ASTHost.com - Three words, dependability, support, and affordability. With our world class Customer and Technical support and screaming fast servers, we can provide the best hosting experience that you can find anywhere at any price. Our plans are competitively priced for you, the average customer, so that webhosting for your site won't break your bank.

News

Feb 26 2005
Announcement : phpBB 2.0.12 released

phpBB Group are pleased to announce the release of phpBB 2.0.12 the "Horray for Furrywood" release. This release addresses a number of bugs and a couple of potential exploits. It also adds a new feature in the form of an ACP based version checker (maintainers of language packages please take note of the need for the additional localised string!).

One of the potential exploits addressed in this release could be serious in certain situations and thus we urge all users, as always, to upgrade to this release as soon as possible. Mostly this release is concerned with eliminating disclosures of information which while useful in debug situations may allow third parties to gain information which could be used to do harm via unknown or unfixed exploits in this or other applications.

Customer Service

Dec 27 2004
Major Announcement : Major worm exploit in phpBB 2.0.10

Unfortunately, there is a major worm exploit in phpBB 2.0.10 that has recently been discovered and has serious consequences. We have already been effected by it once and as such, all clients, regardless of server or control panel, MUST upgrade to version 2.0.11 or your site may/will be disabled without further warning till it is corrected.

We are currently searching the servers for any site using this vulnerable version and will be disabling them shortly.

If required, we do provide assistant in upgrading your board to the latest version. We do not do MOD changes to any heavily customized boards.

Customer Service

Jul 11 2004
Major Announcement : NAC Data Center Move - Completed

On Sunday, July 11, 2004 the datacenter move had cause a longer than expected downtime. To maintain our quality of service and reputation, we are offering a 50% refund on your one month hosting charge. To see if your eligible for this refund, submit a ticket to the helpdesk.

We sincerely appologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

Customer Service

Jul 8 2004
Major Announcement : NAC Data Center Move - July 11, 2004 – 0330 - 1130 GMT / UTC

On Sunday, July 11, 2004 sometime between 0330 - 1130 GMT / UTC all servers located at the Net Access Corporation (NAC) data center will be relocated to a newly constructed data center about 25 minutes drive away from NAC.

Servers Affected: cPanel Servers

NAC resell their services via two providers, one of them being a company called Pegasus Web Technologies, Inc. This is who we have all our NAC based servers contracted through. Pegasus make up around 60% of all the servers inside of NAC's New Jersey data center.

Full off-site remote backups will be captured before the move commences.

If anyone has any questions then please don't hesitate to ask.

Thank you for your full cooperation!

Network Team

Apr 21 2004
EMERGENCY LINUX KERNEL UPGRADE

We have opened a emergency maintenance window between 18:00 - 19:30 GMT today. The estimated downtime is around 10 - 15 minutes per server. During this scheduled maintenance window we shall be updating your server's Kernel.

The Kernel is the heart of the Linux Operating System. This upgrade is required due to a critical security related vulnerability that has been found in the current Kernel release. This exploit affects most systems running the Linux Operating System and is not a specific irlhost - serverhq vulnerability.

The downtime caused by this upgrade should only last a few minutes while we send each server for a reboot following the upgrade process. However, the downtime may be longer if we run into any complications during the upgrade process or the server requires to run a FSCK (File System Check) after the reboot.

We normally schedule maintenance windows 24 hours or more in advance, but due to the nature of this vulnerability we want to patch it as soon as possible.

Network Team

Mar 17 2004
NAC Network Switch Maintenence

Date: Friday, March 19, 2004
Time: 2:00 AM - 4:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

During the maintenance window stated above, NAC will be performing maintenance on several key routers within the Data Center.

The maintenance will involve upgrading the router "firmware" to support more VLANs than the routers currently support.

The purpose of VLANs is to provide a "wall" so that if one server within the data center receives a DDoS attack, that attack doesn't "bleed over" to the other adjacent servers.

We expect the downtime to last around 15 - 30 minutes.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter

Jan 30 2004
Worm Virus

On February 1, 2004 the mass-mailing worm W32.Novarg.A@mm will perform a Denial of Service (DoS) attack on the internet. This will mean that many server systems will be overloaded due to this virus sending large amounts of information over the network. None of our servers have this virus but they may still become overloaded from other systems.

Due to this we may have to shutdown/reboot our network for short periods of time.

We will be watching closely all incoming traffic and server loads over February 1, and hope there will be no need to shutdown/reboot our network.

To read up on this virus and how to remove it from your computer, check out Symantec's Site

Jan 12 2004
Routing Service Advisory

NAC are currently experiencing reported problems with one of their OC-12 fibre optic lines at their Parsippany, NJ data center. This may be causing some packet loss and latency within the Network. The issue is currently being investigated by NAC and their respective telecom provider.

We have had no reports of problems ourselves and our own monitoring hasn't detected any problems. Therefore, at this time this is only an advisory as oppose to a service outage notice.

Thank you for your understanding

Sep 07 2003
Windows 2003 Hosting

Due to high demand for windows hosting, we will be offering Windows 2003 Hosting with Ensim Control panel shortly. Stay tuned for details.

May 29 2003
CPanel Advance and Fantastico update

Software Upgrade:
We are updating the Fantastico installer in the 'CPanel Advance' to a new release and have added many new software applications.

Description:
The Fantastico installer in the 'CPanel Advance' theme, which is available on all servers, has been updated with a new interface design and 8 additional applications, ready to be installed. Another new feature is the ability to install any application as many times as you want, on any domain and any folder/location.

Remember, all applications can be installed from your (and your client's, if you give them access to the 'CPanel Advance' theme) CPanel with only a few clicks!

The new applications are the following:

pMachine Free
The most flexible and creative online publishing software. With pMachine, you can publish virtually any kind of web content - from a basic weblog, to an advanced interactive magazine.

CS Live Help
A live help support chat system that allows the operators of the websites to monitor their visitors as they are browsing the site and proactively open a chat session with the visitor. Other features include eiter text based database or Mysql database, chat notification, user is typing message, multiple chat sessions and multiple operators.

PHP Support Tickets
A support ticket system for your clients. Through the admin side of the application you can set up user accounts. These Users may then log into the Client side and write any amount of requests to the system. On submitting a request the request is emailed to the Administrator's email specified within the Config file.

Support Services Manager
Yet another support system! SSM is a complete support desk, knowledge base management, and customer relations management solution.

Moodle
A course management system (CMS) - a software package designed to help educators create quality online courses. Such e-learning systems are sometimes also called Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE).

Noah's Classifieds
This application is an advanced classifieds management system, which allows unlimited categories, image upload, and includes a large amount of admin- and user-end features.

PHPList
PHPlist is a web application that implements a personalised mailing list manager or customer relationship management (CRM) system. PHPlist is designed to assist you to stay in touch with your audience, without flooding them with information they don't want.

WebCalendar
WebCalendar is a PHP application used to maintain a calendar for one or more persons, with many features such as multi-user support, multiple languages and more.

May 17 2003
Weekly Draws - FREE Hosting
From May 22, 2003 to August 28, 2003 ASTHost will be offering weekly draws (Every Thursday) on hosting accounts as we kick-off into Summer 2003. No Purchase necessary. Prizes range from Small Biz to Plan 3 as indicated on the Draw dates. Winners first name will be posted on the site. Domain Name registration is optional. This contest is open to everyone (Worldwide).

Probability of winning depends on the number of entries received. We use statistical randomization to select the winner, so everyone will receive an equal chance of winning. You only need to enter the draw once, and your name will be placed for all draws. You can win more than one account. Winners will be notify via email. Please DO NOT submit a trouble ticket regarding this contest. Contact our marketing person instead. Winners might be contacted via telephone, and must comply to ASTHost’s A.U.P (Acceptable Use Policy). (DETAILS HERE)

May 07 2003
H-Sphere Hosting
H-Sphere is a scalable multiserver webhosting control panel, which provides complete hosting automation for Linux, BSD & Win2000 platforms, is easy to use, and has extensive user interface, billing solution, and integrated trouble tickets system.

Looking for H-Sphere control panel with us? We will start in introducing Linux hosting on this new control panel in the next few days. We have no plans in hosting for BSD and Windows 2000/2003 at the mean time, but the scalability of this control panel makes use decide on deploying it to clients.

Will it change your current CPanel Advanced control panel? No. Your current hosting will stay as it is, but if you decide to moved over to H-Sphere once its readily available, you're free to submit a ticket.

Stay Tuned!

Alex

Jan 26 2003
Massive Internet-wide Worm Attack
In the past almost 24 hours, the Internet has experienced a massive attack by a worm hitting hundreds of data centers and trying to exploit a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 vulnerability. Even though none of our servers is exploitable, the traffic and packets caused by this worm has still caused long downtimes to all of the networks on which our servers are connected to. Some servers have been back up within 2-4 hours, others are still slowly coming back to normal.

None of our servers have been compromised or have experienced any data loss at all, as we are running RedHat Linux as the operating system, not Windows.

This was not a hit onto ASTHost servers only, however against the entire Internet and its backbones. Several major websites, including Yahoo, EBay and CNN have experienced serious outages this past night and early morning.

Dec 21 2002
Server Issues
Around 8PM - 1AM EST some servers have been experiencing network problems. We are awaiting further news on this from an on-site technician. Thanks for your patience.

Dec 20 2002
Reseller Plans
The reseller plans due for December 1, 2002 has been postponed to January 31, 2003. Sorry for the inconveniences.

Nov 23 2002
FormMail Spam Vulnerability
In the recent weeks and especially in the recent days, we have seen an increasing amount of abuse of FormMail scripts. What is basically happening is that spammers search the internet for formmail.pl (they can do this easily by typing http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/formmail.pl) and then exploiting it with additional code at the end of the URL to send out spam messages to hundreds or often thousands of people. Please remove these scripts and replace them with the secure version:

NMS Scripts (http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/) has written a secure version of Matt Wright's FormMail called "NMS FormMail". Please download it from http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/formmail.zip and IMMEDIATELY replace your current FormMail script with it.

Exploitable Versions:
Matt Wright FormMail 1.0
Matt Wright FormMail 1.1
Matt Wright FormMail 1.2
Matt Wright FormMail 1.3
Matt Wright FormMail 1.4
Matt Wright FormMail 1.5
Matt Wright FormMail 1.6
Matt Wright FormMail 1.7
Matt Wright FormMail 1.8
Matt Wright FormMail 1.9 Secure Versions:
NMS FormMail 1.9s The FormMail in CPanel will also be disabled/removed.

Thank you for your assistance in keeping the servers 'clean' of spammers and at top performance.

Nov 20 2002
Small and Starter Biz Plans
Effective Nov 20 we will be offering 2 lite packages starting from $2.95 per month. If you are business starting out on the world wide web, this package is for you. Also available is a $4.95 Starter Plan.

- Alex - Vice President

Nov 16 2002
Site Redesign
Our newly design site launched. Special thanks to our webdevelopment team for a successful launch this week.

- Alex Pang - Vice President

Nov 4 2002
Order Form
ASTHost order form will NOT be available from 3:15am tomorrow to 7:45am, for database maintenance, optimization and redesign.

- John - Tech Support

July 29 2002
Control Panel Upgrade
We are proud to announce the updated version of cpanel theme today. This not only includes a more attractive and user friendly design, but also more features, such as:

- MX Entry
- HotLink Protection
- Redirects
- Edit .htaccess
- GnuPG Keys
- Search engine submit
- Agora Cart
- Awstats

- John - Tech Support