The Road Ahead

Over the last week or so another phishing spam message purporting to be from HM Revenue and Customs has appeared (see screenshot below). We have received it several times and we expect many of our customers have as well. The current version of this message originates from the address donotreply@hmrc-payert-gov.uk

We consider this message to be a phishing or scam message and is malicious. We strongly recommend all customers that receive this message delete it immediately and do not attempt to open or download any attachments.

We haven’t disappeared, we’re still here. The computer gods have just not being favouring us for the last couple of days.

One of our web servers, NENE, has been offline for nearly 48 hours due to events that are beyond our control. As this issue is not likely to be fixed before Friday (at the earliest), we have temporarily moved all affected websites including our own to a different server.

Our standard mail service have not been affected and are working as normal. We intentionally split our Web hosting and mail services exactly for this kind of situation.

So, what happened?

Over the past few weeks, our NENE web server has been misbehaving for no apparent reason. This behaviour was not apparent to our customers or visitors, but noticeable to us via our daily checking and monitoring.

As any investigation could cause service interruption, we held off until last weekend. Unfortunately, despite many hours of work we couldn’t trace the problem and we suspected that Windows itself may have been corrupted beyond easy repair.

As NENE is actually a virtual server, the quickest and easiest solution was to replace it with a brand new virtual machine (we had backed up all data prior to taking the server offline). With virtual servers, the process of installing and configuration is typically quicker than with physical hardware so we aimed only to be offline for a couple of hours.

So we provisioned a new virtual machine, a process that typically takes a few minutes. It didn’t. It took over six hours for our service provider to provision a new server. Once available, the new virtual server was far from healthy, with one of its’ more apparent problems being its’ inability to restart without hanging/crashing.

We’re currently sitting in a very frustrating limbo as our service provider attempts to find a fix. They’ve managed to independently replicate the problem but have yet to discover a cure.

Update 17:00, 4^th September

The latest update we have from our service provider is that they have managed to replicate the problem in their test environment and are currently investigating the underlying cause.

Update 15:30, 5^th September

Our service provider has traced the issue. However, as the fix requires some changes to their infrastructure that are unlikely to be completed before Friday (7^th September).

We will shortly begin migrating Hosted Exchange 2010 mailboxes to Hosted Exchange 2016. In the next week or so, we will be contacting individual Hosted Exchange 2010 customers to discuss and arrange a suitable date for migration.

Migration will occur on an agreed date between 20:00 and 06:00 BST and will require some client and DNS settings to be changed. In the case of the former, any device that currently connects to an Exchange 2010 mailbox may need to have one or two server addresses changed. If we are responsible for managing a customer's domain (i.e. it is registered with us), we will make the necessary DNS changes unless agreed otherwise. If a domain is outside of our control, we will distribute details of the required DNS changes.

Some of our customers may experience a slightly impaired mail service this morning due to an ongoing issue with our data centre provider.

At midday today (23rd June 2018), our data centre provider informed us that an issue has been detected with the data storage system used by our standard mail services. They are investigating this issue and will be working to fix it as soon as possible.

At the time of writing, our standard mail services are working as expected. We continually monitor all our services and you may view our live service status at https://status.calzadamedia.com

Update 13:00

The latest updated we've received from our provider is that they've detected a drop in performance which they are investigating. We have been warned that performance may be degraded on a sporadic basis.

Our own monitoring system have yet to detect any impairment to our standard mail systems and they are working normally.

Update 14:48

Problem has been traced to a faulty disk that will be replaced. There is no impact to ongoing service performance and there is no indication to loss of data.

GDPR day has arrived. Rejoice.

Update Privacy Policy and other legal documents and agreements.

To meet the requirements and standards of GDPR, we've updated our Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions and other legal documents. These updated policies, documents and agreements took effect from the 22nd May 2018. If you are a Calzada Media customer or a visitor to our website, please take a moment to review these important documents.

• Privacy Policy
• Terms and Conditions
• Website Terms of Use
• More legal documents and agreements

Will any services change because of GDPR?

Any purchased services or products will continue as before. We've only had had to make one small modification to our web hosting service management tools as part of our GDPR compliance.

Will I still receive messages from Calzada Media?

If you are a Calzada Media customer with an ongoing service or product, then yes. You will continue to receive messages from us regarding the product or service you have purchased. These messages include renewal notifications, billing information or advanced warning of service maintenance or upgrade. We will send these message to you as part of our legitimate business interest and to satisfy the contractual agreement between us and our customers.

Will you be sending out marketing messages?

We will only send out marketing messages to people who have explicitly consented to receive them.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please do get in touch via the support helpdesk.