Net Explorers Service Status

Several major UK ISPS have apparently been affected by a DNS cache poisoning attack. The result of this is that some customers may find they are not able to access websites on our servers.

So far we know the following ISPs are affected (but only a handful of their customers it seems):

BT
NTL/Virgin
EasyNet

All our servers are online and functioning correctly. Every website we host is online. If you want to check this for yourself you can try accessing your site through a proxy server. For example go to:

http://www.the-cloak.com/login.html

Enter your website address in the box in the bottom left and click 'Start Surfing'. You should see your website as normal.

Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to resolve this problem, since it is outside of our servers and network. No doubt the affected ISPs are working on resolving their DNS problems and we expect the matter to be fixed within 24 hours.

Server: ganesha.netexplorers.co.uk
Type: unplanned

The server is curently under some kind of attack which is causing the server to be put under extremely high load. We are working on identifying the source of the attack and blocking it.

UPDATE: 15:00

The attack has been blocked and normal service has been resumed.

ganesha.netexplorers.co.uk became unresponsive on all ports. Engineers are rebooting the server and normal service should be resumed in a few minutes.

UPDATE 11:17
The server is now back online and we are investigating the cause of the outage. We are very sorry for an inconvenience caused.

Server: ganesha.netexplorers.co.uk

Webmail is not currently accessible on this server. Our engineers have carried out extensive work to try and find the cause but have not been successful. The issue has been escalated to the developers of the Plesk Control Panel software and we are waiting for them to provide us with a solution.

Since the problem is specifically with webmail and not the email server you can continue to send and receive emails as normal using a client such as Outlook or a web based service like www.mail2web.com

Please check back for updates on the status of this issue.

UPDATE: 15:48pm

Webmail is now fully functional. Thank you for your patience.

Server: ganesha.netexplorers.co.uk
Type: Unplanned

We are experiencing massive volumes of spam which is causing the server to overload and crash. Engineers are currently working on the issue.

UPDATE: 17:12pm

We are continuing to work on this issue. Service will be intermittent until it is resolved.

UPDATE: 30th May 2008, 18:06pm

Server load is back under control and the spam attack has been dealt with. Currently webmail is not functioning and you will not be able to log in. A server technician is working on this and we hope to have it resolved in the next 24 hours. In the meantime you can try using http://www.mail2web.com or an email client such as Outlook.

Thank you to all our customers for their patience and understanding during this difficult time.

UPDATE: 31st May 2008, 11:00am

The cause of the webmail problem has been identified. Fixing it requires a short period of downtime which has been scheduled for midnight tonight, after which normal service will be resumed.

Please note that our preview URL feature that allows customers to view their websites before their DNS has propagated e.g http://mydomaincom.pre-dns-change.com is temporarily not working correctly.

We hope to have this fixed within 24 hours.

When: 3am - 6am GMT, 29th February 2008
Server: ganesha.netexplorers.co.uk

We are performing a Plesk upgrade which will take approximately 3 hours. During this time there will be a period of approximately 1 hour when there may be intermittent service.