One of the biggest support issues that we see on a daily basis is clients being blocked by our server firewalls.
We are currently working on a solution that will let existing clients check their firewall status and unblock themselves but until this solution has been tested and brought on-line we thought we would let you know a bit about our firewall system and how to avoid being blocked.
What is a firewall? A firewall is designed to block connections to a machine connected to a network - in the case of our servers the firewall blocks what it deems dangerous or suspicious traffic to the server.
What triggers a block? We have rules set up that can trigger a block, we are not going to go into to many details here but generally any behaviour that can be seen as malicious would trigger a block. The most common block reason is a poorly configured email client... If you enter your email account password incorrectly into Outlook (or whatever email client you are using) then your PC / Laptop will try and log into the server with the wrong details. If this keeps happening then the firewall will see this as an attempt to bypass password security on the email system (by guessing the password) and block you.
What happens when I am blocked? Some of our firewall 'triggers' carry a temporary ban - the email issue above carries a 30 minute temporary ban, this means that you will be locked out of the server for 30 minutes.
Some more serious 'triggers' (such as brute force attempts, SSH access attempts etc) carry a permanent ban.
Symptoms of a firewall block are very similar to when the hosting goes down - basically nothing works.
How can I get myself unblocked?
Just raise a support ticket in our client billing and support system
www.twdbilling.co.uk and we will investigate the issue, we will need your PC's IP address (we can tell you how to get this info) and then check the firewall IP ban list.
If you are on the list we can remove you and also tell you WHY you were blocked, and work with you to stop it happening again...
Although being blocked from your own hosting account is annoying we feel that we are running the very best firewall security - because we host mainly business websites we need to provide you call with a secure hosting environment.
