Password Rotation Policy Reverted

Dear TCH Family,

As many of you are aware, we started enforcing a new policy for password rotation.  In theory this was a splendid idea from both a security and administrative view point.  Over the past 24 hours we have had a wide range of customer comments regarding this new policy.  These have ranged from this is the best new policy ever all the way to TotalChoice has gone to the dogs.

The largest concern about this new policy came from our reseller client base.  This is due to the fact that the new password change can not be effected from WHM.  It can only be effected from cPanel logins.  This is a flaw or bug that we did not realize was present in cPanel until our reseller clients started running into it.  We are working with cPanel in an effort to correct this issue.

As many of you are aware I take customer service very serious and I also do not beat around the bush with my clients.   It appears that this policy has become more of a nuisance for clients and that is something I would never want to promote.  It is with that in mind that I have chosen to revert this change and forgo this new policy.

I would like to thank all the clients that have reached out in both support of and against this issue.

As always thank you all for making TCH what it is today and most importantly….

Happy Hosting!

New Password Rotation Polices

UPDATE:

I would like to thank all the clients that have reached out in both support of and against this issue. Please review the latest update concerning this policy.

Dear TCH Family,

TCH takes security very seriously and we are always looking at ways to improve the security for our internal infrastructure and for our client’s web presence. In an ongoing effort to provide our clients with the most secure environment possible we are enforcing the following new password rotation rules.

Effective immediately, every shared and reseller hosting client upon their next login to cPanel will be prompted to change/update their user passwords.  You will not be able to utilize your old password during this new password update.  Once this is completed, users will then be prompted every 180 days to once again rotate their passwords.

We would suggest you implement at a minimum, an 8 character long password with combinations of upper/lowercase, number and special characters.

We believe this new policy will insure that the hosting environment provided to our clients will become more secure.  This will also promote password security that will hopefully pass down to the way all users handle their passwords not only here at TCH but overall.

As always we appreciate your business and look forward to providing our clients many more years of happy hosting!

Thank you

Bill Kish
TotalChoice Hosting

Database issue corrected..

The issues with our internal databases have been corrected and we are back online without any issues to report.

Database Failure…

We are currently working on a MySQL issue that is effecting all of the TCH sql driven pages.  The RAID array that powers our SQL pages has failed and we are in the process of restoring service.

This does not effect any servers across the TCH network.  This only effects the main totalchoicehosting.com pages.

This issue cropped up at 2:38PM EST.

We are working as quickly as possible to restore services in full.

Update 3:56PM EST: All databases have been restored from backups. The website and back end services (billing, forums, helpdesk) are all back online.

Coming Soon… Updated Status Pages!

As some of you know last week TCH was the victim of a ddos attack on two different days. We have learned quite a bit about the attacks and how to fight them in the future.  I think our biggest lessons came in the way of customer support during any sort of outage.  What I learned from this past attack is that customers start calling us about 10 minutes into the outage.  As everyone knows, we simply have had no major outages at TCH in several years.  The last network outage that lasted more than 15 minutes was at least 3 years ago.

Enough of my rambling, everyone that hosts at TCH knows about our budget hosting with excellent up time and services.  Even with the two outages of last week our network up time is still 99.982%.  In fact, TotalChoice is ranked #1 by Hyperspin for hosts with more than 50 servers monitored.  Number #1 uptime of all monitored hosting companies.  This is quite a feat for a budget hosting company.  I am really proud of TCH and its staff.

Whilst our up time is excellent , we have learned something from our short periods of down time.  We need to move our network status page and blog to another Data Center.  Currently if the TCH Data Center goes off line, so do our status pages.  This is going to change.  We are in the process of preparing to do just that.  I have a friend that owns and operates another data center on the West Coast.  He was looking to do the same and wanted to host his status pages off network.  So we have struck a deal.  A server for server type of barter.

We expect to roll out these changes in the next 48-72 hours.  I will be sending out a mass email to our client base informing them of this after we have done a bit of testing on it to make sure everything is working as it should.

Happy Hosting!