Notice the star ratings against your competition’s PPC Ads? If you worry they attract customers then you should. They do. But it’s easy to get into the feedback game and gain your own set of stars.

UPS has been down now since around 3:30 PM EST. Apparently it has been hit by Turkish hackers. It is one of multiple sites that apparently have been hit.

New York is under threat of a hurricane on Sunday 28 August 2011. In the event the city loses power, ozEworks will be closed until power is restored. Anyone with urgent hosting issues should contact HostDime directly.

A common piece of code called timthumb.php has a security issue. If your site uses it you need to upgrade it.

ozEworks Server 2 is currently experiencing issues and all sites on that server will be effectively “down” while the matter is being resolved.  We will update this post with more information when we have it.

WordPress released V3.2 and with it the requirement to run MySQL V5. If you are on hosting that does not run MySQL V5 then you cannot upgrade. ozEworks will be upgrading its servers to MySQLV5 in last quarter 2011.

We’ve never liked GoDaddy hosting. Their servers are poorly configured for the needs of osCommerce. But we have used them in the past for domain registration. Not any more. After reading about Bob Parsons cowardly slaughter of an elephant, we’re moving to register.com.

HostDime servers have been down since around 11:00 AM due to unexpected issues relating to an UPS upgrade. Servers are coming up now and we need to keep being patient while the matter is resolved.

When is a change more than a change? USPS notified everyone they were updating their API on 2 January 2011 but claimed backwards compatibility. Well that did not happen.

The USPS API server is currently not responding. Sites using USPS will find checkout_shipping.php is loading slowly and will eventually report a “Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to production.shippingapis.com:80 (Connection timed out)” error. Stay tuned …

On September 22, we will be upgrading our servers to a new kernel which will help mitigate the exploit for CVE-2010-3081(http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=4518).
This is scheduled to be done beginning Wednesday 22, 2010 at 10 PM EDT through Thursday 23, 2010 at 4 AM EDT.
While the reboot will take place during a six hour period, this does not mean that your server will be offline for this length of time. A typical reboot should take no longer than 15 – 20 minutes. We do not foresee any further downtime outside of this window. If you do notice any issues after the reboot,  please log a Support Ticket.
Note: Emails will be queued in a mail proxy and will be received once your server comes back online. No e-mails will be lost during this maintenance.

ozEworks has been trialling its new support desk which uses qdPM in the last few months. We’ve now upgraded to the qdPM Extended version and will be implementing it for all support.

Blogging may make you a writer. It does not make you a journalist. Read how a New Jersey court rules that blogger is not coverted in the same way a journalist is …

ozEcommerce was selected as the Cart of the Week by PracticalEcommerce. In their article you can read about ozEcommerce from ozEworks perspective as well as from one of our major customers SouthernImperial.com.

MasterCard and Discover are modifying their rules concerning the processing of debit, prepaid and gift cards. Authorize.net has some information about how it can effect you.

Have you checked your reputation mywot.com? If not then have a look at this FireFox plugin that could be driving customers away.

A new email scam is going around telling people their Authorize.net account has expired and you need to log in to renew. Don’t.

WordPress has released 2.9 and announced 3.0. Is what was a simple CMS being a Microsoft-like behemoth? Could be.