Incident Description:

Many of you have requested we implement FTPs as a method to transfer files because you were not satisfied with the way regular FTP transmits usernames and passwords in clear-text.

Before I go forward, I have to explain why this supposedly easy-to-accomplish task takes us so much time: the hosting platform we’re using (H-Sphere) is built as a do-it-all entity with it’s own version of ftp, Apache, IIS, mail-daemon, etc. You cannot just upgrade or modify something without risking to break something else in the process. Of course, this will change soon as we are building our own control panel, which I hope you will love, and which is going to be so much easier to manage from both user side and sysadmin side.

Back to the issue, we have been working on implementing FTPs for some time now, and now we have a “beta” version that we can introduce to you. We activated FTPs on all cp6 servers (web300 to web349). Please keep in mind that this is a testing version and if you find any issues with it we would appreciate your feedback. If everything goes smooth on our testing batch of servers, we will activate FTPs on all servers on CP7 and CP8 by the end of the month. Of course, I didn’t forget about CP1, CP2, CP3, CP4 and CP5. However, they are running an older version of hsphere, and it will take us longer to upgrade. My educated guess says “September 1st”.

I am always waiting for your comments.

/tibi