[CLIENT NOTICE] Hosting Servers Upgrade Scheduled - March 3rd - 5th, 2017

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Bigger and better things are coming your way!

Due to the enormous growth we've experienced, we are performing significant upgrades to our website, email and database hosting servers' hardware and software. This is a major system upgrade and improvement for InternetWebBuilders.com, ESmart Stores and Alpha Web Hosting clients. What this means is faster, safer, better end user experience. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

We are targeting this weekend, between 9 PM Pacific time on Friday March 3rd and Monday, March 6th at 5:00 AM Pacific time. We will do our best to minimize the amount of time that your email and websites are inaccessible. Any down time in which websites and emails are unavailable will be limited to Saturday & Sunday nights starting 11 PM through 3 AM during the upgrade period (unforeseen circumstances not withstanding).

Improvements include upgrading the infrastructure to enhance performance, reliability and speed, increase capacity, improve security and add backup redundancy. Customers accessing the servers during this period may experience slow and/or intermittent response. Please plan for this by printing any information you may need during the upgrade period (work orders, invoices, job schedules etc).

The upgrade will affect access to websites and email services during the upgrade only. Other services such as, Office 365, Microsoft Exchange and domain name management will be unaffected and fully available.

No changes to the interfaces are planned for this upgrade. After the upgrade is completed, you should find no differences in your account, (though accessing it may be faster) with the exception of:

• The FTP server configuration will require TLS/SSL encryption to issue commands.
• We are also installing new ModSecurity rules. Few problems generally occur with these rules, however, if you notice you are denied access to pages that worked fine before, be sure to let us know, as we can disable rules for certain sections of your site, if necessary.
• Some configuration changes will be made to php through the php.ini file, including some changes that disable certain functions that are often used to propagate malware. We also ensured that php error reporting is not passed to the user.

We appreciate your patience and understanding during this upgrade.

Thank you for your support!