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PoC exploit – Windows PrintNightmare bug

Unfortunately, researchers have discovered a new vulnerability in Windows operating system. The proof-of-concept Windows Print Spooler Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2021-1675) has been published online by mistake. Microsoft classified this vulnerability as remote code execution, hackers might be able to take full control of unpatched computers. This vulnerability affects both personal computers and cloud servers.

Cirrus hosting is in the process of applying patches. We strongly advise our dedicated server, VM and VPS clients who are using Windows Operating System to apply the necessary patches to harden their server. There is NO action required by our website hosting clients.

For more information about the Microsoft security updates please visit the official Microsoft vulnerability page here.

Plesk Onyx Is Reaching Its End of Life

It is time to say goodbye to Plesk Onyx, if you are still using Plesk Onyx to manage your websites time is running out to upgrade your control panel to the latest Plesk version (Plesk Obsidian). As we highlighted this in our previous blog Plesk Onyx will reach its end of life on April 2021.

In order to get the important security updates, access to free SSL, latest application and features, mitigate risk and ensuring compliance with standards like GDPR we strongly advise you to upgrade your control panel to the latest version. If you are using Plesk Onyx or an earlier version you should contact our support team as soon as possible to discuss different upgrade/migration options. You can read more about Plesk’s end of life here.

Plesk PanelEnd of Life
Plesk ObsidianN/A
Plesk OnyxApril 2021
Plesk 12January 2019
Plesk 11December 2016

This is only applicable to our VPS / VM / dedicated server clients. To check the Plesk version installed on your VPS / VM / dedicated server you should log in to your Plesk and take a look at the system overview page; here you will find the OS and Plesk version information. We strongly recommend that you take the time and check your OS and Control panel version and again if you need any assistance please do not hesitate to contact our support team.

cPanel and Plesk Price Hike

In October 2020 cPanel and Plesk announced new changes to the pricing structure and these changes will become effective on January 1st 2021.

cPanel has increased the monthly licensing fee across the board, for detail information please visit here. The price breakdown is as follow:

PlanCurrent Monthly FeeNew Monthly Fee – starting Jan 1, 2021
cPanel Admin (up to 5 accounts)US$20US$22
cPanel Pro (up to 30 accounts)US$30US$32.25
cPanel Premier (up to 100 accounts) US$45US$48.50

Plesk has also increased its license prices on its core products, for detail information please visit here. The price breakdown is as follow:

PlanCurrent Monthly FeeNew Monthly Fee – starting Jan 1, 2021
Plesk Web Admin (up to 10 domains)US$10US$11
Plesk Web Pro (up to 30 domains)US$15US$16.50
Plesk Web Host Edition (unlimited domains)US$25US$27.50

We are reviewing the price increases and we will adjust the pricing/renewals for clients who are using Plesk, cPanel, and website hosting subscriptions accordingly.

About Cirrus Tech Ltd: Cirrus Tech Ltd. has been actively promoting its services to the hosting industry since 1999. The company has focused on 24/7 tech support, value-added services, and a cooperative attitude towards all its clients. Cirrus Hosting is now one of the largest Web / cloud Hosting companies in Canada.

Windows Web Hosting – Plesk Obsidian on Windows Server 2019

Here at Cirrus Hosting, we are pleased to offer our latest Windows Web Hosting solution. Our new plan is running on the latest Windows Server version and the latest control panel (Plesk Obsidian). If you are looking for the most stable and up-to-date .net, MS SQL, PHP and MariaDB hosting then we got you covered.

Our new Windows web hosting plan supports the latest applications you need to lunch your website, like:  

ASP.NET 4.7.2

ASP.NET Core

.NET Core 3.1

MSSQL 2019

PHP 7.4

MariaDB 10.3

The all-new and improved Plesk Obsidian not only offers the new look and feel but also offers enchased security and monitoring tools and optimized web stacks and improved user. Some other cool features of Plesk obsidian are:

– Composer v2: Composer is a dependency management tool in PHP. It is not only installed and updates the dependencies but also reviews and highlights the potential challenges with updating the particular PHP version.

– Advanced Monitoring: new Grafana charts give you visibility and insight into your server health. You also can configure email notification to be sent to the admin or push notification to Plesk mobile app.

– Mango DB Support: Wait no more with Plesk Obsidian you can install and manage Mongo DB databases and users.

At Cirrus Hosting we are always trying to improve our services and provide the most reliable hosting solution to our clients. When you subscribe to our Windows web hosting solution you can take advantages of the following features as well:

Managing Spam Filter: Cirrus hosting is one of the first Canadian web hosting providers who have integrated the SpamExperts on our web Hosting plans, FREE of charge. Using advanced spam-pattern detection and machine learning algorithms, SpamExperts state of the art incoming email filtering separates valid email from dangerous & unsolicited email before it even reaches your mailbox. You can access to SpamExpert management console through your control Panel to whitelist or release emails from quarantine.

Installing SSL certificate: In a nutshell, SSL certificate enables secure communication over the internet by encrypting the data such as your password or credit card information which is being transmitted between your computers and the server. You can either install the Free SSL certificate issued by Let’s Encrypt – click here for instruction on how to enable in on your hosting plan –you also have the option to order a commercial SSL certificate. You can read more about the SSL certificate here.

Lunching website / e-commerce: if you are new to website design and hosting not to worry, Sitebuilder provides you with all the tools you need to create your website it is easy and intuitive. For information about how to use the site builder please visit here. If you have already designed your website you can simply transfer your website content to the server via FTP.  

Installing applications: though Application vaults you have access to most popular apps like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc…. the cool features of application vault is that you can add, update, and remove apps by a push of a button.

Reviewing website stat: once your site is up and running you would be able to evaluate your site efficiency by reviewing the visit statistics, you can find your website statistics in your control panel

Are you looking to host your website on Windows Server 2019? What are you waiting for; subscribe to our windows web hosting plan and take advantage of the enhanced security, all new apps, and many other cool features.

Call us at 1.877.624.7787 (1.905.881.3485 if you’re in the Toronto area) or email us at sales@cirrushosting.com for more information about these features in this list or if you have any questions in getting your new server. We will be happy to assist you.

  •  Click HERE to find out more about our Windows web hosting plans.

Cirrus Hosting Is Supporting Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Cirrus Hosting is pleased to announce that we are now supporting Ubuntu 20.04 LTS; a new operating system is now added to our dedicated server plans as well as the latest Cloud VM and Virtual Private Server (VPS) plans.

As you might have already known every Long Term Support (LTS) release has a 5 years support lifecycle and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will reach its end of life on April 2025. In this release the big emphasis is on GUI and desktop themes, Ubuntu 20.04 comes with GNOME 3.36 and cool features like fractional scaling. Some of the other changes include kernel 5.4, native EXFAT, and better ZFS support/integration.

About Cirrus Tech Ltd: Cirrus Tech Ltd. has been actively promoting its services to the hosting industry since 1999. The company has focused on 24/7 tech support, value-added services, and a cooperative attitude towards all its clients. Cirrus Hosting is now one of the largest Web / cloud Hosting companies in Canada. To explore your options on ne operating systems please visit our Cloud / VPS hosting page.

Latest Update On Apple and Google’s Effort to Shorten The SSL Certificate Lifetime

Once again Apple and Google are reshaping the global Certificate Authority (CA) market. In 2018 we published a blog post about Google’s effort to enhance connection security; Google was encouraging – some might say forcing- website owners to secure their blogs and websites by installing SSL certificate. In October 2017 Google Chrome started showing “Not Secure” warning when visitors enter data on an HTTP page or if visiting HTTP page in private mode. In July 2018 Google launched the next phase, by shows “Not Secure” warning when visiting all HTTP sites through chrome. In this post, we will cover the basics and your options.

This time however they are setting a limit on maximum allowed lifetime for SSLs. On 3rd of March 2020, Apple announced “TLS server certificates issued on or after September 1, 2020 00:00 GMT/UTC must not have a validity period greater than 398 days.” And Google chrome followed suit, read more here. After 1st September if your SSL certificate Validity is more than 398-day you will receive the following error “ ERR_CERT_VALIDITY_TOO_LONG and will be treated as misissued.”

If you are using Let’s Encrypt you do NOT need to take any action. Certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt are valid for 90 days. However If you are using commercial SSL certificates, after 1st September 2020 you can only issue/renew SSL certificates for 1 year ONLY.

Here at Cirrus Hosting we are offering Let’s Encrypt to our customers, our website and WordPress hosting clients are now able to activate Lets Encrypt through their control panel. We also offer Commercial Certificate to our customers. For detail information about the Type of SSL certificates we offer please click here.

About Cirrus Tech Ltd

Cirrus Tech Ltd. has been actively promoting its services to the hosting industry since 1999. The company has focused on 24/7 tech support, value-added services and a cooperative attitude towards all its clients. Cirrus is now one of Canada’s largest Web/Cloud Hosting companies.

cPanel Automatic Conversion from EasyApache 3 to EasyApache 4

As you know cPanel deprecated EasyApache 3 on 31st December 2018. A few days ago cPanel announced a date for EasyApache 3 to EasyApache 4 Auto conversion; the automatic conversion will take place in early 2020 and it might break your site.

  • Optmods will not be migrated automatically and you have to fix it manually.
  • Upgrade will fail if you don’t have enough free disk space
  • Websites using older PHP version 5.6 and lower will break

To avoid any issues or possible downtime If you have cPanel installed on your VPS/VM or dedicated server it is highly recommended that you initiate the migration from EasyApache 3 to EasyApache 4 yourselves as soon as possible. For step by step instruction please refer to cPanel migration process here. Please make sure you meet all the pre-requisites.

If you currently subscribe to our Management Plan III or IV, no action is required as your server is already up to date. If you need help with managing your server you can always subscribe to one of our server management plans

Cirrus Hosting Is Now Deploying CentOS 8

Cirrus Hosting is happy to announce that we are now offering the latest version of CentOS on our Dedicated Server plans and we are in the process of offering it to our cloud VM/VPS clients. CentOS 8 comes with lots of new features and upgrades. Let’s take a look at some of them:

  • Introduction of new package manager it’s based on DNF technology. This offers enhanced dependency calculations and optimizes memory utilization.
  •  Encrypted Root File System
  • Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO)
  • nftables is a default filtering framework
  • Python 3.6 is the default version and CentOS 8 still supports Python 2

Cirrus Tech Ltd. – Web Hosting and Hosted Infrastructure Solutions for Small and Large Business

Cirrus Tech Ltd., based in Toronto, Ontario, is a private, family-owned corporation founded in 1999. It is now one of Canada’s largest web hosting companies and a leading provider of comprehensive Internet services. Cirrus Tech provides locally based sales and engineering support for its Internet services in Canada and hosts its entire infrastructure in its local data centers.

Cirrus Hosting explains how since its foundation, previously known as Cirrus Tech. has vigorously managed to offer valuable web hosting and hosted Internet infrastructure solutions and services to small and large businesses, locally as well as internationally.”

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