We are announcing new changes to our domain registry services and pricing which will impact all domain customers for their next renewals and new domain registrations and transfers starting on 11/11/2021.

Our original registry provider, which has allowed us to maintain excellent domain pricing for a select handful of TLDs for our customers, is unfortunately closing down and discontinuing support for their service. This does not mean any downtime for your sites! All domains will be moved to a new registry provider behind the scenes for continuing service. Your domain will still be with us and you will manage it here in our account portal, but our registry provider will change. This transition comes with both good and bad news: We will now be able to offer (many) new TLDs for registration, however, pricing will increase for all domain registrations, renewals, and transfers effective immediately, and pricing will vary between domain TLDs going forward.

We will have access to nearly all available TLDs, and will progressively add more TLDs to our domain registration and transfer options very soon.

For a long time we've been able to offer extremely competitive domain pricing (for .com, .net, .org, .biz, .us, and .info TLDs) at $12/year to all customers because of our no-frills registry provider that only supported a short list of TLDs. These prices will unfortunately be increasing as this registry provider is retired. The new pricing for these TLDs for new registrations, renewals, and transfers is as follows*:

.com - $15/year
.net - $16/year
.org - $16/year
.info - $21/year
.biz - $21/year
.us - $15/year

* - Note new orders cannot be placed at the old pricing at this time and new orders cannot be accepted until the transition to our new registry provider is completed on 11/11/2021. Resellers will still receive a $2/year discount on all domain registrations, transfers, and renewals. We are likely to see more frequent domain pricing changes and TLD additions in the future as a result of the registry provider change.

We apologize that this announcement comes so close to the time of the impending changes. Please note all domain operations (registration, renewal, transfer, and modification) are presently suspended until 11/11/2021. If you have urgent changes to be made to your domain, please contact us at the help desk and we can put in a ticket with the registry for urgent change requests.

ATTENTION SHARED HOSTING USERS:

If you are experiencing a default cPanel page when browsing to your website hosted with us and you are using third party DNS, you will need to update your hosted IP at your DNS provider per our IPv4 Renumbering notices that we have e-mailed you.

You can find your hosting IP by logging in to cPanel, then click 'Expand Stats' on the left hand column, and then write down the hosted IP displayed there. Input that IP into your third party DNS control panel to update your website. 

If you need assistance with this process, please open a support ticket and we'll be happy to help.

Emergency Maintenance Notification

**NOTE: This only applies to dedicated server customers who are located in LAS1. NO SHARED, RESELLER, OR VPS CUSTOMERS ARE LOCATED IN LAS1.***

Start Time: Tuesday, July 22 2014 4:00PM Pacific Time

Estimated Completion Time: Unknown, current estimate 12-18 hours

Expected Service Impact: None

Possible Service Impact: High

Maintenance Information:
LAS1 is currently operating on emergency backup generator power. The electric utility company which provides power to our LAS1 datacenter (NV Energy) has determined that our main service transformer has suffered a critical failure, resulting in a complete loss of utility power to the datacenter. We are actively working with their engine ers to complete a repair or replacement of the unit ASAP.

Our facility is currently operating normally on generator backup power. All redundant power systems have operated flawlessly thus far, and customer power has not been impacted in any way. Our fuel suppliers have been notified and are on standby should we require additional fuel at any time.

Please stand by for updates, as this situation is rapidly evolving.

Update #1: 07/22/2014 @ 10:37 PM Pacific Time

The data center has concluded emergency power maintenance without any impact to power delivered to customer equipment. NV Energy has completed replacement of our main utility transformer with a larger unit, which we hope will preclude any future incidents. We have transitioned off of our backup generators and are now running normally on utility power.

Please let us know if you have any questions regarding this matter.

We are happy to announce a number of improvements for Shared & Reseller clients.

We have phased out usage of PHP 5.2 in favor of PHP 5.3. For 99% of customers this should be a transparent change as we have replicated the configuration between the two very closely. If you do run in to any problems, please feel free to let us know and we will help get any issues resolved. For users on the new Helios server, the primary PHP version is 5.4, with 5.3 available via .htaccess setting.

We have finally managed to work out the quirks with PHP Opcode Caching in our shared hosting environment, and we are excited to be rolling out Zend OpCache support to all servers over the next several days. Atlas is already online with the new Zend OpCache module.

We have also improved server security across the board by enabling CageFS for all current hosting systems. This should not have any negative impact on currently running services.

We are pleased to announce that we will be upgrading our backup facilities across all Chicago Shared, Reseller, and VPS systems to the new R1Soft CDP 3.0 software beginning today. This process will disable backup access for a few days, but once the upgrade & backup seed process is completed, you will find the R1Soft Backups link in your cPanel for easy access to backups.

What does this mean for backups in the meantime? Access to R1Soft CDP backups will not be available again until after your server has been seeded in the new R1Soft CDP 3.0 system. This does mean you will not be able to gain access to the older backups, as well.

Are any changes being made to backup policy & retention? Yes. We are changing from an hourly backup schedule to a daily backup schedule with 7 day retention. This will improve service speeds throughout the course of the day, and keep backup hours to a minimum even on our largest systems.

Will I notice anything else? You may notice slight speed degradation while backups are being seeded for the first time. This process should be negligible in its impact on the currently running systems, however, and we do not expect it to cause any problems with site accessibility.