We’ve made some improvements to our firewall…

In order to help keep your websites and email secure we operate firewalls on all of our servers. You’ve probably heard of a firewall as you almost certainly have one on your computer – the job of the firewall is to police the connections made to and from your computer while it’s on the Internet, ensuring only good connections can get through.

Our firewall works in the same way, except we also keep track of login attempts and failures. If we see too many from one person, the firewall kicks in and automatically blocks any further attempts.

Sometimes these blocks can affect you if you’ve simply forgotten your password, you try to guess it one too many times, and then find yourself blocked. Once you’re blocked the server simply won’t talk to you and, for all intents and purposes, it looks like it’s down.

As of Monday we’ve been running our firewall in a slightly different way. If you become blocked from the server and try to visit your website you’ll now see a message letting you know that you have been blocked and what you can do about it. The message reads:

Your connection to this server has been blocked by its firewall

It is likely that you have recently triggered one of the following:
* Failed email (POP/SMTP/IMAP) login attempts
* Failed control panel login attempts
* Failed webmail login attempts
* Failed website login attempts

You will need to contact the server owner to remove the block.

When reporting this block, please provide:
* Your blocked IP address: [...]
* The server name: [...]

The message includes your IP address as well as the server name, so if you do become blocked the only thing you need to do is contact Technical Support with those details and we’ll get the block removed. We’ll also advise why the block was put in place to try to avoid further blocks in the future.

If you’re a reseller, note that the block message contains no branding and doesn’t say who we are; if one of your clients becomes blocked they will contact you rather than us