Web Hosting Blog

Brief: We are upgrading our Sheffield Backup platform to the latest release.

Timeframe: Between 00:00 and 01:00 Saturday 9th August

Expected Impact: MsSQL, Win1, Win7 and Win9 will all be rebooted during this period, downtime is estimated at around three minutes per server.

What you need to do: All customers are advised to check their sites availability and functionality after this maintenance window. While we will endeavor to check all sites, this is a time-consuming task (given the bespoke nature of web site programming), and user reported issues will be dealt with as the highest priority.

As ever, please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or suggestions via the control panel support system.

15:53 - We are currently experiencing some issues with our Dublin mail cluster mail.pipeten.com, we have engineers on-site identifying and fixing the issue.

16:29 - Some services should now be restored and other services will be restored ASAP.

16:40 - All services with the exception of the control panel (cp.pipeten.com) should now be functioning correctly.

Sheffield - Maintenance Notice 01/09/2008

Brief: We are upgrading our Sheffield hosting platform to the latest release. This update is a full version upgrade, as such it will bring many package updates accross all servers and extra functionality as well as ensuring the continued security and stability of the hosting platform.

Timeframe: Between 22:00 Monday 1st September and 02:00 Tuesday 2nd September 2008

Expected Impact: The control panel will be offline during the maintenance window. All servers will also be upgraded and we expect this to be for a very brief period as each service is restarted.

What you need to do: All customers are advised to check their sites availability and functionality after this maintenance window. While we will endeavour to check all sites, this is a time-consuming task (given the bespoke nature of web site programming), and user reported issues will be dealt with as the highest priority.

As ever, please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or suggestions via the control panel support system.

Combing the power of our control panel H-Sphere and primary backup solution R1Soft, we are pleased to announce free and instant backups restores for all Linux dedicated solution customers.

This beta functionality allows you to view all restore points (daily or four-hourly usually) and seeds for your server (the last full backup) then simply select what you’d like to restore and to where. There may be a 1 to 15 minute wait depending on what time of day it is.

Please contact support if you’d like to enable this option in your control panel.

Quite a few of you have been asking what our new EV SGC SSL certificates do, and why they are “so expensive”. Hopefully we’ll explain in relatively simple terms below why these certificates are worth every penny…

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.ME domain name registrations have gone live this afternoon and Pipe Ten are proud to be able to offer them on their first day of registration! .ME registrations are available on a first-come, first-served basis, and if initial indicators are accurate, they will move quickly.

.ME has incredible potential for Internet users world-wide. With a .ME domain, the Internet will, quite simply, be all about YOU. Domain names have now gone personal.

Visit domains.pipeten.com to register your .ME domain name today!

We’re always on the look out for talented and experienced staff, so if you are interested in joining the team at Pipe Ten then please send a copy of your CV through to jobs@pipeten.com in either Word or PDF format.

Click here to view the current positions available at Pipe Ten.

Brief: We are upgrading our Sheffield hosting platform to the latest release. This upgrade will add additional functionality as well as ensuring the continued security and stability of the hosting platform.

Timeframe: Between 23:00 Monday 30th June and 02:00 Tuesday 1st July 2008
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For .NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.5

Trust levels are basically different sets of security configurations depending upon the circumstance.

You have:

• Full - You can do whatever you want, format the HDD, shut-down the server.
• High - Same as Full but you can’t call unmanaged code.
• Medium - Recommended by Microsoft for shared hosting environments (and all sane sysadmins).
• Low - Same as medium but you can’t do any DB, Network or other calls.
• Minimal - Unless we just wanted to calculated things, we can forget this trust level.

What we actually run is a custom trust level… By this we mean the standard Microsoft Medium trust with a few relaxations and few more restrictive items for ‘proper’ shared hosting security, such as:

• Allowing of OleDbPermission.
• Allowing of OdbcPermission.
• Less restrictive WebPermission.
• Reflection but no ReflectionPermission (so you can still use reflection for code you have permission to access).

Using a Medium trust level prevents applications from accessing shared system resources and eliminates the potential for inta application interference.

Offsite links:

• Microsoft - Using Medium Trust
• Microsoft - When is reflection permission needed?

Due to popular request we now offer PHP5 support for Linux accounts at no additional cost. Customers wishing to take advantage of this should contact support through the usual methods requesting migration to a PHP5 specific server.