SafeSecureHost.com News:

Nov-24-2010 - Server is restored and back online. All users are temporarily blocked from logging in to increase security. As we finish checking things out, we will start re-enabling logins. If you need to change your site immediately, use our "contact us" page.

Feb-13-2009 - Order process modified to accept PayPal, Visa, Master Card, Discover, American Express, or checks for payment.

Dec-30-2008 - We added a "captcha" field to our "Contact Us" page. The spammers were injecting too much noise and junk in there and we couldn't take it any more. We didn't want to add the extra annoyance for you, our clients, but we don't know of any other easy way to solve the problem. Thanks for your understanding.

Dec-8-2008 - We now offer SSL/TLS access to our SMTP mail service.

Dec-6-2008 - Servers are updated to Fedora 9 kernel and related programs.

Sep-7-2008 - We now offer SSL access to our IMAP and POP3 mail services.

Jul-27-2008 - Our data center had a network outage to the internet backbone from about 7:15 EDT until about 9:30 EDT. They are investigating the cause of the outage to prevent it in the future.

Jan-12-2008 - Servers are upgraded to Fedora 8 kernel and related programs.

May-1-2007 - We had about a 2 hour outage today while a failed disk drive was replaced. The server runs with the disk drives mirrored in a RAID array, so no data was lost. We apologize for the down time, and will try to schedule any future repairs at a less busy time of the day and week.

Oct-30-2006 - Server upgrades are complete. If you have any problems or seem to be missing anything, please let us know through the "Contact Us" link.

Oct-15-2006 - Upgrading main server, migrating all user, web, mail acccounts.

Jul-17-2006 - Upgraded mail system to allow 8 meg attachment with webmail.

Feb-26-2006 - All domain registrations managed by Safe Secure Host were altered today. We have altered all registrant, techical, administrative, and billing contacts for all domains we manage to reference Safe Secure Host. This is being done to protect the domains from being hijacked, and provides the equivalent of private registration at no additional cost to you. You (our clients) are still the owner of your own domains. If you decide to move your web hosting somewhere else, and need to transfer your domain, we will assist in the transfer. The only time we will "hold" a client domain, is if that client has failed to pay their hosting bill.

Feb-09-2006 - Activated another very effective spam filtering tool. We are very impressed with the effectiveness of this tool, and we think our mail clients will be too!

Dec-13-2005 - Today between 2:35 PM EST and 2:55 PM EST our servers were temporarily disconnected, because of a major power outage of one of the largest Internet exchange points in St. Louis. This power outage caused all network equipment in the server location to shut down.

Unfortunately it took about 15 minutes to activate the power generator, and restore the power in the entire building. The power outage of the Internet exchange point affected Internet routing in the entire St. Louis area, and our servers weren't the only victims of it.

The hosting site staff is currently investigating, why the battery backup power didn't work, and why it took so long to switch to emergency backup power.

This outage was beyond our control and is only connected to the power outage at the local Internet exchange point. All our systems, including backup systems, were fully operational the entire time.

Nov-13-2005 - Denial of Service attacks affecting mail service: the last few days, there have been serveral intense denial of service attacks on other servers at our hosting facility. We are working with the facility personel to minimize impact on our servers. They have been successful in blocking the attacks and restoring normal network service, but it takes a few minutes to accomplish this. So far, only the mail server has been affected and no mail has been lost, only mail client access to the mail server has been slowed down during the attacks. Web server service has NOT been affected. If the facility can't isolate the impact of these attacks on our servers quickly, we will move our mail server to a different facility. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

May-22-2005 - Mail server is restored. Unfortunately, the file recovery from backups probably duplicated many emails from the past week. Sorry for the inconvenience.

May-14-2005 - Now updating antivirus signature database every 15 minutes!

Mar-12-2005 - Added more updated anti-spam rules to our spamassassin mail filters. This should provide more relief from some of the obnoxious mail that was sneaking through the filters.

Dec-4-2004 3:00 AM - 7:00 EDT The network will be down to one of our servers. The Network Backbone provider will be repairing a defective router to try to solve network slowdown issues. Mail will queue up until the server comes back online.

Dec-1-2004 3:00 AM - 7:00 EDT The network will be down to one of our servers. The Network Backbone provider will be rewiring the datacenter to try to solve network slowdown issues. Mail will queue up until the server comes back online. ***NOTE*** this outage did NOT happen...

Nov-29-2004 FTP is available again. Web "Hit Counters" are also fixed! We are running the server in "Security Enhanced" mode now, so if you get any strange access denied error messages, please inform us using the "Contact Us" link.

Nov-28-2004 We had a hard drive failure on one of our servers. The drive has been replaced. We upgraded the operating system. Affected web sites are being restored from backups.

Nov-18-2004 3:00 AM - 7:00 EDT The network will be down to one of our servers. The Network Backbone provider will be rewiring the datacenter to try to solve network slowdown issues. Mail will queue up until the server comes back online. ***NOTE*** this outage did NOT happen...

Nov-17-2004 11:00 AM Apparently the outage was an uninterruptable power supply failure. The network backbone technician was a no-show due to another network outage somewhere else. So... the network downtime has been rescheduled for Thursday morning, same time, same channel.

Nov-17-2004 10:03 AM We appear to be back online!!! Thanks for your patience...

Nov-17-2004 9:09 AM Update: our colocation provider is on his way in to the datacenter to find out what is wrong. We hope to be back online SOON!

Nov-17-2004 8:21 AM The network that was SUPPOSED to be back up by 7:00 AM EDT is NOT back up yet. We will contact them and provide an update.

Nov-17-2004 3:00 AM - 7:00 EDT The network will be down to one of our servers. The Network Backbone provider will be rewiring the datacenter to try to solve network slowdown issues. Mail will queue up until the server comes back online.

Nov-12-2004 3:20 PM EDT Network is back online. We will evaluate if they really fixed anything or not, but expect changes for the better during Thanksgiving week.

Nov-12-2004 2:20 PM EDT One of our network backbone providers has taken the internet connection down to one of our web servers. They are installing test equipment to try to determine what has been causing some network slowdowns. We are urging them to restore the connection as quickly as possible. Our dissatisfaction with this network provider is motivating us to move most of our web sites from this server to a different server with a much more reliable and faster backbone connection. We plan to make this move during the week of Thanksgiving. Stay tuned for updates...

Jun-26-2004 There is a new virus out, using Microsoft based web servers to spread itself, called Download.Ject or JS.Scob.Trojan or Scob or JS.Toofeer. The Safe Secure Host servers are Linux based and are NOT vulnerable to the flaws that contribute to the spread of this virus. You are safe while visiting our servers and any of the sites hosted on our servers. For more information on this virus you can visit  http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/download_ject.mspx

Jun-19-2004 Today, at 3:10 AM EDT, spammers on a different server at our server location, tried to send over 5,000 spam emails to over 150,000 recipients (mostly AOL accounts) through our server. Our spam filters stopped delivery to the intended recipients, but we fear that many of the forged "From:" email accounts received the MAILER-DAEMON bounce message, falsely accusing them of sending the spam. To all those innocent email users, we extend our apologies. We have personally received floods of MAILER-DAEMON bounce messages too, and understand your frustration and inconvenience in cleaning up your inbox. We did report the source of the spam to our server site owners, and they promised to take action. We also tightened up our mail filters, so this should not happen again with our servers.

May-6-2004 One server was taken down for about four minutes at 11:56AM EST to remove a faulty piece of equipment. This was necessary to prevent the possibility of a much longer outage. This affected many web sites, and all email access. No emails were lost in the process.

Mar-10-2004 All mail accounts now have secondary server hold and forward working. If the primary mail server is unreachable, the secondary mail server will accept your mail and hold it until the primary mail server comes back online. The secondary mail server is also fully spam and virus filtered, just like the primary server.

Mar-9-2004 We had a brief (about 3 hour) network outage at one of the servers this morning. Most mail and web sites were affected. The network was being reconfigured for improved performance, and Mr. Murphy got involved and it didn't go as planned. The problem has been corrected, and the network improvement is working. There should be one less hop getting to the server now, and network latency (as measured by ping) should be about 5 to 10 milliseconds faster. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Mar-3-2004 Mail system conversion to postfix with spam and virus filtering is complete. The amount of spam and number of virus infected emails being rejected it truely amazing. Your mail volume should be down and the quality of your mail should be improved. If you are NOT getting mail that you think you should be getting, sent a note to support@safesecurehost.com with the full email address of the person sending the mail, and we will add them to the whitelist so their mail gets through.

Feb-20-2004 We are in the process of converting the mail system to begin antivirus and spam filtering of all emails. We have scanned the existing mail folders and deleted or quarantined all virus infected messages. If all your mail seems to have disappeared, don't panic! It just means your conversion is in progress, and all your mail should reappear on the new and improved mail system quickly (within one day). If you have any questions or problems, please contact us.

Please note: absolutely no mail will be lost during the conversion.

Dec-2-2003 We upgraded our Linux kernel operating system today to prevent the security problem that allowed the Debian servers to be hacked. The patch was made available to us today, and we applied it today. We take our server security seriously!

Oct-27-2003 All web accounts have been moved to the one of the new servers.

Your IP addresses have changed. Please use your domain name(s) to access your server folders. The old IP addresses will be disabled soon. Login and FTP is disabled on the old IP addresses.

If you are having difficulty with your login or FTP please contact us.

This is the first of two moves. Your IDs, Passwords, and directories are still the same as on the old server. The directory structure will change significantly when we make the second and final move, but new features will be available. More to come soon...

Oct-21-2003 All email accounts have been moved to the new servers:

There is a different webmail program. To access it replace the www. with webmail. on your domain name. If you are having difficulty with your email please contact us.

Oct-17-2003 Equipment improvement progress report:

To improve our server availability, as a result of the lightning related network outage on 9/27/03, Safe Secure Host has acquired new servers in hardened and power protected datacenters in two geographically separated cities with much better internet backbone connections.

The new servers are now online, and we are in the process of configuring them, and have begun moving some web and mail accounts there.

We will send each Safe Secure Host customer an email as your account and files are moved to the new servers.

There ARE some differences in web mail program and your web site directory structure. The email will detail the differences, but the move should NOT affect the accessibility of your mail or web site, and the move is designed to guarantee NO loss of any emails.

We hope to move all email and some web sites the weekend of 10/18/03 so please check your email.

If you access your email with POP3 or IMAP, you should see absolutely NO disruption in email (except for a few minutes while we actually make the move).

If you access your email with our web mail program, there will be instructions there on how to use the new web mail program.

Sep-29-2003 We are back online...
Lightning caused a significant network outage from 1:30 AM Saturday (9/27/03) until 4:30 PM Monday (9/29/03).
We are sending an email to all Safe Secure Host customers to explain the outage and our corrective actions.
Please check your email. (Yes, email is back up too!)

Sep-12-2003 Updated our website graphics.

Sep- 4-2003 Backbone internet feed went down at approximately 5:25 PM EST for about 1 hour today. Our colocation host is discussing the network reliability with the backbone provider. We hope to see continued improvement in reliability and performance.

Aug-27-2003 Servers were down for about 2.5 hours today due to power failure at our hosting site, caused by severe thunderstorms. Sorry for the downtime, but it was totally beyond our control.

Aug-14-2003 Servers were unreachable for about 2.5 hours due to the HUGE power failure in the US North East and Canada. The power failure in Cleveland took out our internet backbone carrier. They did an amazing job of getting us back online as quickly as they did. Our servers remained up then entire time, they just couldn't be reached until the carrier rerouted traffic around powerless Cleveland.

Aug-13-2003 Co-owner Jim Menges celebrates the birth of his third daughter. Visit her at www.IlanaFaith.com.

Jul- 8-2003 Servers were down for about 4 hours early this morning due to power failure caused by severe thunderstorms. Sorry for the downtime, but it was totally beyond our control.

Jun-16-2003 Updated phpMyAdmin to version 2.5.1

Jun-14-2003 Updated mail packages. Mail lists now support moderated lists, mail list setup in qmailadmin is MUCH improved!

Apr-13-2003 Updated phpMyAdmin to version 2.4.0

Jan-25-2003 Sapphire/SQL Slapper worm slows internet... Our servers are NOT vulnerable to this worm. Any slow response time you may see accessing our server is due to internet backbone congestion. Our servers are functioning at normal, full speed.

Sep-22-2002 Activated Webalizer traffic analysis reporting on all sites.

Sep-21-2002 Installed mail filtering capability. (See details here)

Sep-21-2002 Increased secure webmail session timeout to one hour.

Sep-21-2002 Added News link.

Sep-20-2002 Verified that our servers are NOT vulnerable to the Linux/Slapper Worm.