Dear Customers,

Our developers have implemented a new Web Hosting Control Panel feature – easy-to-configure remote access to all MySQL databases in your web hosting account.

Now you can access your database(s) from any external host of your choice, using your preferred MySQL Remote Access application. To ensure maximum security in your communication with our MySQL database server, we have set an IP restriction that allows only your original IP address to be used for establishing a remote connection. This prevents anyone who somehow manages to crack your database login details from connecting to your database from their IP location.

Remote MySQL access is included with all web hosting services that use the Hepsia Control Panel. However, it is disabled by default to protect your security. Here is how you can allow access to a selected MySQL database from an external location:

1. In the Control Panel, go to Databases -> MySQL Databases. In there, click on the ‘Remote MySQL’ icon in the table of MySQL databases: You can find Remote MySQL Access in the 'MySQL Databases' section
2. In the pop-up window, you will see the IP address of the device that you currently access your Control Panel from. You can change it to any IP address that you want to connect to your MySQL database from remotely: Here you enter the IP address of the remote host you want to connect from
3. From the ‘Remote Access Time’ field, you can select the time period within which the remote connection between your remote host and the selected database will be running. You can select between 1 hour and 3 months: Here you specify the duration of the remote connection
4. When setting up the remote connection from your PC or web server, you will need to use the MySQL host listed below the IP field as a connection destination. This is the address of the destination host you need to specify in your remote connection application
5. When ready with your remote connection settings, click on the ‘Add IP address’ button on the right: Click on the 'Add IP' button to have your host address authorised to access the selected database A confirmation message will inform that the host has beed successfully added. This will instantly allow remote access from the specified IP address to the selected MySQL database.

For now, the remote database access feature is available for MySQL databases only. Remote PgSQL database access is still in the works.

Kind Regards,
Web Hosting team

Dear Customers,

We now have the ModSecurity Apache plugin running on all of our web hosting servers. This little plugin acts as a firewall for web applications and has so far reduced the number of hacked websites on our servers significantly.

As of this week, ModSecurity will also prevent "brute force" attacks. A brute force attack stands for an attempt to guess the username and password of a web application, using a predefined set of usernames and passwords and combining them at random. If there are more than 15 failed login attempts from an IP address within 3 minutes, the IP address will be blocked from the website for the next 30 minutes.

To help the ModSecurity plugin combat brute force attacks, our App Installer is also configured to replace the default "admin" username, which is used by the majority of web applications by default.

Best Regards,
Web hosting team

We have added the latest stable PHP releases to our Web Hosting Control Panel. You can now use the current stable version of PHP 5.5.5, as well as two legacy versions PHP 5.4.21 and PHP 5.3.27. These new PHP updates do not add any new functionality and are focused on polishing what is already available and on fixing reported bugs.

The PHP 5.5.5 release, for example, addresses more than 20 reported bugs, whereas PHP 5.4.21 contains 10 bug fixes.

As for PHP 5.3.27, this will be the last official update and no new bugs will be fixed in the future, save for security fixes. The latest regular release of the PHP 5.3.X branch brings 10 bug fixes, including a security fix for the XML parser. We will continue to offer PHP 5.3.27, but please keep in mind that the PHP team advises users to migrate to the newer PHP 5.5.X and PHP 5.4.X branches.

With Regards,
Your Web Hosting Team

Dear Customers,

We have just introduced a new feature in the ticket system for clients. The feature allows you to escalate the ticket with a single click of a button in case you are not happy with the responses you are getting so far.

We do hope this will allow us to resolve ongoing issues more quickly and to the satisfaction of our clients. Happier clients and satisfied clients are our main goal after all!

Best Regards,
Support team