Scheduled maintenance for software updates (completed)

Due to software updates on our servers, most Web hosting customers will experience about ten minutes of scheduled maintenance downtime between 11 PM and 1 AM Pacific time starting on one of the following nights, depending on which server your site is on:

• Friday, August 22 (servers beginning with letter “l-z”)
• Saturday, August 23 (servers beginning with letter “a-k”)

(The servers named “bender” and “lrrr” have already been upgraded, and those customers are not affected.)

If you’re interested in the details: Our servers use the Debian Linux operating system, which is periodically updated with new versions (just like Windows or Mac OS X). Last year, Debian was updated to version 4.0 (called “etch”), and since then, we’ve been running a “mixed” system on our older servers. Many programs (such as MySQL, PHP 5, and any program that had a security vulnerability) have long since been upgraded to the newer “etch” versions, but some other programs still need to be updated.

What we’re now doing is finalizing the upgrade on all servers that aren’t already fully using “etch”. This will simplify our management of security updates and give customers access to newer versions of some programs.

Unfortunately, a side-effect of the upgrade is about 10 total minutes of downtime, divided into a four-minute outage while the server is restarted, and a couple of separate two-minute outages while other programs are updated. We always strive to avoid any downtime, but in this case, it’s unavoidable.

Incoming mail may be delayed for a few minutes during the maintenance, but as always, no mail will be lost: it will just be queued and delivered a few minutes later.

Please contact our support team if you have any questions. We appreciate your business!

Update: all scheduled maintenance was completed normally, and there will be no additional interruptions to service.