From around 18:00 tonight (18th August 2010) our support team will be performing essential maintenance on the MySQL server running on RA.  We anticipate the downtime to be in the range of 30 to 60 minutes.

During this downtime, access to any hosted websites utilising MySQL will be impaired.

Update 19:20

The maintenance work was completed by 18:30.  Normal MySQL service has now resumed on RA.  For live status of our services, please visit http://status.appliedconsultancy.com.

We are currently experiencing some problems with our office ADSL/Broadband connection.  This is causing substantial delays to any messages currently being sent to any address at appliedconsultancy.com.

This connection problem does not affect any websites hosted through NamesAndSpace or any other ACSL web-based services.  Our support website, ACS Support, is also unaffected.

Update 1530: Our connection is now somewhat erratic both in terms of speed and reliability.  We are receiving some messages, and we will reply to those as soon as we get them.

Update 09:30 18th August: Our Internet connection is working normally.

As part of our normal operating schedule, several of our hosting servers will be undergoing routine maintenance between 18:00 and 19:00 tonight.  During this time, access to some services may be impaired or unavailable.

The ACS Support website will not be affected by tonight’s work and will remain operational should any customers wish to contact our support team.

For live status of all our NamesAndSpace (N&S) hosting servers, please visit http://status.appliedconsultancy.com.

As and when the maintenance work has been completed, our support team will update this blog.

As part of our continuing programming of server renewal, one of our oldest hosting servers, ODIN, is being retired.  Over the past couple of months our technical team has been slowly transferring the websites, services and other responsibilities handled by ODIN to other servers.

For the most part, this process has been transparent to the majority of users.  However, some users may need to change a few setting.  Our support team will be contacting these users in the upcoming days with further information.

According to the current timetable, ODIN will be finally retired at the end of this month.

If you have any queries regarding the possible implictions of ODIN’s retirement may have upon your ACS/NamesAndSpace hosted website, please contact our support team.

To get the latest status of our NamesAndSpace server, please visit http://status.appliedconsultancy.com.  This website display the latest status for all of our hosting services and is fed directly from our specialised monitoring systems.

Hosting error messages are specialised pages that appear when something goes awry for a website visitor.  The most common error is the 404, or in English, file cannot be found.  By default, when these errors occur with websites hosted by NamesAndSpace (N&S), the visitor will be taken to a simple error page with NamesAndSpace branding.

As of today (11th June), hosting error messages will now be handled through our support website, ACS Support.  For website owners, this change means that the number of steps required to contact our support team is reduced – with the new messages, you are already on our support website.  For website visitors, the context of the error messages remains unchanged.

Messages customised to your site

The majority of NamesAndSpace hosting packages included the  to specify custom error messages.  Hosting customers may be interested in creating messages that conform to their site’s design and/or to their own wording.   If you are interested in configuring custom error messages for your hosted website, please contact our support team who will be able to assist you further.

Our technical support team has recently upgraded the NamesAndSpace webmail.  The new version of webmail is both faster and easier to use.

If you are a standard NamesAndSpace (N&S) hosting customer, you may access webmail at any time.  All you need to know is your e-mail address and password.  Once you have these to hand, open your web browser and go to http://mail.namesandspace.net.

For a guide and more information on N&S Webmail, please see http://support.appliedconsultancy.com/faqs.asp?content_id=3184.

A side-effect of yesterday’s Internet Connectivity Issues was that our backup mail systems were subjected to a near 24 hour real world test, which they passed with flying colours.  All our Backup MXs performed exactly as intended without compromising the service availability for any of our mail customers even when running under loads of tens of thousands of messages.

What’s a Backup MX?

In the event of one of our primary mail servers going offline, all mail traffic is automatically transferred to one of our backup servers, called a Backup MX.  This switchover is seamless and is completely transparent to both the sender and the recipient.  The Backup MX will then store all incoming messages until such time that primary server is online again, at which point all messages are automatically sent to it.

All NamesAndSpace hosting accounts that include mail services automatically come with a Backup MX facility so that in the event of our the N&S mail server going offline, you don’t lose any messages.

Changes to Spam Filtering

At the peak of yesterday’s traffic,  our Backup MXs were storing in excess of 20,000 messages pending delivery.  Needless to say, the vast majority – more than 90% – of these were spam or junk mail.  In light of this, we are revising our spam filtering systems to purposefully intercept and eliminate a substantial proportion of spam messages before they reach individual e-mail accounts.

Our spam filtering systems work on a score-based.  Every message passing through our servers is subject to a series of checks, each of which is designed to test a particular aspect or property of the message for validity.  If a check fails, then the a value is added to the message’s spam score.  Once the score reaches a threshold value – the spam mark threshold – , the message is considered to be a spam or junk message.  If the score reaches a higher threshold value, then the message will automatically be deleted.

The changes we have implemented are two-fold.  Firstly, we have lowered the bar of the spam mark threshold.  This will have the effect of a higher proportion of messages being marked as being Spam.

The second change is more proactive.  One of the checks we employ is called a Blacklist Lookup where the address of the sending e-mail server for each message is checked against an online list of known spamming servers.  If the sender is a known spammer, then the message in question will now be automatically intercepted and deleted.

Since we implemented these changes last night, the amount of spam messages reaching individual mail boxes has reduced significantly.  These changes were not made solely in light of yesterday’s issues as we had been planning to introduce them in the near future.  If anything, yesterday merely served to accelerate their introduction.

False Positives

In the highly unlikely event you may believe that some valid messages are being marked as spam – otherwise known as a false positive – please contact our Support Team via http://www.acssupport.co.uk for further assistance.

As always, if you have queries regarding any product or service supported by ACS Limited, please do not hesitate to contact our Support Team via http://www.acssupport.co.uk.

We’re experiencing a few intermittent connectivity problems with our office Internet connection this morning.  This in turn is delaying some messages being sent to any e-mail address at appliedconsultancy.com.  At present, we believe these issues to transitory and will should be resolved shortly.

These connection issues do not impact nor affect our NamesAndSpace (N&S) hosting servers, nor any of our own websites like ACS Support. All of our N&S servers are located within resilient data centres that incorporate multiple levels of redundancy.

Update 14:35

We’re still experiencing internet connection problems at our office which is impacting on our incoming messages.  At the last count, there were over 3,000 messages still waiting to arrive (95% of which will be spam).  If you have any questions or queries, please submit them via our support website http://www.acssupport.co.uk which remains fully operational and unaffected by these problems.

Update Wednesday 10:00

The internet connectivity issues have now been resolved and all outstanding messages have now filtered through to our mail systems.  If you sent a message to any e-mail address at appliedconsultancy.com it should now be with the intended recipient.  As with out NamesAndSpace hosting accounts, all our e-mail systems utilise Backup MXs (mailservers) to ensure that no valid (see below) mail traffic is lost.

Following an internal review, we’ve decided to trim back on the number of fax number we currently have in use.

With immediate effect, the fax number to be used for all avenues of enquiry and contact (sales, accounts, support etc.) is 0871 714 3410. All faxes sent to this address will be redirect to the appropriate recipient at ACS. So, for support matters, the fax message is passed to our support team.

The old support fax number of 0871 714 5240 is no longer in use.

As before, we ask that wherever possible, all support enquiries and issues are reported via our support portal, ACS Support. Support requests issued by fax have a lower priority than those submitted via our Support website.

A faxable support form may be downloaded from http://support.appliedconsultancy.com/files/userfiles/file/supportfax.pdf.