We have noticed that there has been an increase in the number of websites exploited over the last few weeks, not only websites hosted by Kiwihosting.net, but in many of the hosting forums we follow there has been a large number of other hosting companies also reporting such increases. The following article explains a little more about the current exploit that's been reported most frequently and what you can do to help protect yourself against it.

Whilst at Kiwihosting.net we do everything possible to help protect our servers against exploits the vast majority of sites exploited that we investigate are as a result of

1) Customers running 3rd party software such as Joomla, PHPBB, vBulletin etc and not keeping up to date with new releases
2) Customers having FTP passwords that are weak and easily guessed or bruteforce compromised
3) Customer computers infected with malware/keyloggers or trojans.

For those customers who have not yet moved their sites to our HELM servers we highly encourage you to consider doing so, we run additional software on these servers that helps us to dramatically reduce the attack vectors on the server by blocking any suspicious request or URL received.

We recommend all customers consider running software such as Malwarebytes, and AVAST Anti-virus to help protect your own computers against such intrusions.

For the full article please refer to our support forum

We will shortly be starting a major consolidation of our shared hosting servers and control panels.  Currently shared hosting customers are supported by one of our HSphere clusters, we intend to migrate all customers away from these servers and on to a new set of HELM powered high speed servers which is the same control panel software used by our Resellers customers.

We will also be doubling the disk space and traffic on all shared hosting plans once migrated as part of this consolidation exercise.

We hope to have all Windows customers migrated to the new servers over the next 6 months and will be contacting customers in groups to arrange to assist with the migration of their website content, databases, email  etc.

However if you wish to move your website yourself immediately and take advantage of the new control panel, faster servers, new features such as .NET 3.5 SP1, ISAPI Rewrite PHP5.x etc then we are also offering an incentive to make the transition easier.  Any customer who chooses to migrate their site content themselves without our assistance, and migrates all content within 1 month of requesting your new HELM account will be entitled to a credit of up to 6 months hosting fees !  For every additional month past the first month that the old shared hosting account remains open the credit will be reduced by a month.

If you wish to take advantage of this offer please send an email to our support team including your account name or number and we will set up your new account for you ASAP.

We are now supporting Microsoft .NET 3.5 SP1 on our Reseller Servers.