Modwest Blog

Blackfoot partners with San Diego-based Intertune to support Modwest web hosting customers

APRIL 12, 2018, Missoula, Montana – Blackfoot, the owner and operator of the region’s largest multi-gigabit network, announced today it has entered into a strategic partnership with San Diego-based company, Intertune, to support Blackfoot’s shared Modwest web hosting customers.

“We are excited to partner with Intertune,” said Dave Martin, Chief Technology Officer at Blackfoot. “They can provide our customers with additional features and services for their web hosting initiatives and projects. Intertune has been providing excellent web hosting services for nearly two decades and will be a terrific provider for our customers going forward.”

Blackfoot expects to transition all current customers to Intertune by December 31, 2018.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Why did you sell your web hosting business to Intertune?

Competition for basic web hosting services has grown significantly over the past few years. Unfortunately, it became clear that without having the singular focus on web hosting services, like Intertune has, Modwest is simply unable to provide its customers with competitive web hosting features and prices.  

Who is Intertune and why should I agree to be their customer?

Like Modwest, Intertune started providing web hosting services in 2000. Intertune has been making customers happy since they first started, and their singular focus is on providing world-class web hosting services. Simply put, Intertune is able to provide you with the latest and greatest web hosting features and they have the expertise to seamlessly migrate your website!

Do I have to migrate?

Migration is mandatory and at a later date, Modwest will shut down its shared web hosting system entirely. However, we have partnered with Intertune to ensure the transition is as smooth as possible. Their team of dedicated migration specialists will work with you individually to help migrate your services and provide 24/7/365 support. Migration related information can be found at  modwest.intertune.com. You may contact Intertune at 855-TUNE-468 (855-886-3468), ext. 700. Please note that this extension is available 8am - 5pm PST. Once the migration of your account starts, we will provide you with the 24/7/365 support contact information with chat and email options.

Will my website experience any downtime?

No. With Intertune’s instructions, you are assured that there will be no disruption to your email and web hosting services. Intertune’s dedicated migration specialists will be available to guide you through the process and provide 24/7/365 support.

Where will my site be hosted now?

Your site will be hosted by Intertune. Blackfoot partnered with Intertune to provide you with the same high quality hosting services. Intertune was founded in 2000 and has been solely focused on providing high quality shared and dedicated hosting services. Learn more at http://www.intertune.com/.

What do I need to do?

Within the next few days, you will be receiving a welcome email from Intertune. This email will contain information on how to access your new control panel and update your billing information. You must update your billing information before June 1, 2018. In addition, an Intertune dedicated migration specialist will be in contact to help you migrate your services. If you have any questions in the meantime, you may contact Intertune at 855-TUNE-468 (855-886-3468), ext. 700. Please note that this extension is available 8am - 5pm PST. Once the migration of your account starts, we will provide you with the 24/7/365 support contact information with chat and email options.

Will my services or pricing change?

Intertune will maintain the same affordable pricing, terms and product features that you have today. Plus, Intertune will provide the added benefit of 24/7/365 phone support, advanced spam filtering and anti-phishing services at no extra charge! In addition, they are looking to add more features that will add even more value after your migration is complete.

What are the steps required to migrate?

The migration will involve a few steps and may vary depending on your subscribed services. In general the steps for migration will include the following:

1. Update your billing information. As part of the migration to Intertune services, you will be required to update the Intertune billing system with your credit card information.
2. Setup Outlook or other email clients. Intertune’s migration specialists will help you and any additional users set up an additional account within your favorite email client on your desktop and/or mobile phone.
3. Review your migrated website (optional). Intertune engineers will migrate your website over to their servers without your involvement. If there are questions that arise during the migration, they will let you know. You will then have the opportunity to view your website on Intertune’s systems before the account is migrated.
4. Change your DNS servers. Once the above steps have been completed, a change will need to be made with your domain name registrar (wherever you registered your domain initially). This will flip the switch to Intertune’s hosting services.
5. Sync your Intertune mailbox with your Modwest mailbox. Each of your users will have the ability to login to a secure link and have any mail that is left on their Modwest mailbox downloaded to their new Intertune mailbox.

An easy way to avoid getting hacked

Getting hacked can be a real hassle. Restoring your website takes time, and for most people money to have their web developer pull backups. One of the most common ways hackers gain access to websites is through vulnerabilities in software applications. So what can you do to prevent being hacked? One of the easiest things you can do is update your software applications on a regular basis. This may seem like a no-brainer, but we get calls every day from customers who have had their website hacked as a result of outdated software. It’s important to realize that hackers generally don’t target a specific website, but rather, develop automated scripts that scour the Internet looking for known security holes to exploit. By updating your software applications on a regular basis you are better able to fend off most of these attacks.  

Here are a few tips to get you started with a few WordPress basics:

    How to check your current version of WordPress

• Within your Administration Screen the version number is displayed in the lower right corner. You can always visit wordpress.org to see what the latest version is.

    Updating WordPress Plugins and Themes

• When new updates are available you should receive an update notification in your Administration Screen. To update, simply click the link in this notification and follow the prompts.

    How to check for updates

• Checking for updates and installing those updates is simple. Under the Dashboard menu in the Administration Screen click Updates to view your current versions and to download the latest version of WordPress, Plugins and Themes.
  

Regularly checking and installing updates is a quick and easy way to protect yourself. While not foolproof,it is an effective way to save time, money and a lot of hassle!

Congratulations to our survey winner!

Congratulations to Marc Steinberg of TheGroup4QualityCare in Missoula, Montana!  Marc is Modwest’s winner of our customer survey prize – an Amazon Kindle Fire. TheGroup4QualityCare trains healthcare providers in motivational interviewing, a way of working with and for the people they serve in their practices.  Motivational interviewing is an evidence based approach that helps people make healthy changes in their self-care of chronic conditions, like diabetes, heart disease and obesity. Congratulations to Marc – enjoy the tablet, and thank you for being a valued customer!

Thank you to all of our customers who completed the recent Modwest Customer Feedback Survey. The information we gathered measures your customer experiences with Modwest and spotlights areas where we need to focus more attention. We are committed to providing world-class service and your candid feedback is critical to our focus on continuous improvement.

A final thanks to all of you that have helped build our business by referring friends and clients to Modwest. Please know that your referral of our service is the finest compliment we can receive. For those of you that don’t know about our affiliate program, take a look at our affiliate page to learn how you can earn credit for telling your friends about Modwest.

Protect yourself with strong passwords

With the burgeoning sophistication of hackers these days we thought it would be a good time to remind everyone to take a look at your current password management practices.  A strong password not only protects your ‘stuff’ but also benefits the overall network health of service providers.

Best practices for password management vary greatly; however, most sources agree that a strong password leverages a combination of letters, numbers and special characters. Here at Modwest, we have implemented the following requirements for our customers’ passwords:

• Must be different from the User ID.
• Contain a minimum of 8 characters and a maximum of 32.
• Must contain 1 capital letter, 1 lower case letter, and 1 numeral or special character.

Finally, avoid using common dictionary words or personal information like your pet’s name or street address. These combinations are easily solved by password guessers. Throw these password guessing applications off by randomly adding characters and numbers somewhere in your passwords.

If you have any password management recommendations, tips, or tricks, please comment!

Modwest upgrades to PHP 5.3.16

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Last night we upgraded PHP in the Grid from 5.3.15 to 5.3.16. This new release patches over 20 bugs and security vulnerabilities existing in 5.3.15.

PHP 5.3.16 is active only on the Grid's Debian 6 environment.  To change your hosting environment, login to OnSite.  This upgrade should not cause any application issues.  For a full list of changes between 5.3.15 and 5.3.16, visit php.net.

As always, let us know if you have any issues resulting from this upgrade.

Modwest upgrades to PHP 5.3.15

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Last night we upgraded PHP in the Grid from 5.3.14 to the latest release, 5.3.15. This new release patches several bugs and security vulnerabilities existing in 5.3.14.  Here is what the PHP development team says about this update:

“The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.5 and PHP 5.3.15. This release fixes over 30 bugs and includes a fix for a security related overflow issue in the stream implementation. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.5 or PHP 5.3.15.”

PHP 5.3.15 is active only on the Grid's Debian 6 environment.  To change your hosting environment, login to OnSite.  This upgrade should not cause any application issues.  For a full list of changes between 5.3.14 and 5.3.15, visit php.net.

As always, let us know if you have any issues resulting from this upgrade.

Database Server Second Wind

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Modwest’s plan to deploy a new Grid database server has been lurking in the shadows for months. Though db2, our most recent addition, still had plenty of headroom, we wanted to offer the newest Community MySQL, 5.5, for those needing cutting edge MySQL features . Lack of problems have a way of de-prioritizing a project, so we delayed  the new db3 database server in favor of stability and capacity improvements to our mail and storage clusters.

In May, disk IO usage on db2 leapt wildly upwards. Caught off-guard, we urgently revived the project to create db3. Several unexpected delays assailed the db3 project, and in early July, we still had weeks to go before db3 was ready.  Db2 was starting to noticeably affect service. We stepped back to reassess the situation; we needed to help customers now and buy time for a long-term solution. And, something just did not feel quite right about the spike in usage.

We checked the normal indicators of MySQL performance:

• Slow Queries –They were numerous, but there were no smoking guns that explained the burgeoning disk wait.
• Query Cache – 1GB in size it was performing well at over 80% efficiency.
• Sort Merge Passes – This statistic was very low; it was only in the hundreds for a service that had been up for hundreds of days. So, we did not change sort_buffer_size. The benefit of changing sort_buffer_size is debatable, anyway. Additionally, sort_buffer_size applies to each session, and in a shared hosting environment, what works today could flatline the server tomorrow, as the number of connections grows.

Then we noticed the camouflaged obvious. Db2 is a machine with 12 SAS drives. 2 are in RAID-1, dedicated to the OS, and the remaining 10, in a RAID-10, spend their existence spinning at MySQL’s behest. Guess where /tmp was mounted? That is correct, on the RAID-1!  A RAID-1, where writes cost double. All queries ‘using temporary’ were completely dependent on the write IO capacity of a single hard drive. This was a terrible mistake, and the source of the machine’s lethargy. Our intention when rolling out db2 was to put /tmp on the RAID-10, where there was 5 times the write IO capacity of the RAID-1.

Adjusting the TMPDIR environment variable to go into the RAID-10 was the obvious solution, but our  System Administrators like to find the best solution. They explored some options, and we settled on at least trying tmpfs for MySQL’s temporary tables. Tmpfs uses virtual memory, which, as long as the machine is not swapping, is going to be much faster than disks. Tmpfs was attractive because of its speed, but also because we could set an explicit limit, and all the memory could go where it was needed, unlike sort_buffer_size. If tmpfs did not work well, we would use the RAID-10. 

The results of tmpfs dwarfed expectations. The benefit to db2 was astounding. Almost all write IO on the RAID-1 ceased:

 

There are 10 times less slow queries:

 

If your website ran any queries that required filesorts larger than sort_buffer_size, we are happy to say you are going to notice a massive improvement. Our plan is to still roll out db3 with MySQL 5.5, but are  relieved that no one is suffering database slowness while we work on it.

 

Congratulations to our survey winner!

Congratulations to Dance Central for being our Kindle Fire survey winner! Thanks to everyone who took the time to complete our short survey last week. The information we gathered measures your customer experiences with Modwest and spotlights areas where we need to focus more attention. We are committed to providing world-class service and your candid feedback is critical to our focus on continuous improvement.

A special thanks to all of you that have helped build our business by referring friends and clients to Modwest. Please know that your referral of our service is the finest compliment we can receive. For those of you that don’t know about our affiliate program, take a look at our affiliate page to learn how you can earn credit for telling your friends about Modwest.

Visit us at Out to Lunch Wednesday, June 20th

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Summer is here – join us to celebrate with a little food and music! This Wednesday, June 20, 2012 Modwest is sponsoring the Missoula Downtown Association’s weekly Out to Lunch festival in Caras Park. Enjoy lunch from one of the 20+ food vendors, live music by Gladys Friday and soak up some rays on the longest day of the year! The event kicks off at 11 am and goes until 2 pm. Modwest will have a table set up by the pavilion, so stop by and say hello!

Hope to see you there!

P.S. We’ve partnered with Mountain Line to provide free bus service to and from this event. Find out more about the free bus routes >

A Modwest pro tip: Explore custom fonts for your website

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Not too long ago, web designers were stuck using just a small selection of fonts for personalizing their websites.  To ensure a website would look the same on a variety of browsers, designers had to choose from a handful of web-safe fonts. Until about 2010, if designers wanted to present text in a non-standard font, they had to "pick their poison": Create a static image representing the text, use a somewhat limited technique to replace text with a small flash image, or use custom font capabilities that were only supported by some browsers, leaving the rest to see default fonts. Each of these methods sacrificed some combination of development time, presentation quality, search-engine readability, and browser compatibility. Yet, it was often worth the cost for designers to present headings and navigation menus in a personalized font that reinforced their sites' identities.

Happily, in 2010, the major browsers finally united on a single method to support custom font faces via CSS. This new method, @font-face, allows your site to use any TrueType font you have put on the server and assign it to styles in your website. With this method, all you have to do is convert that font to an EOT format using a tool such as this one: http://www.kirsle.net/wizards/ttf2eot.cgi. Then, upload it to the server and call it via CSS. (Here are some in-depth instructions: http://boldperspective.com/2011/how-to-use-css-font-face/)

The Catch
Now, I wish I could end this blog right here. Unfortunately, there is a significant catch with using custom fonts: licensing. It's likely that most of the fonts on your computer are not licensed for you to legally re-purpose on your website. 

Thankfully, a number of web services have launched to give you a wide selection of free fonts to freely incorporate on your websites. Here are just a few to get you started:

• Google Font API - http://www.google.com/webfonts
  In 2010, Google launched the Google Web Fonts, a wide collection of free-to-use fonts, plus a simple javascript snippet that makes it easy to install. The script handles the font linking and CSS setup, and also performs some nice tasks, like optimizing your font for older browsers that support custom fonts -- even Internet Explorer 6. Modwest.com makes some use of the Google Font API (see http://www.modwest.com/webhosting/allfeatures.phtml)


• Typekit - https://typekit.com/
  Similar to Google Web Fonts, Typekit offers a script to make installation easier, but its selection is much more extensive. In addition, websites serving more that 25,000 page views per month will have to spring for one of Typekit's fee-based plans, starting at $25/year.  Now, if your site is serving that much traffic and image is important, this annual fee is really affordable.


• Other Custom Font Providers:
  Font Spring (http://fontspring.com/), Typefront (http://typefront.com/), Font Squirrel (http://www.fontsquirrel.com/)

Hopefully this kick-starts your journey beyond the old, miniscule collection of standard web fonts. If you have any other recommendations, tips, or services, please comment!