24 hours in order to prevent password scanning on them. If you woild like to enable access to your PC please add the following code to your htaccess file.

<Files ~ "^wp-login.php">

Order deny,allow

Deny from all

Allow from x.x.x.x

</Files>

(replace x.x.x.x with their ip what they get from www.whatismyip.com)

For more details on editing the htaccess file and adding the code please visit the following url;

http://wordpress.noc38.com/how-to-edit-htaccess.htm

Your ongoing patience as we finalizes the troubleshooting process is the best course of action, and is greatly appreciated.

Best Regards,

SkyNetHosting.Net Inc.

-------------------------

Discussions about the Attack: 

WebHostingTalk:  http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1255387

HostGator: http://blog.hostgator.com/2013/04/11/global-wordpress-brute-force-flood/

Siliconrepublic:  http://www.siliconrepublic.com/strategy/item/32269-massive-brute-force-attack/

HostingDiscussion: http://www.hostingdiscussion.com/customer-service-support-issues/32748-wordpress-brute-force-attack.html

Sucuri.Net: http://blog.sucuri.net/2013/04/mass-wordpress-brute-force-attacks-myth-or-reality.html

HostDime: http://www.hostdime.com/blog/2013/04/brute-force-attack-affecting-global-wordpress-installations/

Ever wonder how secure your WordPress password is? With www.howsecureismypassword.net tool that checks your WordPress Password and tell you how much time it would take for a normal PC to crack your password. Control panels such as cPanel comes with build in modules to stop such attacks but WordPress has no factuality to block such attacks by default, so if you have a weak password chances at that your blog could get compromised in no time.

We'd strongly recommend constructing fake passwords for testing purposes rather than using your actual WordPress password on www.howsecureismypassword.net . Consider HowSecureisMyPassword.Net as an interesting exercise about how adding a few characters and symbols to your password can increase its security. You can never be too paranoid about security!

Best Regards,

SkyNetHosting.Net Inc.

We will be performing an emergency power maintenance on the rack that Server Alexis currently resides in. This maintenance will be taking place tonight (4/4) between 0000 and 0500 PDT(GMT -7). Due to the nature of the maintenance we will need to power off the server prior to the maintenance beginning, but no sooner than 0000 PDT.

If you have any questions or concerns about this upgrade, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Best Regards,

SkyNetHosting.Net Inc.

UPDATE: The maintainance was completed with 5 minutes downtime.

We will be doing maintenance on Saturday, March 9, 2013 at 01:15 AM - Saturday, March 9, 2013 at 03:30 AM EST to fix problems related to InnoDB which was not fully completed during the last maintance. During this maintenance, some services will be off-line, including apache web server and MYSQL services.

Please excuse us for any inconvenience that this procedure may have caused to you or your site visitors.

Best Regards,

SkyNetHosting.Net Inc.

The maitance is now completed. 

Best Regards,
SkyNetHosting.Net Inc.

Recently, server Nicole had some minor issues resulting MySQL services to crash from time to time and experience some downtimes on few occasions. This problem is due to InnoDB keeps failing and effecting MYSQL on the server.

We will be doing scheduled server maintenance on Sunday, February 24, 2013 from 6:00 AM (EST) – 7:00 AM (EST) to fix these problems related to MYSQL and  InnoDB. During this maintenance, all services will be off-line, including web sites, e-mails and control panel access.

Please excuse us for any inconvenience that this procedure may have caused to you or your site visitors. 

Best Regards,

SkyNetHosting.Net Inc.

We will be upgrading php on all of servers from PHP5.2 to PHP5.3. This upgrade will resolve many security exploits and make services more stable. Ideally we would have preferred to continue support for PHP5.2 for an extended time, but unfortunately PHP5.2 has been made “End of Life” by the PHP Group and is no longer receiving any security updates. Some providers may still continue running PHP 5.2 but we feel this isn't a safe path to take and could potentially end up putting our clients at a greater risk. Our view on this is that a scheduled upgrade to PHP5.3 with enough notice and then doing the upgrade in a controlled way is the best course of action and in addition we had many users actually requesting PHP 5.3. over the last 2 years.

The upgrade is scheduled to be completed within the next 2 weeks. All popular PHP software such as WordPress, fully support PHP5.3 and you are unlikely to have any problems or notice anything. However if you are running any outdated PHP scripts or custom PHP scripts that does not support PHP5.3 we recommend to upgrade them to the latest version to make to make compatible with PHP5.3.

If you have any questions or concerns about this upgrade, please do not hesitate to contact us.

I hope you will enjoy the new features and increased security!

Best Regards,
SkyNetHosting.Net Inc.

Thank you for your continued patience throughout this process.

Best Regards,
SkyNetHosting.Net Inc.

Recently, server London had some minor issues resulting in the named servers to crash and experience some downtimes on few occasions. This is due to the fact that there are too many accounts hosted on server along with certain websites that are monopolizing the resources available on the server, causing the services to crash.

We understand these issues are very frustrating for our customers and we have decided to upgrade Server. We believe these improvements were needed to maintain uptime and reliability in order to keep all valued customers 100% satisfied with our services. 

Thank you for choosing SkyNetHosting.Net as your hosting provider.

Best Regards,
SkyNet Management

We have identified an issue with one of the hard drives on Nicole servers raid array. The server is currently performing a live raid rebuild and its 90% completed, once the array rebuild is fully completed we will be taking the server offline for a short time to replace the degraded hard drive from its raid array. Server performance is normal and its running fine with the remaining drives.

Progress: The rebuild has finished and we will be shutting down the server to swap HDD0 now.

Progress: Hard Drive is replaced and server is rebooted and back online.

Best Regards,
SkyNetHosting.Net Inc.

At 08:10 PM (GMT +0:00) Singapore server stopped responding. It was detected that the server's motherboard is having issues having the server unstable from time to time. The mother motherboard is currently being replaced and the estimated downtime to replace the motherboard is 1 hour. We will update this post once the server is back online.

Progress: Motherboard is replaced and the server is back online.

Best Regards,

SkyNetHosting.Net Inc.

Recently, server Jessy had some minor issues resulting in the named servers to crash and experience some downtimes on few occasions. This is due to the fact that there are too many accounts hosted on Jessy server along with certain websites that are monopolizing the resources available on the server, causing the services to crash. We understand these issues are very frustrating for our customers and we have decided to upgrade Server Jessy by tripling the number of CPU's and memory and upgrading the SATA  hard drives to new SAS 15K drives. We believe these improvements were needed to maintain uptime and reliability in order to keep all valued customers 100% satisfied with our services. 

Thank you for choosing SkyNetHosting.Net as your hosting provider.

Best Regards,
SkyNet Management