Our own www.tigertech.net Web site and “My Account” control panel will be unavailable for approximately 15 minutes beginning at 9 PM Pacific time tonight (December 2). We’ll be replacing and upgrading some hardware.
Customer Web sites and e-mail will not be affected at all.
Customers on the “amy” server experienced a nine minute interruption in Web site and e-mail service between 5:58 and 6:07 PM Pacific time today (November 16).
Customers on other servers were not affected.
Our “bender” server encountered had an extremely high load starting at about 1:36 PM (Pacific time) today, and lasting until about 2:00 PM. Due to unusual circumstances, a runaway customer script caused the RAID disk array to become overloaded with writes, causing scripts that write to the disk to run slowly. The server may have seemed slow or unresponsive to customers at some point. We don’t consider this type of event to be acceptable, and apologize for the inconvenience.
We fixed the problem, and modified the server’s settings to hopefully prevent a recurrence. The changes were propagated to all similar hosting servers to protect them as well.
Starting just after 9AM (Pacific time) today, the “bender” server experienced some very high loads (for about 40 minutes). It seemed to be coming from a combination of severe database, e-mail, and Web server access. Sort of a “perfect storm” of unusual load.
We work very hard to run all of our servers at a reasonable level, with excess capacity to spare. Even though the load was unusual, we don’t consider this type of limitation acceptable. We are reviewing the server’s configuration files to see if we can make changes to avoid this sort of problem in the future.
Our Web hosting customers who use FastCGI have been seeing extra “500 internal server” errors in their logs and statistics since September 12.
The good news is that this is just a logging bug caused by a recent Apache Web server update. Visitors to your site are seeing exactly what they always saw, and there isn’t any problem besides the incorrect logging.
Customers on the “mom” server experienced a seven minute interruption in Web site and e-mail service between 4:26 and 4:33 AM Pacific time this morning (September 15).
Customers on other servers were not affected.
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time this Friday September 11, all our servers will be restarted. As a result, Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes at some point during this maintenance “window”.
Some of our customers may have noticed “high packet loss” today from about noon to 12:25 PM (Pacific time). This could make it seem like Web sites hosted on our servers were loading slowly, or even timing out.
The problem has been resolved by our upstream provider, but we are working with them to make sure it doesn’t recur.
Customers on the “flexo” server experienced a four-minute interruption in Web site service between 9:48 and 9:52 AM Pacific time this morning (August 12).
E-mail was not affected, and customers on other servers were not affected.
The problem happened when the Apache Web server did not respond to a “graceful reload” command when we installed a “mod_security” update to block certain attacks against the WordPress blog software.
We are looking into the root cause of this incident and will take steps to prevent it from recurring. We don’t consider any kind of service interruption acceptable, and we sincerely apologize for the problem.
For the last several years, we’ve offered PHP versions 4 and 5 on our servers. This made sense when PHP 5 was new: Even though PHP 5 is faster and more secure than PHP 4, a small handful of scripts were originally incompatible with version 5, and we wanted to give customers a choice.
However, PHP 5 is now more than five years old, and the PHP developers declared version 4 obsolete in 2007. All our new customers have been using PHP 5 by default for more than a year, and we’ve received no complaints about incompatibilities.
No PHP script should require the obsolete PHP version 4 any more. Because of that, we’re beginning the process of removing it from our servers.
