AKIS

CubeCart Stores – Sending Spam – Urgent Information & Action

URGENT ANNOUNCEMENT
Unfortunately we have found a number of CubeCart stores being exploited due to a CubeCart (3rd party software) security flaw related to the tell-a-friend feature which has recently come to light and we are now taking  action on all AKIS Design+Host client CubeCart stores  in order to stop this happening again in the future. Important – If you have a CubeCart store built by us then please read this announcement in full…
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WordPress New Release – 3.0 Out Now!

WordPress 3.0 has finally been released and is now available to upgrade/install – see info and download page here. We’ve now started the process of checking site themes for 3.0 compatibility and then upgrading sites – we hope to have all client sites updated over the next 7 days. Get in touch if you have any questions about this new release – or see the WordPress 3.0 info/blog page.

25% Discount to existing clients with pre-2010 websites

Further to the announcement below regarding phasing out our revisions service for old sites, we are happy to confirm that for the duration of 2010 we are now offering a 25% discount to clients with existing ‘static’ AKIS websites built prior to 2010 if they wish to upgrade to a new website from our current range. Contact us if you are an existing client and would like to take advantage of this offer.

Advance Notice: Phasing out revisions service to pre-2010 sites

This news post applies to all AKIS clients with websites built prior to 2010 – i.e. those with ‘static’ websites rather than a CubeCart ecommerce site or our new WordPress database driven websites.  Please  note that we are phasing out the provision of our update/revision services to these old style static sites at the end of 2010. From 2011 we will only be offering to carry out minor edits such as text changes or photo swaps – not the addition of new pages, major layout changes, etc.  But we are now offering a 25% discount to clients with existing AKIS websites built prior to 2010 if they wish to upgrade to a new website from our current range – see separate announcement on this.

Transition to suPHP (Advance Notice/Schedule)

NB: Also see the initial advance notice announcement on this subject.

This announcement is related to our upcoming work on all servers to enable suPHP. suPHP is a tool for executing PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners. It consists of an Apache module (mod_suphp) and a setuid root binary (suphp) that is called by the Apache module to change the uid of the process executing the PHP interpreter. In more general terms, enabling suphp will add an additional layer of security and remove issues related to file ownership permissions when using popular PHP based applications such as WordPress and Joomla.

The schedule for carrying out the change to servers is as follows:

US BAKER - April 26 2010 @ 12:00 AM EST  [ now completed ]
UK BELLAMY – April 26 2010 – 10:00 PM GMT  [ now completed ]
UK RICHARDS - April 30 2010 – 10:00 PM GMT [ now completed ]

Click “read more” below for the full details of this important announcment…

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AKIS Servers – Coming Soon:”suPHP”

We will soon be rolling out “suPHP” across all servers which will not only provide an added layer of security but equally importantly will enable PHP scripts to run under your account username instead of the ‘nobody’ user which is the default Apache/Web server user. This brings about many benefits which include, but is not limited to:

• All files and folders generated via HTTP (such as blog and CMS content uploads and generation, including WordPress) will be owned by the correct user instead of ‘nobody’

• More efficient process control (how many can run at once, how long the processes can run for, the amount of CPU and memory each process can take)

• Enhanced security between user accounts

• Display accurate disk usage on quota calculations

• More efficient abuse tracking for processes running spam scripts or attack bots

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