What is 2-Step Verification?
2-Step Verification is a security process in which you provide two means of identification. With 2-Step Verification enabled, you add an extra layer of security to your account. You will be required to sign in with your password and a code sent to your phone.

How will 2-Step Verification affect the way I login?
After you enable 2-Step Verification, you will be required to provide a code sent to your phone along with your username and password when logging into your Control Panel or Supersite.

How will 2-Step Verification affect my profile?
We will verify any changes to your email or phone number by sending a verification code to the previous email / phone number. You will be required to submit this code to complete the change to the email / phone number.

What happens if I lose my phone or can’t access my codes?
You can contact our support team at http://www.aalphanet.com/helpdesk/ to regain access to your account.

How can I offer 2 step verification to my Customers and Sub-Resellers?
2-Step Verification will be available to your Customers and Sub-Resellers by default.

How do I access my Customer’s / Sub-Reseller’s account if they have enable 2-Step Verification?
You can still login to your Customer’s / Sub-Reseller’s using the Login to Panel button. Learn how.

What if my Customer/Sub-Reseller loses their phone or can’t access their codes?
You can disable the 2-Step Verification for your Customer/Sub-Reseller, which will allow them to access their account with the password. Learn how.

Q. What is happening on 15th May 2015 ?
This is the day when all our personal mail packages (now migrated to business email) will reach its end of life. On 15th May 2015, the orders which have not been renewed after 15th April 2015, will expire and be in suspended state for 30 days.

Q. What will happen after the expiry ?
Once the order has expired, we will disable its outgoing mail functionality completely for a period of 30 days. However, POP and IMAP will continue to work, so you will be able to download the existing mails without any issues.
NOTE: No new emails will be received post the suspension.

Q. Why is my outgoing and incoming mail service disabled ?
We have done this, so that clients who are unaware of the change will take notice.

Q. How do we resume the mail services ?
You need to renew the hosting package as per the new billing cycle. Once the package is renewed the outgoing and incoming mail services will be restored instantly.

Q. What if I don’t want to renew ?
If you do not wish to renew the hosting package, you need to download the mails on your local machine. Once you have the mails locally, you don’t need to do anything further. The expired package will automatically get deleted after 30 days

Q. How do I delete unwanted email accounts ?
NOTE: You will not be able to do this after 15th May 2015, since the account will be in suspended state.
You need to renew the email service and then follow the below steps:
First, you need to delete the unwanted email accounts from the email dashboard.
After you have deleted the email accounts from the dashboard, to delete the email accounts permanently and reduce the used email accounts number, you need to follow the steps mentioned below :
– Log into your control panel
– Click on Products–>List all orders–>Click on the domain name.
– Scroll down to business emails –> Click on Delete Email Account(s)
Doing this you will be able to delete the email accounts permanently.

Once you have deleted the unwanted email accounts, please contact our Sales team for pro-rata refunds.

Q. How to switch to Free email service ?
There is no direct option of switching from business email to free email service. You will need to do the following:
First, take a complete back up of all the email accounts before deleting the email ids.
You can configure the same on any email clients using the pop settings and download all the emails to your local computer.
Once the contents are downloaded you will have to refer to the steps mentioned below :
– Log into the reseller control panel
– Click on Products–>List all orders–>Click on the domain name.
– Scroll down to business emails –> Click on Delete Order
One this is done you will have to click on Manage Emails under Emails option and create your free email accounts.

Starting 6th of August, 2014, Our Registrar will be charging an annual fee of INR 249 for Privacy Protection on every domain name.

For domain names that are already registered and use Privacy Protect service, no charge shall be levied till the domain name expires, or until the next renewal, whichever is earlier. At the time of renewal of the domain name, you will have the flexibility of not renewing Privacy Protect along with the domain name.

For domains names that are already registered and do not use Privacy Protect service, upon activation of this service, charges shall be applied on a pro-rata basis till the domain expires.

Why Privacy Protection?

– When buying a domain name you have to provide accurate contact information or else your domain registration could be terminated as it would be in violation of the registration agreement.
– This information has to be made publicly available to everyone via the public WHOIS database as required by ICANN, the international governing body for domain names.
– Everyday, this valuable source of accurate contact information is targeted and harvested by spammers and telemarketers resulting in unwanted and unsolicited contact. Also since your contact information is public, you are at risk for identity theft and fraud and of being contacted by harassers and stalkers.
– Privacy Protection ensures that your private information is not published by replacing all your publicly visible contact details with alternate contact information.

How does it work?

– When you enable Privacy Protection on a domain name, we replace all your publicly visible contact details with alternate contact information so that when a WHOIS query is performed on the domain, an alternate mailing address, email address and phone number are displayed.

– You retain full ownership of the domain and have complete control of it.
– Anyone that tries to contact you using the alternate email address or phone number provided in the public WHOIS database will be directed to an online contact form which will in turn email the message to you. All mails sent to the alternate mailing address will be discarded.
– Privacy Protection can be disabled/enabled at any time

Dear Valued Customer,

We’re writing to inform you of an important change in your server’s default configuration that may affect your websites, including those of any of your resold accounts. We will be updating the default version of PHP on LINUXWALA servers

We have attempted to automatically check the compatibility of your accounts. Please bear in mind that you may circumvent any of these results by manually configuring your desired PHP version utilizing the instructions in this email’s FAQ section

FAQ:

1) Why are you making this change?

The default version of PHP that our servers are currently utilizing (PHP 5.2) has been deprecated for some time. As such, we would like to see your sites enjoying the security and performance benefits of the newer versions of PHP which we already have available on your server.

2) How can I make sure my sites will work?

While we are taking every possible step to try and automatically assign the right version to all of your scripts, we do want to ask you to please login into your cPanel and test all of your sites using PHP 5.4 yourself.

The default behavior of your account is for PHP settings to be inherited by sub-directories. That means that you can quickly test all of your site’s compatibility with PHP 5.4, by setting the PHP handler of your home directory (public_html) to PHP 5.4. Then simply test your websites by opening them in your browser. We have added an easy to use plugin to configure your PHP version to your cPanel, follow these steps to use it:

* Login to your cPanel

* From the home page locate the “Advanced” box and click on “PHP Configuration.”

* Select “PHP 5.4” from the drop-down menu and leave the default directory, click “Update” to submit the changes.

* You should see a confirmation message that reads: The “.php” file extension will be processed by PHP 54 for this account.

* You may now visit your websites and check for any issues or visible errors. If your sites function normally it means your sites are compatible with PHP 5.4 and you will not need to perform any other steps from this point.

* Alternatively, If you do notice issues with your sites while using PHP 5.4, you can revert to PHP 5.2 by follow the above provided steps and choosing PHP 52 from the menu. Our upgrade process is set to honor the handler settings you choose.

Please Note: Selecting “No Custom Handler (Sys Default)” means you’re electing to utilize whichever version of PHP the server is set to use. While PHP 5.2 is currently the system default version, once the upgrade is complete, the default version will be PHP 5.4. Thusly, if your applications require PHP 5.2, you will want to make sure to specifically select the “PHP 5.2” option.

3) Will my site’s experience any down time?

The switch between PHP versions is a simple text change in your .htaccess file. There is no maintenance which must be performed on the server itself. However, applications that are not compatible with PHP 5.4 will fail to load properly if they have not had the correct version of PHP set. While we will make every effort to automatically perform compatibility checks for each account and set the appropriate handler, it is imperative for you to double-check compatibility.

4) Who can help me update my site/script to use a newer version of PHP?

While we can assist you with changing the version of PHP your script utilizes, we will not be able to recode your site to be compatible with newer versions of PHP. You should contact the script’s author/developer to inquire as to whether or not they can or plan to re-design their code to utilize latest versions of PHP.

Here is a broad time line and summary for this outage:

At around 8:30 GMT on April 24thwe detected that one of the storage units which serves part of our email infrastructure became non-operational causing email services for a subset of our customers to not function.
We immediately started a process of restoring access to this storage unit and our engineers worked dedicatedly over the next few hours to restore functionality to affected email accounts.
As of 17:00 GMT on April 24th access to all email accounts affected by this issue was restored. All affected accounts were at that time able send and receive email via webmail and through external clients.
Emails that were queued up during this outage were relayed to individual email accounts after email services were restored and should be working without pause at this time.
As of this update, we are still working to restore this storage unit to a fully operational state. This process is taking longer than we originally anticipated. We currently have some of the best storage unit experts in the industry working round the clock to bring the unit back online. We are currently being advised that this process can take several days to complete.

What is the current impact? Is there still something which is still non-functional?

Customers that were affected by this downtime are currently unable to view emails received prior to this outage, specifically, those emails that were stored on the storage unit that suffered the outage and were being accessed either via webmail or IMAP. If you were however downloading your emails to a local email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird using the POP protocol – then there is no further impact to your service due to this issue.

When will you fix this issue? What can I expect in the interim?

Our goal is to restore access to your stored emails as soon as possible and we are sparing no effort towards this. We care deeply about ensuring that you have best-in-class services and we apologize deeply for the inconvenience caused to you by this outage. We are now being advised that bringing up the affected storage unit is, unfortunately, not a matter of hours but of days. In the interim we will endeavor to keep you updated as best we can with any and all meaningful updates because we do care about getting you back up and running fully. As much as it pains us, we cannot offer a concrete ETA at this time but will continue to update you regularly.

What happened? Can you explain in detail what really went wrong?

One of the storage units that stores email for a subset of our customers went offline as a result of set of pre-planned activities we were working on to bring a new storage cluster online. We build our systems with multiple layers of fail-safes and safeguards, and we are still in the process of doing a post-mortem on what we could have done better to prevent this from happening. We promise you a full account of this when we complete this investigation along with a detailed summary of steps we will take to prevent a similar event in the future as soon as we complete this analysis.

What can I do if you have additional questions?

While we realize you will still have questions, we hope this post adds to your understanding of this outage. We promise to be here to work with you and provide transparent & meaningful updates as soon as we are able. This post will be the primary medium of communication with you and as such we are directing our contact center agents to refer you to here so we can have clear and consistent communication with you. However, we will continue to be available on our regular support channels in case you require any additional assistance during this time.

Thank you for continued patience and support.