As you may have heard in the NZ media, Vodafone New Zealand is closing down it's NZ Domain Registration, Web Hosting and Email hosting services. Vodafone will need all of it's customers to move their domain, web and email hosting services before 28th February 2019. If you are a Vodafone customer and are in this situation, the Lounge Network can help you with your future Domain Registration and Web Hosting needs. According to the Vodafone website at https://www.vodafone.co.nz/broadband/domains-and-hosting/ , this will affect NZ Domain and NZ Web Hosting and Email services, and they are suggesting their customers move to a specialist web hosting provider like us before the 28th February 2019. These are all the services affected: Domain name registration Email hosting Web hosting Domain name hosting (DNS Hosting) The good thing is that we can host all of these services on our networks. The Lounge Network have been providing NZ Domain Name and Web hosting services to New Zealanders...

Rolling Update Work Window starting from the 12 August 2017 Scope of Work:   CPanel has introduced a new backup system which is going to replace it's legacy backup system.  At some point in the near future, CPanel will no longer support their legacy backup system.  In an effort to stay ahead of this, our upstream providers we will be converting the backups from the legacy system to the new backup system on a few servers every day.  They don't anticipate any loss of backups, but it's always advisable as per our terms of service to retain your own backups as well.  Our upstream providers have tested and verified the upgrade and don't expect any issues.     The new Backup system now functions with a new user interface (UI) and having the following features:   The new Backup system also now supports multiple incremental backups.   Retention behavior - When a complete backup finishes, the system deletes the oldest backup. When the system backup p...

CPanel Servers Maintenance - New CPanel Features and Security Updates July 21 2017 - July 24 2017 During this maintenance window, our upstream providers will be upgrading the version of the control panel software on the Cpanel servers. This upgrade will bring some exciting new features such as EA4, CPanel's new system for Apache management, PHP-FPM, and a host of security patches. We do not anticipate any major issues during this upgrade, although there maybe some small outages. The update will allow you to be able to use a PHP selector where you can test upgraded versions of PHP simply by logging into your control panel and selecting the version you want to use. This is especially helpful for software upgrade tests and subsequent deployments.  This announcement only applies to our CPanel based servers. It does not apply to our Business Class and Corporate web hosting plans.

This problem is apparently causing emails sent via Spark / Xtra /Yahoos SMTP server, to bounce back with the following error 550 5.7.1 You are not authorized to send as  name@yourdomain.co.nz Apparently this is due to Spark currently being in the process of moving to a new email provider. A temporary fix for this is to send out your email directly via Yahoos SMTP server setting. So this means changing your outgoing SMTP server setting from send.xtra.co.nz , to smtp.mail.yahoo.com . In most cases this should work, at least temporarily, until Yahoo deactivate this, and until Spark come up with a local solution. We do also suggest contacting Spark and raising a ticket with them, as the more people that report this problem to them, the more likely they will fix it properly. Apparently people are having other problems to with the Spark email service during the migration, so this fix above may not help with those problems. If you use the Lounge Network for your email, you d...

 As you may already know Wellington and upper parts of the South Island were rocked by a severe earthquake this morning, causing quite a bit of damage. The regions continues to be rocked by severe aftershocks. We hope everyone is safe and ok across NZ. Our main office has been disrupted by the Wellington earthquakes. As a result of the quakes, we have had periods of no power or internet  access. So this may affect our ability to respond to enquiries during this time. We may have more power outages as aftershocks continue to strike our offices. Our web hosting services however are not affected in anyway. The servers are housed in professional datacentres in Auckland, Wellington and overseas, and are designed to withstand these types of earthquakes. So please bear with us during this time.

 Our upstream providers will be moving the CPanel webservers at anytime from  6pm on Monday 7th November 2016. They are moving the servers from an old rack to new rack as part of improving the infrastructure. There will be some downtime across all services while this is done.They are expecting downtime of no more than one hour once they commence the move, however it maybe longer.  If you notice your server is not responding, this will be why.

--- THESE UPGRADES HAVE NOW BEEN COMPLETED ---    As part of the regular server maintenance and upgrade program, all CPanel hosting accounts will be upgraded to PHP 5.6 and MySQL 5.5. This will commence on your server at anytime from the 9/09/2016. The servers will be upgraded in alphabetical order, and will do a few each day as they complete the work on updating all the servers. We hope that they will be done within a month, but will update this page if there are any delays, or when they have been completed. These upgrades are substantial and require a lot of work, as they are being done on live production servers. This announcement applies only to clients on our CPanel hosting plans, which use the 'CPanel' branded control panel.   As many may already know, PHP versions 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4 have reached end of life (EOL). PHP is third party software that some of our clients use to run their websites on. Not all websites will be using PHP. EOL means PHP...

Our offices are currently having fibre installed. This means that we will have periods where we will have no internet access. There is also the risk that we may have an extended periods of downtime. This won't affect clients websites, as websites are stored at the datacentres. However it may affect our ability to reply to support and update our network status page with announcements. So please bear this in mind if you email us for support.

Drupal has identified some remote code execution vulnerabilities on several contributed modules on version 7.x Customers who sites run on Drupal are urged to review these announcements on the Drupal site, and update the affected plugins - even if they are not active on your site. If your Drupal site uses v7.x, this is highly critical, and you should upgrade the plugins as a matter of urgency. https://www.drupal.org/node/2765573 https://www.drupal.org/node/2765575 https://www.drupal.org/node/2765567  Once the plugins have been updated, your site should be protected from these potential vulnerabilities.

Dear Customers, This message only applies to clients hosted at our Auckland datacentre, and not clients on our CPanel based hostng plans. The Auckland datacentre is currently undergoing the task of updating some of their legacy IP ranges. This usually does not cause any problems, and most changes will happen automatically. Here are a list of changes that they will be making, so that if you are having any issues you can check your domain template is using the right IPs. It will likely only be very old websites, that are 8 or more years old, that may still be using these old settings. If you are using mail.[yourdomain] or mail.mydns.net.nz for incoming mail, please update this to pop3.webhost.co.nz. If you are using mail.[yourdomain] or mail.mydns.net.nz for your outgoing mail settings please change this to smtp.webhost.co.nz, leave this if you have anything else! If you have shared hosting or mail with us, but your domain is using an alternate domain pr...