Some customers using very old e-mail programs (such as Microsoft Entourage and Netscape Mail) have complained that their programs have started showing a warning that the “Certificate Authority Is Expired” or “Unable to establish a secure connection”. These old e-mail programs have certificates for common “root certificate authorities” built into them, with expiration dates that have now passed. There is no way to update the root certificates which are built into these old programs, unfortunately, so these e-mail programs will always complain that the root certificates are expired and thus no longer valid. This is not a problem with our e-mail servers, but instead is a problem with the old e-mail programs — they were never expected to be used this long.
If this is happening to you, there are three possible actions.
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The PHP developers recently released versions 5.4.24 and 5.5.8 that fix several bugs. We’ve updated PHP 5.4 and 5.5 on our servers as a result.
The PHP 5.3 version (5.3.28) was not changed.
These changes should not be noticeable, but in the unlikely event you experience any trouble, don’t hesitate to let us know.
We occasionally hear from customers saying “my WordPress site suddenly got so slow it’s unusable”. When we look into these, the usual cause is that:
- Our customer has installed a WordPress plugin;
- The plugin attempts to contact another server as part of its normal operation;
- But the other server isn’t working properly: it fails to respond to connection attempts.
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The PHP developers recently released versions 5.3.28, 5.4.23, and 5.5.7 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5 on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but in the unlikely event you experience any trouble, don’t hesitate to let us know.
WordPress 3.8 was recently released, and as always, we’ve updated our WordPress one-click installer to automatically install the latest version for new WordPress sites.
If you’ve previously installed an older version of WordPress, you should update it from within your WordPress Dashboard.
The PHP developers recently released versions 5.4.22 and 5.5.6 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.4 and 5.5 on our servers as a result.
In the unlikely event you experience any issues, don’t hesitate to let us know.
WordPress 3.7.1 was recently released, and as always, we’ve updated our WordPress one-click installer to automatically install the latest version for new WordPress sites.
If you’ve previously installed a version of WordPress earlier than 3.7, you should update it from within your WordPress Dashboard.
The 3.7 series of WordPress introduces a feature that automatically applies security updates and bug fixes without you needing to take any action at all — as the WordPress authors put it, you get “updates while you sleep”. It’s a great new feature.
This post is technical, and intended for programmers and security experts — it doesn’t affect our customers.
A few weeks back, one of our hosting customers had a PHP script that would constantly crash an Apache Web server process. We spent a while tracking down the cause, and eventually found a bug in the excellent Apache mod_fcgid FastCGI software that was causing it.
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When you create an e-mail address in our control panel, you can usually choose the level of spam filtering we apply to incoming mail. One of those options is to turn off the filtering completely.
If you’re just delivering mail to a mailbox on our servers, this may cause your mailbox to fill up with junk, but beyond that, it doesn’t usually cause any problems for us.
But if you’re forwarding all your mail to another service, this can cause problems, and you may find that we apply some filtering anyway.
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We’ve received reports from some of our customers about errors or delays sending mail to or from Gmail on September 23, 2013.
This was caused by a general problem at Gmail that they’ve since resolved, and wasn’t related to our servers.
