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We will be performing some important planned maintenance on Friday, August 8, 2014.   This maintenance will include some time outside our normal maintenance window (which is 12am to 3am) because of the scope of work.   The current plan is to have all maintenance tasks finished by 8:00am August 9, 2014.  Many different systems will be affected, but each system should have a relatively short period of downtime.

Some of the tasks to be performed:

• Memory upgrade of one web server to replace failing memory modules
• Maintenance on monitoring system
• Maintenance on new hosted Exchange server
• Many firewall updates to mitigate ongoing DDOS attacks and spam attacks
• Continued migration of sites/services from retiring server
• Upgrade of NetSol Cloud
• Upgrade of webmail
• Modification to smarthost relay

If you have any questions or concerns related to the above maintenance, please call us at 256-547-6817 or email us at support@internetpro.net.

Beginning August 1, 2014, Network Solutions, Inc. will be changing some of the rates we charge customers for service.  This will NOT include any internet related services and only affects onsite service calls and repair work done in our office.  Not all rates will be increasing, but some will be.   We will be moving to a tier-based system with different rates for different tiers of work.   Tiers will be set based on difficulty of work and urgency of need.

We realize that no one wants to see “rate change” as it is usually synonymous with “rate increase” however Network Solutions, Inc. has not increased any labor rates since 1997 although MANY costs have increased between then and 2014.  In order to maintain our high level of service, we have been forced to make these updates and hope our customers will understand.

We appreciate your business and your understanding.

Network Solutions, Inc. is proud to announce that we have expanded our facilities again!  As part of our ongoing growth, we have closed the old annex office located at 1041 Forest Avenue and opened a new annex at 228 South 5th Street next door to our main office (226 South 5th Street).   The new annex is larger and much more convenient due to its proximity to our main office.   We have updated our Contact Page to reflect the staff whose offices are in the annex location.  Our front office has not changed, so when coming to our office for repairs or payments, you will still come to the same entrance you have been familiar with for years.

AT&T Network Engineers will be performing a planned maintenance on Birmingham-Alabama JAR 1 . 
The work will be performed on 7/13/2014, during the maintenance window of 12:00AM-6:00AM, local time. 
AT&T's goal is to successfully complete the task and restore service within the stated time frame.

Our access provider's engineers will be performing a(n) ROUTING ENGINE AND SWITCH CONTROL BOARD UPGRADE.


If you have any questions or concerns regarding this maintenance, please call 256-547-6817 or email support@internetpro.net.

May 14, 2014 – We have received some reports of our customers not receiving email from Hotmail.com users.  Hotmail bounce messages are not very helpful, so this did take some time to troubleshoot.  We have determined that a large number of Hotmail servers are on several blacklists due to a spam outbreak.  Hotmail is not very forthcoming about their operations, but it looks like some of their servers will be dropped from the blacklists in around 7 hours (about 4:00pm CDT).  We have decided NOT to whitelist Hotmail servers for several reasons: 1) they have thousands of servers, 2) they do not make their server list public, and 3) whitelisting these servers will allow a large volume of spam through to our customers.

Hotmail is really most useful as a “disposable” email account and probably should not be used as a mission critical business account.  We recommend that if you are dealing with someone in business using a Hotmail account, that you suggest to them that they use a different free account for now OR set up a new account with their own domain with a reputable ISP such as Network Solutions, Inc. 😉

If you have any questions regarding our blacklisting decision, please contact us at support@internetpro.net.

May 13, 2014 – In true unlucky 13th fashion, we had an AT&T circuit fail at approximately 8:30pm.   This outage affected many customers.  We notified AT&T and the circuit is back up as of 9:10pm.   We are still trying to get updates from AT&T as to the cause of this issue.  We do apologize for any inconvenience this caused.  If you are still having any service issues that you believe may be a result of this outage, please contact support@internetpro.net.

(UPDATE) May 16, 2014 – This morning, we had an AT&T circuit fail. As of 12:35pm this afternoon, all services are back up and running. We are continuing to work with AT&T to find a solution to this problem and how to prevent it from happening again. Thank you for your patience. If you are still having trouble with your service due to this issue, please contact support@internetpro.net

(UPDATE) May 21, 2014 –  We continue to have sporadic issues with AT&T.  We actually have another circuit on the verge of being turned up which is designed to add bandwidth for our customers.  We are concentrating on getting this new circuit going instead of repairing the one with a problem because of AT&T’s incompetence and inability to follow through with repairs.   We apologize for the trouble, and do understand the inconvenience this issue is causing.  We promise that no one wants it fixed more than us!

April 18, 2014 – WordPress 3.9 has been released and contains a lot of new updates.   We are in the process of upgrading all of our managed WordPress sites to the 3.9 release.   During the update, the WordPress site being upgraded will shift to maintenance mode for a few moments.  This process usually takes less than 30 seconds before the site is live again.

This version of WordPress introduces a lot of nice features including:

• Improved visual editing (especially copying and pasting from Microsoft Word)
• Improved image editing with easy access to crop and rotate tools
• Drag and drop of images from your desktop directly into posts
• Gallery previews in the editor
• Audio and video playlists
• Live widget and header previews
• Header image tool which allows you to crop and your header image when customizing a theme
• Much more!

If you have any questions or concerns about this upgrade, please contact us at 256-547-6817 or email support@internetpro.net.

Update: All managed sites have been updated.  If your site is experiencing any issues, please contact us.

April 9, 2014 – A large power outage struck our area and our datacenter was affected.  Backup generation systems came online as expected. However, we did have one UPS failure which affected several servers.   Our technicians are currently working to bring up all affected systems.  The power failure occurred at around 9:45 local time.  Most systems remained online throughout the failure.  We will post updates here as we have more information.\

Update: 10:40pm   – One virtual server host has been adversely affected by the power outage.  It currently seems to have a controller failure, and several virtual machines are affected by this outage.  We are working on moving the affected virtual machines to other hosts.

Update 11:10pm – The issue with the virtual server has been found and corrected.  All machines which are supposed to be hosted on it are being moved/booted up on it.

Update 11:20pm – All servers seem to be up and running.

If you have any questions about this issue or if you have found any unresolved problems, please contact us at 256-547-6817 or email support@internetpro.net.

March 31, 2014 – We’ve been noticing several email issues today.  First, our mail server has gotten on some lesser-used blacklists.  Most ISPs do not use these blacklists because they are “pay to remove”.  If you do have email not going to someone in particular, please send an email to support@internetpro.net and we can implement a workaround.   The main ISP that we have noticed blocking us is Earthlink (formerly Deltacom).

We’ve also noticed several email account passwords being hacked.  We have had to disable several customer email accounts because of this.  When we disable an account it does NOT keep you from receiving email (to the server) so messages being send to you will NOT bounce and WILL be delivered.  However, you will not be able to retrieve your email into an email client OR send email using a deactivated account.  In general, you can contact us to establish a new password for your account, and you will be back up and running.

Lastly, there have been a lot of virus emails coming through today with a subject of something like “New Fax: 3 pages”.   The number of pages has been varying from 2 to 5 pages (that we have seen).   These emails contain a .zip attachment which is a virus.  Our virus scanner is not catching these as yet, but our spam scanner IS tagging them as spam.   Do NOT open these messages.

If you have any questions, please contact us at 256-547-6817 or email support@internetpro.net.