News and Updates

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.

February 12, 2014 – As the weather continues to be dangerous, we are again being forced to allow our staff to leave early for their safety.  Our main office will be closing at 1:30pm today.  Phones will remain open and our technicians will be responding to calls which can be handled remotely.  We will post an update about our opening time in the morning around 7:00am.  We do apologize for the inconvenience.

February 13, 2014 –  Our office will be opening at the regular time of 8:00am this morning.  There are still some travel problems, so we may not be able to dispatch to all customers, but we will be doing our best to handle all calls.

February 11, 2014 – Our area is under a Winter Storm Warning and we have decided to delay opening until 9:30am for the safety of our staff.  Right now, much of the area is just wet, but according to the weather service, the freezing line is moving south and there is potential for hazardous travel conditions.  We will continue to evaluate the situation, but it looks like we will be able to open after this short delay.  We will continue to post updates here as there may be issues later today and tomorrow.

Our technicians will be responding to call and emails.  If you need to contact us, please call 256-547-6817 or email us at support@internetpro.net.

January 30, 2014 – 6:25am – It looks like Comcast is having an area wide outage that is affecting internet, TV, and their phone service.  We do not yet know the extent of the outage but we are working to find out more information. We will be posting further updates here as we get them.

Update 7:25am – They are aware of the problem and have a preliminary estimated time to repair set at 10:30am.  However, this time was just set by their automated system and means that no technicians have actually evaluated the issue just yet, so it is most likely not a good estimate.

Update 7:50am – The Comcast system seems to be back online across the area.