Announcements General news and announcements

Apologies for the downtime that we have experienced and thank you for your patience. We host our Shoutcast panel, billing and support system on a VPS server provided by Vaserv, a large VPS hosting company. They were using HyperVM which was targetted by hackers, who went on to delete data from many customers. There is an article on a popular news site here

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/08/webhost_attack/

The reason that we use another company to host our billing system is that this way if a customer server is down, it means that the support area is hosted separately and won’t be down at the same time – this ensures that customers are able to contact us during network outages.

We were fortunate in that we didn’t lose any data, however you will be pleased to know that we run full backups every day and if data had been lost then it wouldn’t have been a problem as our latest backup was only 3 hours old at the time of the attack.

Everything should be back online and working now, so if you do have any problems then please do get in touch and I’ll look in to this.

Over the next week or so, we will be carrying out the following to ensure that any future issues don’t affect anyone in the same way:

1) A full dedicated server will be set up for the control panel and billing/support at a separate location to all customer servers (please note that we always use full dedi’s for customer stream servers and hosting, we only use a virtual server for the control panel and billing/support)

2) One of the main issues that customers had is that those using the playlist files hosted on mixstream.net will have experienced broken links (although the servers were all still online and streaming). All playlist files (that’s listen.pls, listen.m3u, listen.asx, etc) will be hosted on the same servers as the streams so that they never go down.

3) Although our backups are good, I’ll be reviewing the backup procedure to see if it can be improved further (You can’t be too careful when it comes to backups).

We are also advising customers to change their billing account passwords as there is a small chance of a security issue. We don’t keep any payment/credit card details on file or paypal account details, so there is no threat at all to paypal accounts etc.

Finally, any payments made in the last day may not have been registered by the billing system so I’ll be going through all payments and manually applying them – there is a chance that I might miss some so if you have any invoices still showing as unapaid that you have made payment for then please open a ticket.

We would like to thank all customers for their understanding and continued support during the last day.

Some customers have reported issues with Nochex when using Internet Explorer. This has now been resolved, it turns out that the mailing list subscription form was causing a problem (nested

The billing system that we use will be upgraded tonight to the latest version. This will cause a couple of minutes of downtime which will affect pages on secure.bellonline.co.uk while the new files are uploaded.

Due to slowness, I have had to restart the server s3. This only affects those using the FreeStreamHosting service. You may log in to restart your streams if they don’t come on automatically.

Please note that we never allow servers that are used for paid customers to get overloaded in this way – we have to get a lot of streams onto the free stream servers in order to make a small profit and this means that they sometimes need restarting. The main problem that we have is that a huge number of people sign up and start their servers then never use them again, I’m working on a system that detects servers that haven’t been used for 48 hours and shuts them down – this will reduce load on the servers enormously.

Most BELLonline owned websites now have a brand new look and the following sites have been launched:

http://nostringshosting.co.uk – non oversold web space with cPanel

http://cast-control-lite.net – Cast Conrol licenses

http://www.lowcostdedi.net – Dedicated servers

http://5net.co.uk – Reseller hosting – WHM/cPanel

Some of the websites don’t have huge amounts of info, but this will be added over the coming days.

From now on, rather than using the forums, I’ll be posting announcements here.

The main advantage of using this blog is that users can subscribe without having to register.  Simply enter your email into the subscribe box to the left.

I have moved previous announcements from the forums and applied the correct dates so you can still see the announcement history.

The server is being rebooted but taking a while to come back on.

I have already taken a backup from the server because I believe that there is an issue with the hard drive possibly failing since it has crashed twice in the last month.

Once it’s back on I’ll take another back up and get an engineer to do some tests and replace any faulty hardware. If it doesn’t come back on then I’ll use the current back up/

It seems like there was a short power outage at the usa datacentre causing a number of our servers to reset.

All shoutcast, transcoder and autodj servers should have started back up by now but if you are still experiencing problems then please open a support ticket.