New – Database Vault for Windows!

Posted on April 6th, 2016 by Hannah Sattler

ASPnix is pleased to announce Database Vault for Windows – a brand new database backup management application. Database Vault offers a simple all-in-one solution for creating and managing MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server database backups. No need to have multiple applications for different SQL database engines, let Database Vault do it all!

Database Vault has the ability to store database backups to a variety of storage locations and solutions, such as a local disk, external USB drive, network storage, or an offsite FTP server. More storage locations such as Dropbox, Amazon S3 and Google Drive are coming soon!

A single installation easily manages an unlimited number of database backups and versions. Backups take almost no time to create, and multiple databases can be backed up simultaneously, streamlining the process. Database Vault supports both full and incremental backups for Microsoft SQL Server, as well as supporting SQL Server’s native backup compression. Additionally database backups can be compressed to save space, password protected, and AES-256 encrypted for security. Database Vault has email notifications support for successful or failed backups and can include the backup task log file for a quick diagnostics of what has failed or gone wrong.

Database Vault integrates with the Windows Task Scheduler to allow backup administrators to schedule and plan backup tasks or directly edit the scheduled task within the Windows Task Scheduler, allowing optimal control over the task’s execution.

Database Vault has been tested with databases from only several MBs all the way to 100GBs and handles databases of all sizes with ease!

For a limited time, we are offering a $50 off launch promo on both the MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server backup options.

Securing your WordPress site, Part 1

Posted on January 30th, 2016 by Christopher York

Blogs have been an increasingly popular way of distributing information since their inception in the 90’s. They provide many benefits for promoting information, updates, and multimedia sources. Naturally if you are looking to begin promoting your business, services, or your thoughts via a blog, you are going to want a secure, trusted method.

WordPress has been growing rampantly over the last couple years as a blogging platform. According to Google Trends, interest in WordPress from 2011 to present has been consistently twice that of other blogging sites. Its layout is understandable and has many options for customizing and personalizing. Clearly it is a trusted and effective platform to blog from.

While WordPress comes with security methods, there are steps you can take to improve the security of your blog and protect it from attacks. Most hackers are not willing to spend much time or effort in breaking into your site. They are looking to compromise your server and use it to email spam. An attack is most effectively deterred by making your site more than averagely inconvenient to the hacker.

For starters, avoid using “admin” as a username or part of your username. Most attacks target the username admin with a combination of passwords. Eliminate the first part and you will be protected from the majority of attacks. If you already have that username in use, changing this is fast and easy. Simply create a new user and give it administrator rights. Then delete the old “admin” user and assign past content to this new user so that nothing will be lost in the transition.

You have probably heard this hundreds of times, but it is worth hearing again: use a complex password. Consider this: the three most common passwords of 2015 are “123456,” “password,” and “12345.” Be ahead of the curve and pick a password that is not on SplashData’s annual list of stolen passwords!

Change the table prefix from wp_ to something obscure like nho509b_ to make it less accessible to hackers and harder to guess. This might sound complicated to the less tech-savvy, but it can be as easy as a five minute fix. If you are just now setting up your blog, the customization option will be available during the set-up for database details. Simply change the default setting.

Keep up with updates. WordPress is constantly striving to provide a better blogging platform for your needs. Each new version has updated security methods to address holes found in previous editions. Updated versions are released biannually, with more minor updates released following the two major versions.

These steps are a good place to begin, but for the best security, you will want a quality hosting company. Nearly half of hacking attempts are due to faulty hosting platforms. If you are using a shared hosting platform, make sure it offers account isolation. This extra layer of protection prevents one account from overloading the server and affecting your website.

We will soon be posting a more advanced article outlining addition steps you can take to secure your WordPress site, so stay tuned!

MySQL Server Maintenance in Europe

Posted on November 16th, 2011 by Christopher York

Hello,

Saturday November 19th around 12:00PM MST we will be migrating the European MySQL service to a new server. During this time any websites, or applications that use our MySQL services will be offline. We expect this to take anywhere from 3 – 5 hours.

This is being done due to network performance issues were are experiencing on our current system.

Thank you for your patience during this time. This thread will be updated with more information as needed.

Thank you again for choosing ASPnix!

More about this

ASPnix Monthly Newsletter — January 2010

Posted on January 1st, 2010 by Christopher York

January’s newsletter is focusing again on our service updates, new products, and changes to our hosting services.

We would also like to wish everyone a happy and successful 2010!

TeamSpeak 3 Now Available

TeamSpeak v3 has been in development for over 4 years and is now ready and available for everyone’s use! This is one of the most anticipated software releases of the new year and promises to set new standards for the VoIP market.

TeamSpeak 3 has been rewritten from the ground up with a brand new GUI with all new features! The new feature list for TeamSpeak 3 is amazing, including the new Tabbed severs interface allowing users to have 1 TeamSpeak client running, but connected with multiple servers. 3-D positional audio, new permissions system, bookmarks, user profiles and avatars, file uploader / file browser, friends list, plugins, skinable client, text-to-speech and more!

As with our other VoIP product offerings, we are offering 5 voice-slots free for life!

For more information on TeamSpeak 3 http://teamspeak.com/?page=teamspeak3

For information on our TeamSpeak 3 pricing http://aspnix.com/voip/teamspeak3-voice-server/

Gaming Servers launching soon

Saving hostages, fragging zombies, saving the world from a terrorist attack is just around the corner! Within the next few weeks we will be introducing our new Gaming services with huge PC titles such as; Counter-Strike (1.6 and Source), Day Of Defeat, BattleField 2142, Call Of Duty, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Left For Dead 2. Of coarse this will not be all the games we host, but they are the major titles.

Our gaming services will also be complete with a fully automated control panel known as TCAdmin, this will allow you to control your gaming services, install mod’s, modify configuration files, control user access, rcon access and more all from your browser!

Through our gigabit backed network we can provide you and your friends, or clan mates with a lag free, super low latency gaming experience!

New VoIP / Gaming Server Locations Available

We now offer TeamSpeak (v2 and v3), Mohawk Voice, and our Gaming services in 2 locations. San Francisco California, and Washington D.C. We are still planning a central US location, and a european based location this year. Offering extra locations for latency sensitive services like VoIP and gaming allows us to bring better services, lower latencies, and faster response times for our VoIP and gaming solutions.

MySQL Server Upgrades / Server Discontinuation / PHP 4 Discontinuation

With last months newsletter we stated that we would be migrating from MySQL v4 & v5 to the latest GA stable release of MySQL, v5.1.x. True to our word we have begun the migration process and have removed MySQL v4.1 from our control panel and you will no longer be able to create MySQL v4 databases.

You can still manage your databases through our PHPMyAdmin utility as normal. However effective February 1st 2010 at 12:01AM, we will no longer be running our MySQL v4 servers and they will be shutdown. All clients have until this time to migrate / upgrade their databases to support the latest MySQL standards and technologies of v5.1.

For information about MySQL v5.1 see the below links

This is also a reminder that PHP v4 will be discontinued on our servers, and everyone will be moved to the latest PHP v5.2 release. This will happen the same day as the MySQL v4 upgrade. PHP v4 is no longer supported by the PHP Group, and is deprecated and no longer being developed against. We urge all clients that utilize PHP v4 to check their site against PHP v5.2 to insure all scripts and pages load without issues.

We hope that everyone understands the need to pull away from the older unsupported servers and services. If you have questions you can submit a ticket to our support department. email support@aspnix.com or logon to our forums and post your concerns there.

Graphic Design Services

ASPnix is proud to be offering Graphic Design services. We have the design needs to meet your businesses requirements and budget! Make this new year even better with a brand new identity for your business by getting a new logo, business cards, and any other graphical work your business may need!

Our Graphic Design services are professional level services, we do not provide clients with “clip art” or “templates” or graphics made with Microsoft Paint or other low quality graphical applications. Our graphics are unique to each design and are hand created with industry standard applications like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign so everything is very high quality, scalable, editable, and print shop reproducible. For more information contact design@aspnix.com.

ASPnix Monthly Newsletter — December 2009

Posted on December 1st, 2009 by Christopher York

Decembers newsletter is extending November’s highlights on service upgrades and service additions, we are proud to announce a few new services, service upgrades, and the new face of ASPnix!

We hope everyone enjoys our new web site, forums, and support system as much as we have enjoyed developing them!

New Web site Launched

We now have a new face at aspnix.com with a designed and refreshed look and feel to our web site! We are very pleased to have launched the new face of ASPnix along with our new services which are also highlighted below.

There will still be continuous small cosmetic changes to aspnix.com as time goes on, new features added, new content, and more services as we grow. If you have any comments, feedback, additions, (or subtractions!) regardless if they are negative or positive please leave your comments in our new Community Forums at http://community.aspnix.com/showthread.php?2476-Website-and-Forums-Feedback-Please

New Community Forums Launched

We are happy to add that we have migrated from Community Server to the very well known and widely used vBulletin. vBulletin allows us to have a more “community” feel to our services and web sites, also allows us to better show our services and assist community users with questions.

Our community forums are not just for clients either, we will be adding new categories for programming, graphic design, web development and design, server setup, 3rd party software and more!

For clients who used our CommunityServer link tracking system, please contact us for a new link which will be generated and tracked by our billing system.

New Support System Coming Soon

Within the next day or so we will be launching our new hosting support system based on the world renowned Kayako SupportSuite. This will be a clean installation not a migration from SmarterTool’s SmarterTrack as there is no migration available. We believe that this move is the best as SupportSuite is a far superior product to SmarterTools and will allow us to provide an unprecedented new level of service to all clients.

SupportSuite will allow us to offer higher level service / support agreements with VPS and Dedicated server clients.

We will also be completely redoing our FAQ / Knowledgebase to bring all articles to current date. Also with this new support system will introduce an automated support system to aid in the most common support issues.

Mohawk Voice Service Launched

We are now an authorized hosting provider for the brand-new VoIP service Mohawk Voice. Mohawk Voice is a brand new VoIP application much like TeamSpeak and Ventrilo, but Mohawk Voice has a few additions / features and quality that neither TeamSpeak or Ventrilo offer! Voice quality is near HD-Quality at 44.1KHz / 16bit, and it uses a completely custom SpeeX codec to achieve this amazing quality with a very low hit on system resources and bandwidth.

Right now we are offering 5 voice slots free for life for all new Mohawk Voice signup’s! Yep you read it right, free for life! Mohawk Voice is great for gamers, clans, business, and anyone else looking to have a very simple VoIP application with crystal clear voice quality.

For more information about Mohawk Voice check out their web sitehttp://www.mohawkvoice.com/. You can also view our Mohawk Voice pricing here http://aspnix.com/voip/.

Gaming Servers Coming Soon

Through our gigabit backed network we can provide you and your friends, or clan mates with a lag free, super low latency gaming experience!

MySQL Server Upgrades / Server Discontinuation

For information about MySQL v5.1 see the below links

We hope that everyone understands the need to pull away from the older unsupported servers and services. If you have questions you can submit a ticket to our support dept. email support@aspnix.com or logon to our forums and post your concerns there.

ASPnix Monthly Newsletter — November 2009

Posted on November 1st, 2009 by Christopher York

This is the season to upgrade! Here at ASPnix we will be doing many upgrades to our systems; including MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft WIndows Server 2003, and PHP.

Many of these upgrades will make our services perform better, standout and also comply with today’s newest programming standards!

PHP Upgrade

We will be removing PHP v4 from our lineup of available PHP parser versions. While still in use today by many scripts, and developers PHP 4 is no longer actively supported or developed on by the PHP Group and was deprecated in August of 2008. PHP 5 has been around for over 5 years and is a tried and true industry standard and scripts should be written to take advantage of its on going support, new technologies and features.

While this upgrade will not come over night as we understand that some clients and web sites are not able to comply with this upgrade immediately we are giving 60 days from today November 10th 2009 for all clients to prepare for this upgrade. On January 10th 2010 we will begin phasing out and removing PHP 4 from our servers and moving all PHP 4 enabled domains to PHP 5.

If you are using a script that requires PHP 4, we recommend contacting the developers of your web application and seeing if there is an upgrade to comply with PHP 5.

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Upgrade

We are in the process of upgrading all Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (IIS6) web sites to the new and improved Microsoft WIndows Server 2008 operating system. This will not stop IIS6 support as we will run IIS7 in comparability mode which will still allow your IIS6 based sites to operate normally.

This upgrade is for many reasons, including

Speed. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 is a very efficient and fast operating system.
Lifecycle. Microsoft Windows Server 2003 is nearing 7 years old and is nearing its retired date / end of support cycle.
Security. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 is a more secure operating system all around.
IIS7. Though running in comparability mode, IIS7 is a more robust and secure web server than IIS6.

MySQL Server Upgrades

Upgrades will begin the last 2 weekends of November on migrating both MySQL 4.1 and 5.0 to the latest version of MySQL v5.1. MySQL v4.1 is reaching its end of support from the manufacturer and is no longer being actively developed or supported, this includes upgrades and security fixes. MySQL v5.0 is still supported by the manufacturer, but we felt it would be best to go to current GA release of MySQL v5.1

We will alert clients of this migration by posting in our support system / announcement area of our community forums a week before we begin this upgrade to give everyone time to test and obtain current backups of their databases.

Part of this upgrade comes from the above PHP *upgrade* as the native database for PHP 4 was MySQL 4 and below, and since PHP 4 is no longer supported it only makes sense for us to move ahead with MySQL as well. This also brings new features to the table along with performance boosts as well with the new MySQL.

Microsoft SQL Server Upgrades

Upgrades will begin in the last 2 weekends of November on migration of all SQL Server 2005 services to the latest Microsoft SQL Server 2008. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is backwards compatible with SQL 2005 databases and there should be no upgrade issues. If you questions please contact our support department.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 just like any other upgrade brings new features, faster performance and more!

Microsoft .NET Framework Proposed Upgrades

While this is not an iron clad upgrade yet, we are evaluating the possibility of migrating all Microsoft .NET v1.1 web sites to the 2.0 framework. We are looking into because v1.1 of the .NET framework is very out-dated, not widely supported, and since we are performing the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 to Microsoft Windows Server 2008 migration it only makes sense to move away from the Microsoft Windows Server Server 2003 base technologies and move forward with the new standards.

With Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET v4.0 framework not far away we are seeing less and less demand for the out-dated 1.1 framework. Also with upgrades to Microsoft SQL server, it just tacks on another reason to move away from the old technologies.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions feel free to contact our support department.