Official GeniusHost Blog

Today we have recovered from a serious hardware failure. As far as we can tell, everything is back online and functional, but please let me know if you encounter any problems.

In the meantime we have switched server. We need to carry out a full post mortem on the old one, however this appears to have been the result of a motherboard failure as the server no longer even boots into the BIOS.

Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused by this outage. We work hard to ensure that our services are as reliable as possible, including using high quality, branded, server grade hardware (Dell in this case), however unfortunately some components do still fail.

GeniusHost is proud to announce that the Softaculous one-click script installer is now available on all of our shared and reseller hosting accounts powered by cPanel/WHM.

Softaculous is a great alternative to the popular Fantastico script installation program. Just like Fantastico, Softaculous provides you with a means of installing popular scripts such as Wordpress and phpBB on your web-site through the cPanel web based control panel interface.

Softaculous currently supports 146 different scripts compared to Fantastico’s 50, with more being added all the time. Softaculous also provides more frequent updates than Fantastico, so you can ensure that you are always able to run the latest and greatest version of a script without worrying about security holes.

We have imported user’s existing script installations into Softaculous from Fantastico already, so you should be able to start taking advantage of Softaculous straight away. Support for Fantastico will be removed from our servers at the end of the month.

Please accept our aplogoies for any inconvinience caused. Thanks to this work, we will be starting 2010 with a brand new and much more powerful replacement to our main server, Martini. We are confident the improvement will be noticable and worth the requisite downime.

We will be conducting maintenance work to migrate all clients currently hosted on Martini on to a new, more powerful server from 02/01/2009 08:00 to 03/01/2009 23:00.

Please note that the 2 day maintenance period is not how long we expect all services to be unavailable, but simply covers the time in which the work may take place. Once the maintenance work has commenced, all services on Martini will be unavailable for the duration of the migration.

There may also be brief outages to some or all services either side of the main maintenance work due to essential reconfigurations that are required as part of this work.

There will be scheduled downtime on 18 Nov 2009 from 18:00 GMT that may last several hours. The disruption will likely affect the operation of your web-site, e-mail, FTP accounts and control panel access. Our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Users of Google Mail/Gmail have reported problems receiving email from GeniusHost. If you are trying to get in touch and have not been receiving responses, it is likely they have arrived in your spam folder. To identify these emails, after logging into your Google Mail account type “geniushost.net in:spam” in the search bar at the top of the page. Missing emails should appear.

We believe this issue is a result of our outgoing email server’s I.P. address being part of a blacklist for a day last week due to a (now ex) member abusing our systems. However, we are unsure why email is still going to the spam folder and believe this is only affecting Google Mail users.

We will provide an update when we know more and we apologise if this has inconvenienced you.

Over the past day there has been issues with our installation of PHP. We have made good progress but are working to iron out more problems and would appreciate your patience. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

UPDATE (21 May 2009, 18:40 BST):
Remaining issues should be resolved within 24 hours.

RESOLVED (22 May 2009, 19:20 BST):
We have now completed tests which we believe show we have resolved every outstanding issue. If you come across something which you believe we have missed, please contact technical support. We have also used this opportunity to add some enhancements and security updates.

We are currently chasing our providers to see what is happening. We find down time as annoying as you do and will keep you posted.

We are currently trying to diagnose and resolve issues with our upstream at the moment.

A separate server from within our network caused an outbound DoS attack which saturated our uplink, whether intentional or not. This has now been resolved and we apologise for the service disruption.

VAT (Value Added Tax) in the UK has now been reduced from 17.5% to 15%, so we have changed things accordingly.