There are a small number of clients who have very old websites hosted on the servers. Some are nearly 20 years old, but many are 10+ years old.  Some use Content management systems that are very old and use very old versions of PHP and MySQL.  Clients are reminded that they are required to keep their websites up to date with the latest versions of software and scripts to prevent the website being exploited. Most CMSs can be updated over time to the newest version via the CMS developers website, and these usually have the latest security patches.  When websites get old and aren't regularly updated they also may become incompatible with the servers software and may malfunction. They also can become a security risk and open to being hacked or abused.  Our upstream providers will be phasing out versions of PHP 5 and older and this will happen without further notice, as they are end of life and no longer receive security updates. They regularly update the server software ...

This is just a note that we have updated out postal details on our website, and our new postal address is as follows: Lounge Network PO Box 47 Greytown, 5742 Wellington Region New Zealand  If you are sending us cheques, please make sure you send them to this new PO Box. If you have recently sent a cheque to our old postal address, it should have been redirected to us. However if it was delayed in the mail, or you sent it more recently, then it maybe returned to you. So when resending, please make sure you send it to our new postal address. We would also recommend paying by Direct Credit instead of Cheque, as Cheques are on the way out, and they can get lost in the mail or get delayed. 

Our upstream providers have been notified about some major vulnerabilities with CPanel's current version of EXIM and it can lead to exploitation for crypto attacks. As a result, they have since the 6th of June been patching all of the servers. All  shared servers are now protected.  We want to provide you with information regarding an Exim exploit that NIST has posted about today: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-10149 This Exim exploit could affect any servers running cPanel & WHM versions below our latest LTS version which, as of this email is, v78.0.27. For more information about this Exim exploit, please see the link above.

Our office will be closed for Wellington Anniversary day. Any support emails during this period will therefore take longer to reply to. As always our servers will be monitored 24/7 by the datacentre techs, and should any issues occur, they will be dealt with as soon as possible. Please note that our office is closed, we will not update any of our network status pages during this period. however that won't mean that issues that may occur, won't be getting addressed. If you need urgent afterhours support, you can use our form. This will be charged out as per our after hour charges. 

 We have a small number of clients who are still hosted on the old Windows hosting platform, which has now reached the end of its life.  This platform is no longer supported by Microsoft and they no longer release security patches for it. Websites on this platform will therefore be migrated by our upstream providers to a new windows platform on the 12 December 2018, which will mean websites will be running on the latest windows server software.  Please note that if your website is old and/or using code that is not supported by the latest windows server software, then it may have compatibility issues running under the latest windows software.  In that case clients may need to their website developer to update their website, so it continues to work on new versions of the server software. Most clients will have kept their websites code up to date and current and, so most websites should not be affected by this server migration. Please note that this server migration is ...

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.