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From now on it it's no longer possible to make an unencrypted connection with our servers (POP, IMAP and FTP). As mentioned in our newsletter about the GDPR we had to close the unencrypted connections with our mail-server and ftp-server for security reasons.

This means that email programs with incorrect settings are no longer able to fetch email from our server. This is for both IMAP and POP3 connections. Also email programs on smart phones and tables need to have an secured connection with our servers from now on.

FTP programs who still use an unencrypted connection for FTP, can't reach the...

From today, PHP 7.2 is available in our Service Centre. Log in with your admin account in the Service Centre and go to Hosting, Management and adjust the PHP version to PHP 7.2 for your entire hosting package.

On our helpdesk pages you will find a manual on how to change this setting.

After switching the PHP version, we recommend to check for any problems immediately. There is a small chance to experience problems due to deprecated functions on your site(s). We also advise to immediately update your CMS (Content Management System, for example WordPress or Joomla) and all plug-ins you may have...

On May 25th 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect.

This European regulation is designed to better protect citizens from data breaches and privacy violations. The new law is amongst other things stipulating how companies must handle their customers' data.

Many of our customers chose Greenhost exactly because privacy has always been one of our core values. As a result there are not many significant changes we have to make. However, we do want to take the opportunity to scrutinise some of our designs and see in which ways we can still do better in safeguarding your privacy.

In this spring newsletter an update on the things we've been working on the last few months: an open letter against the new Dutch security law, Greenhost servers are now running on energy generated by Dutch windmills, our new VPS platform is life and DNS-over-TLS is now available.

The Greenhost team

Referendum new security law

Tomorrow is the day! Elections will be held in the Netherlands to elect local representations. Next to this, a referendum is organised with regards to a new law, governing the rights and responsibilities of intelligence services with regards to hacking and digital tapping...

The Time is Now Foundation is a lobby group for sustainability. The foundation states that it is about time we start to invest time and money in introducing sustainability to Dutch high school kids. With teaching sustainability on high schools the foundation aims to create an ethical change.

To achieve this, the foundation organises round-table events quarterly. During these events a think tank is created to identify barriers and solutions for integrating sustainability in the secondary education.

Greenhost thinks it is important that more people are properly educated about sustainability...

Last week, a small Greenhost-delegation visited the Internet Freedom Festival in order to meet other people active in the field of Privacy and Internet Freedom, and get new ideas to improve upon our services. Inspired by a great session by Daniel Khan Gillmor we immediately set up a new DNS-over-TLS server, allowing advanced users to use the internet more privately.

The Domain Name System (DNS) underpins most of our use of the Internet, by providing a way to look up IP addresses from domain names. By design, it provides very little privacy. While more and more sites use encryption once the...

Bepakt (Dutch for 'packed') is an informational site about zero-waste shops in Europe. Zero-waste means reducing waste dumping to zero, by designing and managing product chains in smart ways. On bepakt.com you can find hundreds of addresses of shops that sell packaging-free products. In addition, it is a starting point for more information about zero waste, for example on starting a packaging-free shop.

Buying packaging-free stuff is not yet mainstream. Bepakt helps you to see where you can find packaging-free shops. You can reduce your material footprint by buying less packaged products and...

Mainly by using WordPress sites and newsletter sign up forms a huge amount of unwanted email is being sent. In most cases the owners of these sites don't know they are contributing to this problem.

In the rest of this blog post we will look at the reason for this abuse, how you can see if you are contributing to this problem too and how you can prevent it.

Unwanted email sent from hosting packages

Recently we've been getting more complaints (via Feedback loops) about unwanted emails being sent from the web hosting packages of our customers. We always look into these complaints seriously.

Since Greenhost was founded we have made as many "green" choices as possible. We started by working together with EvoSwitch, continued by buying second hand furniture and developed a shared hosting environment that is extra energy efficient. But at Greenhost we do not only want to be greener than the other companies. We want to be as sustainable a company as we can be!

That is why we have created a permanent team of employees that will dedicate themselves to keep the "Green" in "Greenhost. We have identified the following as important next steps:

• Yearly reporting of our energy usage

What follows is a relatively detailed and technical description of the reasons for the outage. Because we understand not everyone wants or understands this much detail we added a simpler and shorter summary of the problem:

There was a problem with the devices (switches) that regulate the (redundant) internet (network) connections to our data centre. In trying to solve this isolated problem unfortunately a feedback loop occurred that clogged the multiple connections.

We have multiple connections going to the data centre to prevent losing access to our machines, however this issue managed to...