We hope you all had a happy holiday and are looking forward to the new year!

Despite the holidays, we have been working hard on making some much needed enhancements and “fixes” for our PayPal users. For our billing system we run WHMCS, which we are fairly happy with. Unfortunately though there are some limitations when it comes to PayPal;

• If using a PayPal subscription to automatically pay for your service with us, when cancelling the service, you must cancel the PayPal subscription manually within your PayPal account.
• If using a PayPal subscription to automatically pay for your service with us, if you upgrade or downgrade your product, the PayPal subscription is not updated to match the new cost of your service and therefore you either pay too much or not enough when the subscription next occurs.
• If using a PayPal subscription to automatically pay for your service with us and you manually pay your invoice (forgetting there is a PayPal subscription setup), these additional funds are added to your account as a credit with us.

Admittedly these are not so much problems with WHMCS, but with the (previous) inability to do anything about these via the PayPal API. Fortunately, the PayPal API receives updates now and again which allow us to expand on it. Because of this we have now implemented the following changes;

• When cancelling a service with us, if you are using PayPal and have an active PayPal subscription setup, we will automatically cancel this subscription on your behalf. This should eliminate any invalid billing of accounts that are no longer active.
• When upgrading or downgrading a service, if you are using PayPal and have an active PayPal subscription setup, we will automatically cancel this subscription on your behalf. This will allow you to setup a new subscription for the correct amount when a new invoice is generated.
• If an invoice is accidentally paid for twice (either because of a subscription or manual payment), the duplicate payment will be automatically refunded back to you instead of being added to your account credit.

We hope that these new changes address some of the billing issues and complaints experienced by some of our clients.

At ThisWebHost we are more than happy to resolve any PayPal billing issues that are experienced by our customers. If, for example, you have accidentally paid an invoice twice – we will certainly refund the duplicate payment back to you if you contact us and let us know. Please be advised that opening a PayPal dispute (as per our terms and conditions) may cause your services to become automatically suspended. This occurs because of automated system that are designed to prevent possibly fraudulent transactions from taking place and to prevent people from trying to obtain free services with us. With the above new changes, this should be a thing of the past, additionally we believe we are the only hosting provider out there has such a system in place!

Please let us know what you think about these changes in the comments below.

In preparation for Black Friday (November 25th) and through to Cyber Monday (November 28th) we have decided to offer 75% off all of our shared and reseller hosting packages! We wanted to let you know in advance so that those of you who are looking to purchase hosting can sign up at the best time and get some fantastic discounts!

Starting November 25th and continuing until the end of November 28th, you will be able to obtain 75% off all new shared and reseller hosting purchases with us. This is not a recurring coupon, but can be used to purchase hosting at any term. This means you can pick up a year of Starter/Blog hosting for just $8.97! How about a year of our Reseller Standard hosting, for just $41.85?

We expect this to the be last “huge” promotion this year, so if you’ve been thinking of getting hosting with us – this will really be the best time indeed. To take advantage of this promotion, be sure to take a look at our Promotions Page on November 25th through to November 28th.

It has recently been brought to our attention that ‘timthumb.php’, a popular WordPress script used for resizing images on the fly, is vulnerable to a remote inclusion exploit. You can read more about the vulnerability and the fix here: http://markmaunder.com/2011/zero-day-vulnerability-in-many-wordpress-themes/

Due to the popularity of WordPress, and the severity of the exploit which can allow attackers to compromise websites, in order to protect our customers we have attempted to automatically upgrade any ‘timthumb.php’ files to the latest version with this vulnerability already patched against. As of writing this blog post, we have replaced any discovered timthumb.php files with the latest trunk version. Please be advised that whilst we have tested this forced upgrade in many scenarios and have not discovered any issues, there is a small risk that your script(s) or theme(s) may not function 100% correctly with this latest version. We strongly encourage all customers to check that their WordPress plugins and themes are currently working correctly, and if not, please communicate with the author of your plugin/theme to reach a resolution.

Whilst we have attempted to replace all vulnerable ‘timthumb.php’ scripts with the latest version, there is a possibility that some vulnerable versions remain. We strongly encourage and advise that all customers look for any copies of ‘timthumb.php’ within their WordPress installations and update to the latest version as soon as possible. Failure to do so increases the risk that your WordPress installations may be compromised in the future.

Please do not contact us requesting specific instructions on how to upgrade your ‘timthumb.php’ script(s) as ThisWebHost is not responsible for this script in any way. We have taken basic precautionary steps to try and prevent widespread website compromise, however ultimately it is your (the client’s) responsibility to ensure that any scripts you use are up to date at all times.

We are pleased to announce that we have now started offering semi-dedicated hosting packages. The semi-dedicated level package is intended to sit between our existing shared and dedicated hosting packages, providing a more cost-effective solution for customers who require more resources than our shared plans can offer.

Semi-dedicated means that each server is effectively broken up into a very low number of clients. This allows each individual client to consume more resources than they typically would on a shared hosting account, because more are available. Additionally, because it’s semi-dedicated, many of our shared restrictions will not apply, namely;

• No MySQL database size restrictions.
• InnoDB is available.
• No restriction on the number of hourly e-mails that can be sent.
• No CPU limit (in minutes).

We’re happy that this new product now almost completes our product range, providing customers with all of the options available to host anything from a simple private website to a fully fledged several million post(s) forum.

I just thought I’d write a blog post outlining todays DNS issue, for clarification.

What Happened?
It seems that some (not all) DNS records in our cluster had been reset to cPanel defaults. cPanel defaults in this instance meaning a standard cPanel template, where the MX records default to the local server and with the most basic of cPanel A and CNAME records. As such, any modifications made from this default template were removed.

(more…)