The Road Ahead

Free SSL certificates by LetsEncrypt are now available for all hosting customers through the Hosting Control Panel. Once installed, the certificates will automatically renew every 60 days.

Installation is quick and easy to do. For a step-by-step guide, see Adding a free Let's Encrypt SSL Certificate to your website.

Spam (or electronic b*ll*cks to quote one customer) is a substantial irritant to both our customers and ourselves. On average, about 50% of the messages our receive each day are categorised as being spam. A substantial proportion of these messages are intercepted and deleted before they reach individual mailboxes. Messages that don't meet the deletion criteria are automatically placed with the SPAM folder in each mailbox as the odd one or two may be legitimate.

Over time, individual spam folders can grow to contain hundreds or thousands of messages. As the size of the spam folder does count towards overall mailbox size usage, there have been a few instances where a large spam folder has consumed an entire mailbox's quota. Once this quota limit is reached, no new messages can be sent or received by the mailbox until some messages are deleted.

To counter this, as of 12th October we've instituted a new policy whereby we will automatically delete all spam messages that are older than 28 days. To avoid any valid messages being lost, we advise all customers to check the contents of their spam folder at least once a week and move any false-positives (valid messages categorized as spam) to another folder within their mailbox.

We're starting with 28 days, but we are looking at reducing this period down to 21 or even 14 days based upon customer feedback. The deletion occurs on our server, so you may not see messages being removed from spam folders until your account next synchronises with our servers.

In response the the major cyber attack that has targeted the NHS and other business across the UK last week, Microsoft has released a critical update for all operating systems including those no longer supported such as Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003. Microsoft has urged all Windows users to apply the MS17-010 hotfix update as soon as possible.

This update has been released through Windows Defender. More information about the hotfix may found on the Microsoft Technet website.

For most personal and small business customers, install this hotfix and any other outstanding updates via Windows Update. In Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016, the update should be automatically installed. If not, access Update via Start > Settings > Update

What is WannaCrypt and how does it work?

The ransomware known as WannaCrypt has taken advantage of a security vulnerability within Windows that present in at least 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries worldwide. Once a computer is infected, all of its' files are encrypted by the ransomware which then demands payment from the user to access their files. If payment is not received by a certain date, then it is potentially lost forever.

Once installed, WannaCrypt acts like a worm and replicates throughout the local network infecting any other vulnerable computers.

This vulnerability came to light in March and Microsoft issued a patch for all supported Windows systems. WannaCrypt has taken advantage of computers that are either running older, unsupported versions of Windows (Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003) or those that have not had the patch installed.

Email Scanning

Although we scan all email messages that pass through our servers, we cannot guarantee all infected files are intercepted and deleted. We urge all our customers to ensure they are protected against ransomware, viruses and other malware attacks by ensuring they have an up-to-date security software installed on all computers.

At around 14:35 BST today, our AVON and NENE hosting servers abruptly and completely unexpectedly went offline and did not return until around 17:45. This downtime was due to a problem within the data centre and our server provider and was completely out of our control. Our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

This problem did not affected our Standard Mail, Hosted Exchange or DNS services.

With the affected servers back online, we have checked their services, websites and databases and everything appears to be running normally. If any customer has any problems or questions, please do hesitate to contact us.

Unfortunately, this problem affected our website including our support ticket system. Our apologies to any customers that tried to contact us by support ticket - we couldn't access our website either.

During this downtime, we were posting regular updates on twitter https://twitter.com/calzadamedia If you haven't already subscribed, please do so today to get the latest updates and information from Calzada Media.

You may track our service status at any time through our live status website: https://status.calzadamedia.com

Thames is dead. Long live Avon and Nene.

We have retired our oldest hosting server, Thames, and it with two new servers called Avon and Nene. All websites and services hosted by Thames have been transferred across to the new servers.

This replacement is the first of a series of upgrades we have planned for 2017.

New Hosting Control Panel

As part of the upgrade, we've moved to a new Hosting Control Panel. The new control panel software is more intuitive and reliable than it's predecessor WebsitePanel (which, if we are honest, we didn't particularly get on with either).

The new control panel has a new web address too: https://cp.calzadamedia.net

New Microsoft SQL Server Packages

As we are increasingly deploying websites powered by Microsoft SQL Server, we will shortly be