Mail Service Downtime for SPAM Filtering Hardware - Wednesday, April 23 2008
Starting at 2:00 a.m. EDT on April 25th all mail service will be down for approximately 30 minutes as a new spam firewall appliance is installed in the network. This filter system, Barracuda Networks will be utilized to filter OUTGOING mail first for SPAM. The settings will be gentle to begin with and slowly increased to ensure we are not blocking legitimate outbound mail. This will only affect email servers with IP starting with 216.

As some of you are aware, providers such as Comcast and ATT are increasingly agressive with spam and have blocked our servers (without notification) causing mail delivery issues. In investigating these issue we've discovered most of them are based on email forwarders setup by our customers to their comcast/att/bellsouth accounts. When spam goes to the forwarder it currently gets forwarded without filtering. This then flags our servers as spam providers as we are named in the server chain of delivery of the mail.

We've evaluated several option including eliminating forwarders, however we feel this is a better approach that still allows us to offer an important service to our customers.

Control Panel Downtime - Monday, November 26 2007
The maintenance on the control panel was not fully completed last night. The control panel will again be down tonight starting at 11:00 p.m. EST to finish things up.

Thank you for your patience during this time.

Control Panel Maintenance - Thursday, November 22 2007
On Sunday, November 25th starting at 11:00 pm EST the control panel will go down for several hours for maintenance. This will not affect individual sites, only access to the control panel itself.

Control Panel Trouble Ticket System - Tuesday, October 2 2007
We are currently experiencing issues with our internal Trouble Ticket support system. If you need assistance, just send an email to our support team at support( at ) scoutwebservices.com

Domain Name Price Increase - Tuesday, September 18 2007
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) who is the regulatory body for the domain name wholesale registrars approved approximately a 7% price increase earlier this year effective October 14th See http://www.icann.org/correspondence/ for more information.

This decision increases our base costs from the processors and effective October 14th our domain name pricing will also increase to $15.00/year for .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info and .us domains.

This price increase affects all domain registrars and it is a cost we simply can't absorb.

If you so choose, you may want to renew for an extended period of time any domain names that are significant long term committments on your part prior to October 14, 2007.

Important FrontPage EOL Information - Saturday, September 15 2007
As we previously announced earlier this year, Microsoft FrontPage has reached it's End of Life and is no longer supported by Microsoft. Therefore the server extensions we utilize on our servers is also no longer supported.

Effective October 31, 2007 we will no longer support the use of Microsoft FrontPage on our servers. The server side extensions will remain on our servers until January 15, 2008 on a use at your own risk basis.

We're announcing this ahead of time to give you plenty of time to make alternate arrangements. Previously we thought we would keep them until they "broke" however in further research and consideration, we felt that wasn't the best plan of action in fairness to our customers.

We suggest you look at http://www.scoutwebservices.com/frontpage.html for more information and options.

New Plans - Monday, September 3 2007
You asked . . . we listened.

We are very pleased to have reconfigured our current offering of hosting account plans to give you, our customers, what you've asked for. We believe these plans will give you greater flexibility to develop the site you want without paying for things you don't utilize.

The new plans are based on summary disk usage rather than specific allotments for various resources. You can utilize as many mailboxes and/or databases as you choose within the summary disk usage for that plan. This allows all plans to have database access as well as the flexibility to change mailbox allotments for those "heavy" users.

We have greatly increased the disk space and transfer allowance for each plan so you can put more photographs, movies . . . whatever you want up on your site.

We hope you'll take a look at the new plans. If you are a current customer and would like to upgrade to one of the new plans, just send us a support ticket and we'd be happy to switch your account over.

Thank you for continuing to allow us to grow so we can continue to give back to our customers who have made us such a success.

Advanced Calendar Update - Monday, August 27 2007
Over the next several days we will be updating installations of the Advanced Scout Web Calendar on our server. If you are utilizing the calendar and have any issues, please submit a ticket and we'll look at it.

You'll notice only minor changes to the calendar with some behind the scenes scripting changes to allow the calendar to run smoother and faster.

Control Panel Maintenance - Downtime - Friday, August 17 2007
The control panel will be down tonight (Aug. 17th, 10 PM EDT)to do some maintenance. The CP may be down for several hours. Please plan accordingly.

Also during that timeframe, maintenance will be done on Unix5, Unix7, and Unix8 to upgrade the servers. Those servers may be down for 15 to 30 minutes while hardware is switched out.

Thank you for your patience during this time.

PHP4 on PHP5 Server - Thursday, May 17 2007
If you find that PHP5 is breaking some of your scripts you can now change it to run PHP4 as a CGI:

You can run PHP4 as CGI now on the PHP5 servers. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Make sure cgi-bin is enabled in the control panel.

2. Submit a ticket to support, requesting that we install the PHP4 CGI in your cgi-bin.

3. Put these lines in your htaccess file:
Action php4-script /cgi-bin/php4
AddHandler php4-script .php