We’ve previously added free wildcard Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates for all our customers who use our web hosting service. Now we’ve added free certificates to all “parked” domain names, too!
If you have a parked domain name on our servers that’s set up to redirect to another site, you can now use https:// URL addresses for the parked domain name and the redirect will work securely, with no problems.
We’ve updated the MariaDB / MySQL database software on all our servers to version 10.1.41. This was part of a general update of Debian Linux to version 9.10 and then 9.11.
This upgrade should not be noticeable to our customers in any way, but of course, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or difficulties.
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, September 2 to observe the US Labor Day legal holiday. As always, we’ll provide same-day support for time-sensitive issues via our ticket and e-mail systems. However, questions that aren’t time-sensitive (including most billing matters) may not be answered until Tuesday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent issues.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.1.31, 7.2.21 and 7.3.8 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
Between 4:06 PM and 5:03 PM Pacific time today (Aug 22, 2019), sites hosted on the “web08” server were intermittently unavailable due to a technical problem.
The problem was caused by a flood of connections that our systems failed to automatically block as they should. We’ve modified the software that handles this, and we do not expect the problem to recur.
We sincerely apologize to customers affected by this problem; we don’t consider it normal or acceptable, and strive to avoid incidents like this.
Update August 21, 2019: The maintenance described below has been completed for all sites.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be retiring some old servers and moving sites on those servers to new (often faster) ones. Migrating a site takes just a few seconds in most cases, so it’s likely that neither you nor your visitors will notice this happening.
If someone does view your site while it’s being migrated, they’ll see a maintenance screen with a link to this blog post, like this:
If your site is in the small minority that has a large database (more than a few hundred MB), the migration could take a little longer — perhaps a few minutes. We try to do migrations during slow periods for each site, minimizing the impact on visitors.
Read the rest of this entry »There was an intermittent interruption of service for certain customers this morning (July 23rd, 2019) from about 9:15 AM – 10:00 AM Pacific Time.
During this time, a hardware failure in a router at one of our upstream data providers would have dropped incoming traffic for sites hosted in the 74.114.88.0/22 IP address range.
Once aware of the issue, we were able to reroute all traffic for that range through our own routers directly and avoid the issue. We’ve confirmed with the upstream provider that the faulty hardware has been identified and replaced.
We apologize for the trouble this caused customers who were affected.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.2.20 and 7.3.7 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.2 and 7.3 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
Our business offices will be closed on Thursday, July 4 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, we’ll provide same-day support for time-sensitive issues via our ticket and e-mail systems. However, questions that aren’t time-sensitive (including most billing matters) may not be answered until the next day, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
If you have a WordPress site, and you use both the WP Super Cache plugin and the Cloudflare content delivery network, the latest version 1.6.8 of WP Super Cache may not properly cache your pages by default.
This is because of a quirk of the update: A new setting makes it think all Cloudflare visitors are “known users” because they have a “cookie” set. If you had the old “disable caching for known users” option turned on before the update, it won’t cache pages for Cloudflare visitors after the update.
The same thing can happen if you have a WordPress plugin that sets a “cookie” for each visitor for some other reason.
This problem is easily fixed by changing the new WP Super Cache “Cache Restrictions” setting from “Disable caching for visitors who have a cookie set in their browser” to “Disable caching for logged in visitors. (Recommended)”. We’ve updated our WP Super Cache page to reflect this change, and if we notice that a site hosted on our servers suddenly has higher CPU resource usage because of this, we’ll update the setting for you to make it work as it did before.
