As of today, we’re officially no longer supporting the very old Ruby 1.8, Python 2.5 and Python 2.6 programs on our servers. They’ll soon be removed from our servers entirely. (Ruby and Python are scripting languages; if you don’t know what they are, your site is unlikely to affected by this and you can ignore it.)
Our MySQL database servers now support the innodb_large_prefix option and the “Barracuda” innodb_file_format option.
Users should not notice any difference, but this should improve compatibility with a small number of scripts that require these options (notably recent versions of Moodle).
We’ve updated the AWStats software we use to generate website statistics. The statistics beginning today use the latest version 7.7, which fixes several bugs. Customers should not notice any other changes.
We should probably mention that if you’re relying on AWStats for information about the behavior of human visitors, you can usually get more accurate statistics using Google Analytics, which works in a different way than simply analyzing log data after the fact. We have a page explaining more about the difference between AWStats and Google Analytics.
Between 9:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Monday, January 8, 2018, each of our hosting servers will be restarted. This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 5 minutes) for each site at some point during this period.
The PHP developers recently released version 5.6.33 that fixes several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 5.6 series on our servers as a result.
This change should not be noticeable, but in the unlikely event you experience any trouble, don’t hesitate to contact us.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.27 and 7.1.13 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.0 and 7.1 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 Monday, January 1 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, our support staff will be providing 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 problems.
Between 05:46 AM Pacific time and 06:58 AM Pacific time (December 29 2017) some Web sites on our web02 server were inaccessible. This was caused by the failure of a disk in the RAID array. When the disk failed MySQL continued to read corrupted data from it’s file cache rather than using another disk in the RAID array. The cache has now been cleared and the server restarted. This was unrelated to the problems on our web13 server earlier in the day.
Between 6:06 PM Pacific time (December 28 2017) and 05:15 AM Pacific time (December 29 2017) some Web sites on our web13 server were inaccessible for periods of time due to MySQL database corruption problems. During that time customers will likely have experienced a “Error Establishing Database Connection” message when viewing their Web site.
By 8:49 PM Pacific time (December 28 2017) most Web sites were working although a small number needed databases manually restoring by our technicians. That process was completed by 05:15 AM Pacific time (December 29 2017).
We don’t consider this acceptable and will strive to make sure this doesn’t recur. Finally we apologize for the inconvenience this caused.
At approximately 9:30 PM Pacific time on Saturday, December 23 2017, the web07 server will be restarted.
This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 3 minutes) for sites and email on this server. Sites on other servers will not be affected.
