News and Updates

November 2, 2012 – We have brought online three new memcached servers to enhance speed of web applications which support memcached.  Our preferred development platform, WordPress, is one of these applications.  Memcached is a product which was designed to increase performance on sites with heavy traffic.  It allows the server to “remember” or “cache” common pages and database queries thereby speeding up the page loads and reducing load on the server.  If you have an application which can take advantage of memcache (many content management systems can as well as other web applications), please contact our support team at support@internetpro.net for instructions on accessing our memcached servers.  If you know how to configure memcache, use these hosts:

memcache1.internetpro.net
memcache2.internetpro.net
memcache3.internetpro.net

October 30, 2012 – The internet as a whole (at least in North America) seems to be experiencing a lot of problems today.  Many of these issues can be traced to Hurricane Sandy.  As data lines go down in the north east, traffic is being actively rerouted.  This is causing “traffic jams” on the internet even in places that are geographically distant from the storm impact.  Locally, we are seeing Comcast routing issues which are affecting parts of our phone system.  We have seen lost connectivity to servers we manage in an Austin, TX datacenter.  Here are a few links which show some of the current problems on the internet:

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm
http://www.internetweathermap.com/map

This is an ongoing problem and reliable information is hard to come by at the moment.  We will be posting updates as we get them.

Sept. 10, 2012 – 2:00pm  – GoDaddy is experiencing a DOS attack from the activist group Anonymous.  This relates to GoDaddy’s earlier support of SOPA, for which we stopped using their registrar services (article here).   Although some of our customer domains are still registered through GoDaddy (if they have not been renewed yet), this outage will NOT affect those customers.  We operate our own DNS, Email, and Hosting services independently and not subcontracted through GoDaddy.  All of our services are in normal working order.   However, since the news of this attack is making headlines, we wanted to make a statement to eliminate any concerns our customers might have.  Here is an article giving some more details of this attack on GoDaddy: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/10/godaddy-outage-takes-down-millions-of-sites/

Update:  – It is just a member of Anonymous claiming responsibility – not the entire group.

Update – 5:00pm – Looks like the issue has been resolved for GoDaddy.  It remains to be seen if they are going to be the target of future attacks like this.

Update – 9/11/2012 – GoDaddy is claiming that the issue was not caused by hacker(s).   They say that the issue was an internal network problem which corrupted routing tables.

August 21, 2012 – Comcast is blocking email coming from our servers at the present time. We have contacted them about the issue, and expect to be unblocked soon. Customers who send to an address with Comcast will receive a bounce message. That email will need to be resent if you receive a bounce. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Update – 5:07pm – The block has been removed.

Update – 7:00am August 22, 2012 – Comcast has put us on the blacklist again. We are working to get this resolved permanently.

Update – 8:05am – The block has been removed again. Their systems are very automated, so we are having trouble getting confirmation this is a permanent removal.

Update – 8:30am – We believe we found the issue causing the trouble. A user had a password compromised and was their account was being used to send out some spam. Although the volume of spam was fairly low, Comcast was triggering a block. We have changed the password and notified the user. We believe the password was compromised through a “phishing” email that asked the user to “confirm” their username and password.   Please remember that Network Solutions, Inc. will never send you an email asking you for usernames or passwords!  Any email asking for that is a scam.

August 3, 2012 –  We are going to have to perform some emergency maintenance on one of our web servers tonight during the maintenance window.  The work to be performed is a hard drive replacement. Because of the nature of the failure, the server will have to be taken offline for a short period of time (expected less than 30 minutes).  Some customer web sites will be unavailable during this time.  We will post status updates here as the work is performed.

Update –  The maintenance has been completed without incident and all sites are functional.  If you have any issues, please contact us at support@internetpro.net or call 256-547-6817.

July 30, 2012 – We have received several reports of a scam email going around to our customers.   Please note: THIS EMAIL IS NOT FROM US!

This email is a scam to capture your username and password so that they can use your email account to send out spam.

The contents of the message are below:

—BEGIN