Announcements

Important URL Changes

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.

Software Update

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.

Important Notification about Payments (Strong Customer Authentication)

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.

PHP 8 Availability & Offers

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

 

PHP 8.0 Beta

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

Support through XMPP end of life

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

Delay in release of Halcyon Engine & Related Projects

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

SSH Key Algorithm Changes

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

Changes in logging and customer access(API) to them

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.

Deprecation of TLS 1.0 & 1.1 for our services.

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:

Internet Explorer 11 or lower
OS X 10.10 or lower
Windows 8.1 or lower
Android 4.04 or lower
iOS 10 or lower

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

Best Regards, 

eSGR NOC

No price increase due to cPanel licensing changes.

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.

Status Page Maintenance

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

DNS Issue after rolling reboot

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

Documentation Updates

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

Members Area outage fixed.

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.

Cheaper SSL Certificates

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:

  Old Price New Price
Comodo 27 22
Comodo Multidomain 75 50
Comodo Wildcard 200 105
Comodo Premium 150 65
Comodo EV 535 220

Best Regards,

eSGR

Sendme platform update

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

DNS Maintenance

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

DNS Maintenance

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

Storage & Bandwidth Upgrades for Biz, Enterprise, Org, Corporate.

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

PHP 5.4 & 5.5 Deprecated

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

Future changes regarding email services.

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

 

Storage Maintenance

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

Halcyon Engine update

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.

Getting Ready for Halcyon 6.4

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

Switch of minimum PHP to 7.0

We would like to inform you that we have switched to PHP 7.0 as the minimum version on all shared hosting accounts. You can still use PHP 5.6 if you had it previously manually set and you can still manualy force it per account. By August 2018 we will be moving to PHP 7.1 as minimum and we expect to switch to 7.2 by February of 2019.

We have done multiple tests on all hosted services and have identifies really old apps that would fail, in those cases we automatically set the app to 5.6 and notified the user. Please note that by February 2019 we will completely remove 5.6 from all shared hosting servers.

Regards,
eSG NOC

Network issue due to storage upgrade.

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

NVMe Upgrades

We have received our new NVMe disks and we will be performing upgrades on our RT(Caching & Proxy Storage) storage servers on 2018/03/07 16:00. In total we will be adding 120TB of NVMe storage (60TB usable) and ther will be no downtime to any services. About 15% of this storage will be used to provide more Caching & Proxy Storage to current customers for free.

Regards,
eSG NOC

DNS CAA Record Support

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

Members Area Updates (Fixes for slow performance)

Our members area has had performance issues for quite some time. The issue is that we have been adding functionality for years now and thus we have managed to keep our users logged in performing work from one single location 24/7. This slowlly degraded performance in our members area since the servers had to communicate and await for replies from every other services through APIs. 

Today we pushed a big update that completely overhauls the underlying engine and uses are new API end-points. The new engine and API is written in pure Go which is a lot faster than using PHP & Perl. All requests now are async and the payloads are all standardized json. This change had a huge impact on performance, in its current state (no optimization have been done yet) we are serving 3 times the content on 50% of resources. the end-user result is that previous tasks that needed in excess of 20 seconds are now served in less than 3.   
 
For the next few months we will be gathering performance data so that we can start optimising under-performing functions as well as slowly moving from our SQL back-end to our MDS Store.
 
Best Regards,
eSGR NOC

Important SSL Notice: (Symantec, Thawtee, VeriSign, Equifax, GeoTrust, and RapidSSL)

From 2018/01/18 we will automatically replace any SSL certificate on customers accounts issued by Symantec, Thawtee, VeriSign, Equifax, GeoTrust, and RapidSSL. We have reached this decision since major browsers will stop trusting any SSL issued by Symantec and its subsidiaries by April 2018. 
 
The certificates will be replaced automatically with an equivalent from Comodo at no extra charge for the remainder of its life time. There will be no disruption of service during the change, there will be no setup fees or service charges. 
 
After your new Comodo certificate expires you will automatically be moved to our Free DV LE or DV Comodo certs for as long as you wish or you can purchase another certificate of your choice from a reputable CA.
 
If you for any reason would like to keep your old certificate you may contact us at any time between now and 2018/01/17, please note that we are setting a cut off date of 2018/03/20, after that date we will not allow you to keep that certificate active in our systems.
 
VPS & Dedicated Customers: We have scanned all IP's in our network already and tried to identify all domains hosted in our services, we have send you a special email informing you of the issue and our decision. You can use the included form so you can exchange your current certificates.. Again we will exchange your current certificate for free with an equivalent from Comodo, if you require assistance please open a ticket and we will perform the exchange for you for free.

Customers with our free certificates will not have any changes since their certificates are either from Comodo or Lets Encrypt which are not affected in any way.  

Further Information on why we are doing this: Google Security Blog

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Unplanned hardware upgrade (Meltdown & Spectre).

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.

Shared Hosting:

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

Status Page Moved

We have moved the front-end of the status page.  API route for status has NOT changed.

If you use DNS SRV Records for identification you do not need to change anything otherwise please set the URL as:
https://status.esgr.xyz

Regards,
eSG NOC

Hard Disk fail on Shared Hosting Server (Denethor)

We would like to inform you that one of the SSD's on Denethor has failed, the disk has been removed from the RAID and we have planned it to be replaced at 02:30 2017/12/25. The disk is part of the caching RAID structure for that server and it doesnt impose any issues for the servers stability.

Due to the type of connection of the SSD (PCI Express) we will have to bring the server down for its replacement. The downtime will be between 10 and 15 minutes. After the serer is up we will bring down the caching RAID for faster rebuilding, during that time the server will be using Mechanical Disks for all requests so we expect downgraded performance.

We will inform you of further issues if they arise during the process.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC.

Shared Hosting Backup Upgrade

We will be performing an upgrade to the storage used for backing up client data for shared hosting servers. Since during the upgrade no new backups can be made, we will be performing it in a few minutes (no planned backups expected for another 6 hours). The storage partitiong used will now weight 940TB, 340TB more than before and we expect it to be adequate for the next 18 months. The upgrade is expected to take aproximately 2 hours but all current backups can be retrieved by customers at any time during the process.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Members Area Updates

We will be performing updates to the backend of our members area, there will be no downtime on any services or the members area during the process. This update will have changes to allow more modifications to your services directly from our members area with new wizards.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Shared hosting updated finished.

We have found the issue during the update and fixed it. All servers are now updated and to their latest version.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Issue with update of shared hosting servers.

Due to a non expected issue on selected servers we had fall back to safe mode while trying to resolve it. All services are up normally but the speed we serve content is slightly affected. We will offer a solution ASAP and will notify when we finish with the updates.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Update for Shared Hosting servers

We will be performing an update to all our shared hosting servers on 2017/10/18 @ 02:00 (GMT+2), the update is expected to take approximately 2 hours. This is a general maintenance update and we expect a downtime for less than 5 seconds for web services.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Update for Halcyon v6 Finished

We are happy to announce that the full upgrade is now finished. Our downtime was 20 seconds per server on average. 
This upgrade brings online the full Halcyon v6 to all of our shared hosting servers. Please note that Halcyon v6 is in effect v5.6 with all the features we didnt manage to have in time for 5.6.
We will be posting all the details in a future blog post.

As of now ~80% of the functionality of H6 is active on all accounts and this includes:
  • 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)
Finally infrastructure wise we added 4 more DNS servers in our cluster in (Singapore, Sydney, New York, London) and we enabled another storage availability zone in France. Our Amsterdam DNS server is expected to be online and in the cluster in the next few days.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Staged Update for Shared Hosting Servers

We will be performing an update to the shared hosting servers on 2017/09/09 @23:00. With this update we will be setting up the servers to receive the new veresion of Halcyon (v6.0), during the update a a lot of parts of the hosting stack will be updated to newer versions. The updates will take about 4 hours but the downtime for web sites will be about 20 seconds in total. 
Please note that during the updates sessions keys will be purged from all cache engines.

We will be updating you with more technical information during our update to Halcyon.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Upgrade to Soteria 1.2

We have pushed the latest version of our Web Application Firewall to all of our servers. Using Halcyon we managed to update Soteria on our servers with zero downtime during peak hours. the new firewall brings an additional 107 rules with support for the latest versions of all known CMS as well as identification for multiple CVEs of older software.
 
As always during the push of new rules we will be monitoring closely all web sites for possible issues and misconfigurations.
 
Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Upgrade to Halcyon 5.6

We will be performing an update to the Halcyon Engine on 2017/07/10 @03:00, during this upgrade we will have a small scheduled downtime of approximatelly 1 minute to all shared hosting servers.
This upgrade will push all the new features as planned for 5.6, we will soon have a blog post with details on all the new features provided by the latest version or our web hosting engine.

Regards,
eSG NOC

Development infrastructure update

We will be performing an update to our developemnt infrastructure, during this period you will not be able to perform commits, get pushes to the eSG Chat platform for any code update/changes and use the web code viewer.
The udpate will be performed on 2017/07/10 @01:00 and is expected to require 30 minutes.

eSGR Enterprise Chat Platform Upgrade

There will be an upgrade to ECP on 2017/06/29 22:30. During the upgrade the service will not be accesible for aproximately 2 minutes, after the upgrade all native clients and web access will require re-authentication. 

Possible API issues:
  • 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.

Best Regards,
eSGR NOC





TFA Requirement for Services

We would like to announce that we will be requiring customers to have TFA activated for the following services from 2017/08/01.
  • 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
You have been able to use TFA for every process in our systems since 2014/06/01, unfortunately not all clients have activated the service but due to severe security implications on the aforementioned services we will be enforcing its use.

Important: Please note that activating TFA will require it in all of our services, until you activate it access to the limited services will not be allowed.

Regards,
eSG NOC

Monitor Infrastructure Maintenance

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

Minor issue with our DNS Cluster

We have had a DDOS against our DNS cluster for the last few hours, service functionality has not degraded and we dont expect any issues. The attack started at 2017/04/25 @ 00:46, we have limited the surface by localizing it and we are monitoring its progress. All services are fully functional with no delays to replies due to the attack.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Release of Open Source tool for Cacti data acquisition.

We are proud to announce the release of the cacti-go-tools, an open source (GPL2) tool that reports statistics for various services to cacti by extending SNMP. In its current version it supports NGINX and php-fpm. It is in our plans to add a lot more services.

You can get the source and binaries from https://github.com/eservicesgreece/cacti-go-tools

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Monitor Infrastructure Maintenance

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. The graphs will be redrawn at 2017/04/01 00:00+3.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Staged Update for cPanel 64

Due to the amount of changes in cPanel we will be performing a staged update this time. We dont expect the process to last more than 2 days. We know it is important for our clients to have the latest version available to them at all times but this will reduce load on the servers and it will end with a 1 day delay in the availability of the latest build.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Emergency Maintenance on Shared Hosting servers due to TSR-2017-0002 (cPanel)

We are performing emergency maintenance due to TSR-2017-0002 (cPanel), there will be no downtime in the services but the load of some of the servers will reach high levels. There will be no issues with customer sites or speed degradation.
 
Our normal maintenance window next Sunday will happen as usual.
 
Regards,
eSG NOC

Preliminary support for the Guetzli compression algorithm

We will be adding Guetzli support in the Halcyon pre-release stack on 2017/03/31, after testing we found minor issues with Brotli that we will be ironing out before we release it to stable.
 
On our test images (from live websites) we found that we can get on average 6-9% smaller sizes, this  is mostly due to the compression used by Halcyon already, we are not interested for general benchmarking of the new compression method so we will be comparing only to our current one.
 
Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Halcyon v5.5 Released

We are proud to announce the next major release of the Halcyon Engine (5.5). This is a major release with numerous new changes and optimizations.
 
Halcyon is now able to server 99.8% of our current http content from 95% previously, most importantly it will be now serving over 98% of our https traffic.
 
Major changes:
  • Full HTTPS support
  • Full http/2 support
  • Coeus v1 introduced to production
  • Soteria v1 introduced to production
  • Shared(user private) cache blocks between all services.
 
Since Coeus and Soteria were ready for production we chose not to include Brotli in the current release in order to have the engine pushed to production 3 months earlier than expected.
Officially we pushed Brotli to 5.7 but it may appear a lot earlier in a patch since its very close to completion.
 
We will be making a blog post soon with more details on this release.
 
Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Scheduled Server Maintenance

During this maintenance window we will be updating the OS and libraries of the all shared hosting servers and maintenance on the NS1 cluster. We expect a 3 minute downtime for each server.
Maintenance will start 2017/02/27 00:30 and is expected to last for 2 hours. Other than the maximum of 3 minutes downtime per server we dont expect further downtime.

Shared Hosting Servers:
We will be updating the kernel and major software including the licenses of the servers.

DNS Cluster
The NS1 cluster had to be kept 1 version behind due to some clients still using our older API, since all clients moved to the new API we are updating to the latest version.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Chrome Extension Update

Our Chrome Extension app has been updated to an issue with google feeds. Google deprecated the service so created our own version to resolve the issue of converting xml to jsonp.

The new version is already updated and pushed to Google servers.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Live Chat issue fixed.

Today we had a report about an issue with submitting questions through our live chat while all operators are busy. That issue was in essence not delivering your offline messages to our engineers. Unfortunately this was a quite rare race case that the software was not catching and it never forwarded the customer to our support department. 

The issue was identified and fixed and the changes have been pushed to our update server, we expect the fix to be public in the next 2 hours.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC  

Members Area Updated.

Finally we managed to update the members area  appearance and integrate most of our new tools. We will be adding even more functionality in the future 
 
Most Important Changes:
 
The Members Area received a facelift that finally matches with our portal and even integrates some touches from our upcoming CSS upgrade our new web designer.
 
During the last 20 months we checked your flow in the MA and made changes in order to make most actions require less clicks.
 
Halcyon now reports details on your status if there is an issue.
 
Stored Credit is a lot easier to manage.
 
Resellers have their special widget now informing them of their status, decryption key and links to assets, but expect a lot more in this area soon.
 
The old Network Status module has been replaced with our new real time status monitor.
 
The old Knowledge Base has been replaced by our new WiKi that gets more and better quality updates continuously.
 
A bug was fixed in the cpanel tools in the MA and now all customers have full access to them, at the same time we did some modifications to make the process almost 5 times faster.

Best Regards,
eSG NOC

Upgrade of Shared Hosting Servers

During today's maintenance window we will be upgrading the server software of all Shared Hosting Servers. During the upgrade process client web sites will under perform slightly. There will be a downtime of approximately 2 seconds during the restart of the services in the end of the upggrade process.
 
In this maintenance window the following software will be upgraded:
  • Apache
  • Halcyon
  • MariaDB
  • MS SQS
  • NGINX
  • PHP
Regards,
eSG NOC

The eSG Google Tag Manager tool for Joomla is now in private beta.

We are proud to present our newest tool provided to our clients for free. This tool (eSG Google Tag Manager) will manage all of your Google needs in one simple tool and automate the process of incorporating all current Google optimizations for Marketing, SEO and Leed tracking. 
Using this tool you can easily add customized tracking code for your site in order to not only track visitation and hits but also automatically track downloads, file access, cart completions, social network completions, full tag management and google webmaster setup.

The Joomla version of the tool will be available for free to all of our web hosting customers and its expected to be ready for production in 2017/03/01.

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