Announcements

We would like to inform our users that we will be fully deprecating the old URL end points. Both services have been moved to the new URLs for over 18 months now.

Repositories: dev.eservices-greece.net -> esgr.dev

API: api.eservices-greece.net -> api.esgr.xyz

Finally we are reminding everyone that the URL shortening service running on esgr.xyz will be sun setting mid 2022 as planned.

We will be performing an update on all shared hosting services to fix a security issue on the web server software. Due to safety concerns we will not wait for the Sunday maintenance window.

Best Regards,

eSGR NOC

We provide the infrastructure for Your service.

We would like to inform you that we will be enforcing Strong Customer Authentication on all card payments from the 31st of December on Debit, Credit and indirect uses of those (example PayPal). 

This means that in order to pay, you will be required to validate the payment over your TFA, mobile application or other system provided by your bank, in accordance to the EU Directive 2015/2366 (PSD2). 

Best Regards,

eSGR NOC

We provide the infrastructure for Your services.

We would like to inform you that we have enabled PHP 8.0 on all of our nodes for use by all users, insiders installations have been moved to the final version of PHP 8.0. Please allow up to 48 hours for the changes to propagate, if you require a notification you can register in our members area by clicking on the "Notify on Latest PHP Release".

Due to quite a few clients not finding our offers for Black Friday on our My Business page we will be redoing the same exact offer for Christmas and we will send it in a newsletter as we did in previous years. Please note the offers will be valid only for current customers that haven't used them in our actual BF offer.

Best Regards,

eSGR NOC

We are happy to announce that from today (2020/07/14) we will be providing access to PHP 8.0 Beta on our dev servers for testing.

PHP 8.0 is expected to be released on 2020/11/26 and we would like to provide very early access so you our clients can test their applications.

Best Regards,
eSGR NOC

We would like to inform you that we will not be providing support through the XMPP protocol as of today 2020/07/08 as communicated to our users 24 months ago. We will keep the current infrastructure in place for another 12 months for the few users still using it but no support or other calls will be handled by eSGR from this point on.

As stated in our announcement for the EoL of the service 2 years ago, we urge you to migrate to our Business Chat service at the same exact cost as our XMPP offering, a much more reliable and feature rich experience.

Best Regards,
eSGR NOC

We would like to inform you that we will be delaying the new release of the Halcyon Engine due to the extra workload induced by the COVID-19 pandemic.
As you can see from our changelog we were supposed to release the new version on 2020/05/14, unfortunately we are quite behind on schedule. The reason is purely due to the extra support work we have had to provide to our customers due to the circumstances. We will be posting a blog post in the near future explaining the issues we are facing at this moment.

Best Regards,
Nick S.
eSGR NOC

We would like to inform you that we will be switching all of our keys to ed25519 effective immediately. Our old keys (RSA 8k) are now completely removed from use. A few EDCSA keys we have been using for specific clients will slowly be deprecated too (by 1st of June). 

We know this may be an issue for many of our clients due to the current circumstances so if you are not able to update to our newer pubs please notify us ASAP so we can arrange for a private monitoring instance of your services free of charge for up to 45 days. Please note we will not be performing any maintenance on the non updated servers while they use the older pubs.

Best Regards,

eSGR NOC

The access to our API for logging services will change from 2020/01/03. Currently we are storring 200,000,000 records per index which is fine for most customers, since it can hold from a couple of months to a couple of weeks of records, the record size though can be as little as 8 hours for an increasing amount of customers.

For this reason we are increasing our records to 2,500,000,000 per index, we expect the new record size to hold over 96 hours of logs for all clients and over 1.5 years for slow log ones (note that records older than 24 months get purged automatically, unless a custom limit is set).

Why does this matter? 

Due to the way you access our logs, you have faster access to the indice that you activate for queries (including the current open indice), this means that any of your queries will not need to do much if any disk I/O making them instant. From our own metrics we see that over 90% of the daily queries are run on the last 48 hours of accrued data, thus making access faster for you and minimizing the computational load on our servers.

We would like to inform you that we will be deprecating TLS 1.0 & 1.1 on all of our services on 2020/01/10 as planned. This will affect the following:

Please note that our cloud hosting servers will continue supporting the older protocols up to the end of 2020.

Best Regards, 

eSGR NOC

We would like to inform you that we will not be increasing our pricing due to the recent cPanel license changes. Due to our policy of not overselling or stacking clients to a few servers our current prices are not going to be affected at all.

More Details:
cPanel recently announced that they will be increasing their monthly and yearly license costs as well as limit the accounts supported to 100 per license. For hosting more accounts in the same server you will need to pay extra per account.
eSGR has had a hard limit of 100 Accounts per server since 2011, our fulfillment service will fill a server with up to 80 accounts and then leave 20 free accounts for clients that may require an account in the same server in the future.

Best Regards,
George Pantazis
eSGR CTO
We provide the Infrastructure for Your Services.

We will be performing maintenance on our Status Page (https://status.esgr.xyz), we expect intermittent connectivity issues for the next 2 hours. All services will still be monitored at all times and no service downtime is expected.

Best Regards,

eSGR NOC

During our maintenance window we setup a rolling reboot on our DNS Clusters, all DNS servers went up except for 1 in the EU region and 2 in the US region, servers have been taken off the clusters and we are investigating the issue.

The has been and there will be no downtime in any client services due to this issue.

Regards,

eSGR NOC

From today (2018/12/21) to the end of the year we will be adding multiple new documentation articles in our WiKi .

Most of the articles will revolve around web development and security.

We have made an important update on our article about web images and we will be adding a bit more technical information and examples too soon.

Finally we are building up our Joomla Framework articles which are the most requested for now.

On these links, you can find all the current and future articles and a nice first steps guide that should be followed on every new site you build.

Best Regards,

eSGR NOC

Note: During this whole issue no client services were affected since they run on top of Halcyon 6.4.

During the maintenance a number of cascading issues emerged. During the software stack upgrade (halcyon 6.5 Beta 20181206-19243) a major library issue was not identified by our engineers. After finishing the update the changes were pushed to Halcyon and at that point we started having misconfiguration issues. 

Unfortunately at that point Coeus had already started replicating the changes to all of our nodes which in effect made all instances of our members area application inaccessible.  The engineer on call decided to restore the backup of the last version which unfortunately was based on a completely different schema, as a result our wiki and web site had become inaccessible too since the new DB had not been fully populated from the members area application as intended.

At 2018/12/08 @03:41 UTC+2 two more of our engineers were brought in and started working on a fix for halcyon to work with the older library, approximately 2 hours later the fix was pushed (halcyon 6.5 Beta 20181206-19245) and Coeus did an emergency push to all nodes running the beta. 

At 05:02 all of our services were fully functional again and by 05:23 we were serving proper data to all of our nodes.

During this maintenance window we had planned on transferring the members area data to Mnemosyne (Alpha), update Coeus rules and the php engine but due to the issues we are postponing these changes for the future.

From today we are reducing the cost of our SSL certificates. Our Setup fee for all SSL is now reduced from 15€ το 5€, in case the SSL is going to be used on one of our hosting plans then the setup fee will be refunded as credit to your accounts for future purchase.

You can check the new pricing in the following table:

Best Regards,

eSGR

We will be performing an update to the sendme platform on 2018/12/01 23:00 (UTC+2). during the update no email newsletters can be send. The update will require 15 minutes and we don't expect any issues.

Best Regards,

eSG NOC

We would like to inform you that we will be switching all our API calls to the updated name servers (ns2.eservices-greece.net, ns3.eservices-greece.net) on 2018/11/24 23:00. We do not expect any downtime on our services.

Best Regards,

eSG NOC

We would like to inform you that we will be performing DNS maintenance today (2018/11/22) between 01:00 and 05:00 (UTC+2). During this maintenance window the following name servers will be switching backends. We do not expect any down time during maintenance.

ns2.eservices-greece.net, ns3.eservices-greece.net

Best Regards,

eSG NOC

We would like to announce that from today 2018/10/01 09:00 (UTC+3) we will be upgrading our storage and bandwidth for the following plans: Biz, Enterprise, Org, Corporate.

All plans are getting about 50% increase in bandwidth & storage at no extra cost, there will be no price change now or in the future regarding this upgrade.

If you would like to downgrade due to unneeded resources after this free upgrade please note the following:

• You can only downgrade if you have less than 90 days in your current agreement.
• Any time left over in your current plan will be converted to credit and will be applied to your new plan.
• The new plan duration cost cannot be less than 10% of the renewal cost after your previous credit is applied.

We will be offering upgrades to our other plans in the near future.

Best Regards,

eSG NOC

From 2018/10/01 we will not offer PHP 5.4/5.5 on any of our shared hosting plans. After this date you will not be able to switch to any aforementioned versions of PHP, if you have currently switched to one of those your selection will be automatically changed to PHP 5.6 .

Please note that PHP 5.6 will also be removed from our systems by Q2 2020 and PHP 7.1 will be the default version from 2018/11/01.

If you would like to know more details please visit Software Versions

Regards,

eSG NOC

Untill now we have traditionally been storing your emails in your hosting account, on the same exact mount point of it be exact. This has been working fine for us since we can allow you to easily and securely access your mail directly (without the use of an email client or webmail) in an encrypted form.
This in the last 18 months have become very expensive due to our switch to using SSD and NVME SSD for our infrastructure, using these discs has a huge benefit for your hosted application but is barely noticeable for your email access.
Due to this we have started designing a completely different setup, where the email messages will be stored on a SSD Cached and not a pure SSD storage allowing us to offer a lot more space specifically for your emails on our current plans. Technically we would be able to offer this service today to all of our customers but there is a catch and it is a very important one for us. In the way we store your encryption keys, we will not be able to keep your email encrypted in storage anymore. I am pretty sure that many of our customers will not care about this and they would prefer the extra space over the security and verifiability of their email messages but this will be a service degradation for us, thus we will not offer it for now.

We hope to have something near Q4 2019 that will still keep the email securely stored and keep offering an integrated service but we are not there yet or even making a commitment for a release date. After this change though we expect to offer quite a nice upgrade for free to all of our plans, as an example our most popular plan (Indy) will have 2GB of NVME storage for your application and 10GB for email storage.

Best Regards,
George Pantazis
eSG CTO

We would like to inform you we are going to be doing storage maintenance on 2018/08/08 23:00 (UTC+2). There will be no downtime or service degradation during the process and we expect it to last for 4 hours.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

After an internal meeting last week we decided we are going to backport select features of Halcyon 6.4 to our current mainline. The fact is that there are a few reasons that may delay a 6.4 release:
First and most important is the numerous edge cases with older CMS's that we still need to take care.
Secondly we will be offline (Summer vacation) between the 10th and 30th of August (Our technical support will be 24/7/365 as always).

Our original plan was to have the engine detect the version of the CMS and apply filters on demand but this adds complexity which means we may not be able to release on time. Thus we decided we will be backporting some features we think are extremely important for performance of specific payloads.

One of the payloads that will get a big boost in performance is media heavy apps, in our internal testing we have on average a 38% boost in delivery of the content. which is the difference between a 3.6s to 1.4s page delivery.

Last Thursday(2018/07/05) we started pushing the release to all of our servers and since Saturday(2018/07/07) every site is been served using the latest version.

We will still try to hit our target for an August release.

Best Regards,
George Pantazis
eSGR CTO

Fun Fact: On 2018/07/03 03:19:41 UTC+3 Freca served the 10.000.000.000.000th http request since eSGR was incorporated in 2009.

We are in the process for finalizing the next update to Halcyon. All of our hosting servers are on 6.1 with a few exceptions so this release will be bringing everything included in 6.2 too. The current changelog is:

6.2: CODENAME: PANAGARIS / 2018-06-03

• Structured Data Parsing
• Automatic Brotli compression
• Use new API for Soteria
• New self healing proxy engine
• Internal sitemap engine update
• AMP fully Supported
• http2 push fully supported

6.4:CODENAME: ORIANTHI / 2018-08-20 (EST)

• Core Changes (10%-12% speed increase)
• Joomla 4.x Ready
• New Wordpress Rules
• Redis 4.x Redis
• Switch to eSG mcache

We don't expect any additions or feature removal before its release on August.

Due to the nature of some of the changes, we will be rolling this release on newly booted VMs, this will have no effect on website uptime since they will be moved from the old VMs live. This release will make everything ready for some very interesting features coming up with 6.5/6.6 that will improve both serving speed and greater reliability to our hosting services.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

After our last upgrade to our storage devices with multiple NVMe disks we run into the issue that the disk bandwidth supported overcome the capacity of our storage network connections. The new storage does 4714.3 MB/s (Read) and 4363.1 MB/s (Write) per Storage Volume. These volumes are then multiplexed per availability zone and can reach up to 21GB/s for Read and 17GB/s for Write operations. 

These new storage zones had the side effect of completely saturating the 40Gbps connections on each storage zone, during the initialisation of our storage zones this morning we managed to run in full capacity the local backbone (2x40Gbps) which resulted in minor delays in packet delivery for http(s) traffic, it was fortunate that our QoS rules were automatically applied by Halcyon and the packet loss was less than 0.7%.

Today we will be adding another 40Gbps on the storage nodes (20G per zone) and we will be ordering the needed hardware to reach the needed 80GB per zone that we require to fully support our new storage nodes, till then we will be rate limiting our storage nodes to a maximum of 7.5GB/s.

There will be no downtime on any of our services during the network maintenance and storage changes that will be performed today.

Regards,
eSG NOC

We would like to inform you we are now fully supporting CAA records in our DNS servers. You can find more information on what CAA is here Wikipedia.
For security purposes we will be creating the records for all SSL certificates we have added or will add to your services as long as the CSR is created in one of our systems. During this process we will set the iodef record to your accounts email address so that you will receive a notification if someone tries to issue a rogue certificate for your domains.

We will provide support to any of our users that would like to set those records on domains served by our DNS servers free of charge.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

The recent Intel cpu bugs resulted in us doing a hardware overhaul of most of our infrastructure. Unfortunately the cpu bugs didnt only lower the security of our infrastructure but also dropped the performance significantly.

DB Cluster:
On all of our services we always work with a cpu margin of 20% that is used in emergencies or temporary expansion. On our DB cluster the aggregate of all nodes meant we had 2.6 extra servers than what was needed. Our DB cluster suffered most with an average of 42% drop in performance, which in essence meant we needed an extra 3 servers to even cope with the current requirements.

Solution:
We added 3x new AMD EPYC 7401P 24/48 in the cluster that provides the same core count as 12x Xeon E5 6/12 and 75% more performance in computing power. The new cluster of only 3x new servers is at 47% load on average. We will be adding another server in mid-2018 just to increase redundancy and another one as planned in mid-2019.

Status: DB Cluster Is fully functional and ready.

VPS:
In the summer of 2017 (2017/08/09) we switched all of our nodes from Xeon E5 6/12 to EPYC 7401P in a rate of 3:1. That was done purely for performance reasons, at the same time we completely elliminated magnetic storage on our VPS service and lowered the prices dramatically.

Status: VPS Service is fully functional and ready.

In our original schedule we would have started upgrading our platform mid-2019 but the Intel bug has forced us to expedite the process. We switched all Xeon E5 dual socket servers (effective 12/24 per server) to EPYC 7601 (effective 64/128 per server), the RAM was upgraded from 128GB to 256GB. Finally we moved our hybrid shared hosting to pure SSD hosting. With this change we quintupled our cores thus octupling our computing power, doubled our memory capacity, quadrupled our disk bandwidth and octupled our iops capacity.

Status: We are in the process of starting the move of all accounts to their new home.


We will update with more information on the the bugs and mitigation issues.

Regards,
eSG NOC

• PHP 5.3 to PHP 7.2 available
• memcached compatible and redis available for all PHP versions
• Full Ruby 2.4 support (passenger)
• Hooks for nodejs managed services (this still requires manual intervention from user)
• Sitemap Engine (optionally enabled by user) that will create proper sitemaps for google every 24 hours
• Automated fix for www -> non-www when using HSTS for the non-www domain
• SOA Record checks and notification of user on auto redirects
• Switched to IPv6 priority on email servers (every other servers was IPv6 first already)
• Added more than 1000 sql query caching rules
• DNSSEC Ready (User needs to create the records for now)

• API consumers should re-authenticate automatically but in case there is an issue in your code we will send an email and message to the account admin if previous API consumers do not re-connect 5 minutes after the service is operational.
• The proxy service will use a new pined certificate, you may need to accept it on your side.

• DNS Management
  • All DNS functions will require that you have used your TFA key/software while getting a session key.
• SSH Login
  • Access to SSH from customers (wherever applicable) will require TFA. If you do not use TFA your login will fail with a wrong password error.
• Creation of CSR, Access to PEM

We will be performing maintenance to our monitoring infrastracture, during this period no graphs will be updated, monitoring will continue as planned and API will still have access to the data. During this period the service at https://status.eservices-greece.net will not be available. The graphs will be redrawn at 2017/04/25 17:00+3.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

• Apache
• Halcyon
• MariaDB
• MS SQS
• NGINX
• PHP