Some of the posts on our blog mention specific servers. You’ll occasionally see things like “The web14 server will be rebooted at 11 PM”, “mail sent from the web01 server was delayed”, or “more memory has been added to the web10 server”. Your question, quite naturally, is “How do I know if they’re talking about the server that has my account?”
One of our Web servers (the “farnsworth” server) stopped responding at 7:07 PM Pacific time today, and needed to be forcibly restarted. This resulted in a Web server and FTP server outage of about 15 minutes for some customers, although most sites were unaffected.
After being restarted, the server is responding properly, but still showing a problem with one of the disks in its RAID array. Because of that, we plan to replace the disk to prevent future problems, meaning we’ll restart that server again later tonight (after 11 PM Pacific time).
We apologize to all customers affected; we strive hard to avoid this kind of problem.
We’re currently seeing about 15% “packet loss” from our data center to a handful of locations on the Internet (notably connections that go through the above.net backbone). Most people aren’t affected by this, but for those that are, this can cause connections to be slower than normal. We have a ticket open with the data center for this issue, and we’ll update this page when it’s resolved.
Update May 20: The packet loss problem was effectively resolved on Friday, although we’ve been monitoring the above.net backbone connection closely to ensure that there is no ongoing problem. Although we’ve seen a couple of short latency issues that we’re still following up with the data center about, customers are not experiencing any problems.
No matter how hard we try to make sure that other ISPs never block mail from our servers, it happens occasionally. All it takes is someone at another ISP clicking “this is spam” on a few legitimate messages sent by one of our customers, and some automated system at the other ISP thinks “hey, one of these tigertech.net servers is sending spam; let’s block it for a while without bothering to notify them, ‘for your convenience'”.
Now, we should emphasize that this is actually quite rare.
