Tony

The issue was brand awareness and associating with us so here: Vs something like this: The Frog Host one is a newer better look to be giving to people when they want something. So it's not entirely about pleasing all partners it's also about standing out in the partner lists we're on or in any other document we use.

No there are no coupons that can be used for renewing plans. If you had a recurring discount it would already be applied to the renewal. If it was a one time then you received a big discount and we cannot afford to give those discounts out every time someone pays which is why they're one time.

We're having more and more people want to use a logo whether that's partners or customers. We've had problems with partners not wanting to use the current one so wanted to revise it so that would no longer be a problem.

We will be migrating the Marlin node to new hardware starting on April 9th and it should be completed by April 10th. This is a 48 hour window although we estimate we will be done the migration within 24 hours. There will be about 5 minutes of downtime this migration we will move VPS's using the migration tools in OpenVZ to minimize the impact of the move as much as possible. We're sorry about the late notice but due to it's minimal impact we'd rather not delay a necessary migration. Specification break down: Old Marlin Dual Xeon 5430 12GB RAM 4x300GB SATA Raptor Raid-10 New Marlin Dual Xeon 5520 24GB RAM 4x300GB SAS Raid-10 So this is a significant jump in specifications on this node in terms of CPU power, memory and hard drive speed and reliability. If you have any questions or concerns about this migration do not hesitate to make a VPS ticket. Start Date: 04/09/2010 End Date: 04/10/2010 Estimated Down Time: less than 5 minutes Duration: 2 Days

It's spam monitoring service has been a nice addition with it banning the majority of them just after they register. It wasn't just about the bots though our license with vbulletin expires in a few months no interest in paying their price increase or using vbulletin 4. So IPB is a nice change of pace and has come a long way from when I last used it that's for sure.

True I guess it's time to post a daily video from youtube or something

The memory limit cannot be changed. We run CentOS 5.4 right now and it's a safe assumption in the future if there is a new 5.x release we'll be running it.

We were blocking certain countries ranges where most of the spam was coming from. Malaysia was a big one if my memory serves me right. So it start something like this: 1.2.3.* Then we start seeing anything 1.2.* being spam so we block 1.2.* It helped reduce the spam users quite a bit as we blocked a few hundred bots who had signed up (not a single legitimate user on the IP ranges we banned) So there are some ranges that make sense to ban. Also obviously server IP ranges are smart to ban as well.

Spam service also doing an excellent job: http://forums.hawkhost.com/user/1065-joshuaanave/ This user was auto banned because they're a known spammer No more us blocking large IP ranges can rely on the service to pick them up and the odd one that does not is not a huge deal it's a quick mark as spam anyways.

We're fully switched over now and along with that have the spam monitoring service running. Only issue we ran into were attachments for whatever reason they would not link back to the posts. Since we only have a few posts with them I just reposted my mascot ones and the rest are lost. So I guess over the next week we'll see how many bots we get signed up posting links compared to when we were running vbulletin.

We do not offer dedicated servers anymore and I doubt we will anytime in the near future. There were just a lot of headaches with them as far as people not canceling and just not paying leaving us with bills and things like that.

I figured I'd mention most likely tomorrow and if not tomorrow on the weekend we'll be switching from vbulletin to invision power board. We've just had our fill of the bots overrunning our forums and just vbulletin in general being a major annoyance. So expect a new look soon and probably a whole lot less annoying bots showing up on our forums. Which I guess means more people are going to need to post to make up for the bots

Well it would be things that are against our terms of service or acceptable use policy which are not allowed. Keep in mind VPS's are not ideal for game servers. It might run simple games but it wouldn't run your battlefield bad company 2 server or anything like that.

In the .htaccess file it probably has those two lines which is why it works. The 403 is a mod_security error the code I gave turns it off for a specific folder and all it's sub folders.

I imagine the solution was to add the following to the .htaccess file? SecFilterEngine Off SecFilterScanPOST Off

So we're trying the spam monitoring service on the frog host forum. Granted not as high traffic but very neat anyways since a bot visited both forums. http://forums.hawkhost.com/member.php?u=1034 I manually banned them http://forums.froghost.com/index.php?//user/12-xboatsailorz/ Spam service I guess banned them since I don't think any of us banned them.

What I think is not bots is the signing up portion. Although it's just some of them it seems that way other times it's entirely a bot. Almost like there are a few variations of the groups. The none bot ones always post and always the same sites. That's what makes me think they're not entirely bots. What's also interesting is the same bots who visit our forum also visit some forums we have links on. So the LiteSpeed forum which is a PR6 has the same bots as our site and we're a PR5. Oh well though probably won't be using vbulletin much longer anyways. Our license expires on July 18th and the biggest hurdle for us is migrating the site code to read IPB rather than vbulletin. Though Frog Host already has the code for doing this so not a huge deal there either.

You'll notice they always put in a ICQ number as well as location and a few other pieces of information. Since we added an avatar option a lot of them do that as well. For example: http://forums.hawkhost.com/member.php?u=1033 You get ones with just an avatar: http://forums.hawkhost.com/member.php?u=923 Or both: http://forums.hawkhost.com/member.php?u=723 The best part is the same avatar pictures over and over again.

You'll need to make a ticket in order for the account to be downgraded. Someone will confirm it fits in the smaller plan and such before switching you.

That is somewhat feasible but not really since Litespeed and cPanel need to all play nice with this. cPanel has no plans on supporting multiple PHP 5 versions anytime soon. Litespeed reads the httpd.conf that cPanel makes for the web server. Also like I said the problem of the encoders not working with it. It could really cause support headaches when people try to run a script that requires a certain optimizer and it's not there.

Silent crowd

I doubt you'll see PHP 5.3 on any of our servers any time in the near future. What the PHP manual lists and the real world are entirely two different things. There are lots of popular PHP scripts that simply do not work with PHP 5.3. Along with that you also have encoders like Zend Optimizer which do not work in PHP 5.3. So for us as well as probably almost all web hosts PHP 5.3 is a massive nightmare like the PHP4 -> PHP5 migration because user made scripts are poorly made and are not compatible and are slow to become as such.

I have no idea and some of them are manual. Someone will sign up to to get by the captcha stuff then make a post or a bot will then make the posts.

Wordpress redirects to just one url. So if you specify it as just mydomain.com/blog/ then it's going to make anything else that goes to it's folder redirect as such. This is so there is not duplicate content for search engines. So it sounds like www. works fine on your site which makes sense our system automatically adds DNS and web server entries. It's just the fact your software is redirecting to one url.

4a 4b So thoughts, comments, rude opinions?