Not such a great move to Absolute Hosting

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Neville

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My wife has a small business for which I develop and maintain her website. I am mostly a .Net developer so need Windows hosting. After Cybersmart recently shutdown their Windows hosting I moved the domain and hosting to Absolute Hosting. They seemed to come highly recommended and one of the few Windows server hosts in SA.

Ever since my wife's business partner, Mandy, has been unable to access her email from home. Her laptop and mobile phone have been setup correctly and she can access mail at the office using their Vodacom(or Telkom) connection and also on her phone using mobile data. My wife has no issues and accesses mail anywhere - at home we have Octotel fibre with Cool Ideas.

Mandy has Mweb fibre at home and whenever she tries to access her mail, it tells her to re-authenticate, as if she entered the wrong details. Absolute Hosting are telling her that her IP gets blocked by their Smarter Mail security software to prevent hacking and will block an IP after 8 attempts to login with incorrect details.
Mweb are saying there is no block from their side.
She never had issues when the domain was hosted with Cybersmart.

It is not like Mandy to sit and change mail configs in the car on the way home every day. So can anyone speculate as to what could be going on here? To me it seems like some sort of network issue between Mweb and Absolute Hosting?

Considering moving the ladies' domain AGAIN but the problem is finding an ISP that is up to date enough to offer Windows hosting with ASP.Net Core.
 
This sounds more like a case of moving away from Mweb than it does in regards to Absolute Hosting tbh.

@Jade @ Absolute Hosting could you perhaps shed light on this issue?

As rusty said, some alternatives would be Azure and AWS.

Currently I'm using some stuff on Datakeepers' Linux servers, working well and I can choose host location, they seem to have windows servers 2016/2019, so should have .Net Core support: https://virtualservers.co.za/windows-vps/
 
As Rusty mentioned, just slap it into Azure if MS hosting is a requirement.
Im sure most hosting companies are moving away from Windows hosting because its a pain to maintain compared to Linux servers.
 
Hi Neville

Thanks for taking the time to explain this and I believe that there is an open ticket about this issue and that we're waiting on further information from Mandy - the last response was this morning?

With regards to not having or experiencing these issues with Cybersmart, I cant be 100% sure but I suspect that the reason this never occurred is that either the mail passwords were correct and the user was authenticating correctly or they do not have bruteforce detection built into their mail servers.

Please ask Mandy to update the existing ticket so that we can get to the bottom of this and advise further, that is why were are here.
 
Jade @ Absolute Hosting said:
Hi Neville

Thanks for taking the time to explain this and I believe that there is an open ticket about this issue and that we're waiting on further information from Mandy - the last response was this morning?

With regards to not having or experiencing these issues with Cybersmart, I cant be 100% sure but I suspect that the reason this never occurred is that either the mail passwords were correct and the user was authenticating correctly or they do not have bruteforce detection built into their mail servers.

Please ask Mandy to update the existing ticket so that we can get to the bottom of this and advise further, that is why were are here.
Click to expand...
No Jade, this is pointless and why I'm asking help here. The support ticket is just and endless ping-pong game of what-is-your-IP-lets-unblock-it-and-try-again. That is not working for us. And to repeat myself, suggesting that her email password is incorrect when at home means that she deliberately changes the configs on her mail client every day. No, come on. She/we do not have time for games likes this.
 
Rocket-Boy said:
As Rusty mentioned, just slap it into Azure if MS hosting is a requirement.
Im sure most hosting companies are moving away from Windows hosting because its a pain to maintain compared to Linux servers.
Click to expand...
Windows hosting comes with a nice premium, and will definitely not go away any time soon while people need to keep .net framework, mail servers, etc. running.

Neville said:
No Jade, this is pointless and why I'm asking help here. The support ticket is just and endless ping-pong game of what-is-your-IP-lets-unblock-it-and-try-again. That is not working for us. And to repeat myself, suggesting that her email password is incorrect when at home means that she deliberately changes the configs on her mail client every day. No, come on. She/we do not have time for games likes this.
Click to expand...

Dumb question, is there a second machine at the home address that also has the mail service set up/is set to old credentials?
 
rustypup said:
Azure
AWS

Both have local presence, provide multiple toolsets and redundancy options.
Click to expand...
Azure was not cheap the last time I checked, definitely not in small business budget but I'll check again.
Didn't know AWS had local presence, worth looking into.
 
Johnatan56 said:
This sounds more like a case of moving away from Mweb than it does in regards to Absolute Hosting tbh.

@Jade @ Absolute Hosting could you perhaps shed light on this issue?

As rusty said, some alternatives would be Azure and AWS.

Currently I'm using some stuff on Datakeepers' Linux servers, working well and I can choose host location, they seem to have windows servers 2016/2019, so should have .Net Core support: https://virtualservers.co.za/windows-vps/
Click to expand...
Never been a fan of the over priced Mweb either but they're not keen changing and I don't see why they should need to.
Will check out the virtualservers option, thanks.
 
Neville said:
No Jade, this is pointless and why I'm asking help here. The support ticket is just and endless ping-pong game of what-is-your-IP-lets-unblock-it-and-try-again. That is not working for us. And to repeat myself, suggesting that her email password is incorrect when at home means that she deliberately changes the configs on her mail client every day. No, come on. She/we do not have time for games likes this.
Click to expand...
Troubleshooting issues requires a bit of ping pong and at the moment we're waiting on feedback from Mandy.
This morning I asked her to confirm details for me and since then we have not been provided with the info that was asked.

Her IP was unblocked and there have been no connections to the mail server from that IP since then.
 
Last edited:
Hi Neville,

Do you have access to the ticket that Mandy has open as I'd like to post an update to it which shows 19 authentication failures from two IP addresses which resulted in one of the IP's being blocked for brute force, and posting here would require a bit of redacting.
 
Jade @ Absolute Hosting said:
Hi Neville,

Do you have access to the ticket that Mandy has open as I'd like to post an update to it which shows 19 authentication failures from two IP addresses which resulted in one of the IP's being blocked for brute force, and posting here would require a bit of redacting.
Click to expand...
Yes, I do.
 
Neville said:
Azure was not cheap the last time I checked
Click to expand...
Drop the server management and transition to Web App - supports most stacks, patching/etc not your issue. Provides staging environments. Storage is cheap and security is almost bulletproof.... aside from your code/content of course.
 
Change the email password server side and update elsewhere.

Use a strong password without special characters.

Test and let know.
I've seen this issue before and it was really this simple to resolve.
 
|tera| said:
Change the email password server side and update elsewhere.

Use a strong password without special characters.

Test and let know.
I've seen this issue before and it was really this simple to resolve.
Click to expand...
One of the devices is randomly sending an incorrect password and this causing the source ip to get blocked.

I've suggested that the account be removed from the device and setup again in the event that there is some odd caching in place. I've seen Mac do this with SMTP credentials.
 
Jade @ Absolute Hosting said:
One of the devices is randomly sending an incorrect password and this causing the source ip to get blocked.

I've suggested that the account be removed from the device and setup again in the event that there is some odd caching in place. I've seen Mac do this with SMTP credentials.
Click to expand...
Cool. I've seen this issue on Outlook and hosted mail services before.
I narrowed it down to special characters that caused it. Outlook was the culprit, since webmail worked fine.
 
|tera| said:
Cool. I've seen this issue on Outlook and hosted mail services before.
I narrowed it down to special characters that caused it. Outlook was the culprit, since webmail worked fine.
Click to expand...
Thanks for that, this may help the OP in identifying the issue.
 
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