This post describes a technical change that most customers can ignore; we’re posting it for advanced users who may be interested.
If you have hosting service with us, we publish a default SPF record in your DNS zone if you don’t provide one yourself.
The PHP developers recently released versions 5.6.31, 7.0.21, and 7.1.7 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 5.6, 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.
One of the features of our e-mail system is that we add SpamAssassin headers to most incoming mail, as described on our SpamAssassin page.
Until now, we didn’t add SpamAssassin headers to messages that were “whitelisted” because they appear to be from someone you’ve sent a message to.
In recent years there’s been an increase in forged spam claiming to be from addresses you know, though, often because the other person’s address book has been stolen by a virus. Because of that, it can be useful to see SpamAssassin results even for these whitelisted messages, and we’ve changed our mail system to add SpamAssassin headers to them as well.
This doesn’t change the fact that we won’t reject these whitelisted messages, regardless of their SpamAssassin score. The only change is that we now add SpamAssassin headers, allowing customers who want to examine the SpamAssassin score to do so. Customers won’t notice any change unless they have their own systems to examine the SpamAssassin headers.
Our business offices will be closed on Tuesday, 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 Wednesday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
Between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Thursday, June 29, 2017, 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 versions 7.0.20 and 7.1.6 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.
We’ve also added a custom “patch” to our copies of PHP 7.0 and 7.1 that provides a new feature: logging of slow outgoing connections from your scripts.
This can show the cause when a WordPress or Joomla site suddenly becomes slow or unresponsive for no obvious reason. The culprit is often an add-on plugin or component that contacts a third-party server to do its work, but “hangs” when the third-party server doesn’t respond.
Our page about logging slow external connections has more information.
Last weekend, we removed the final spinning disk from our hosting servers. We now use only solid state drives (SSDs) in the RAID arrays of all our web, database, and mail servers. This applies both to new accounts and to every existing account (unlike many companies advertising SSD hosting, who only do it for new accounts).
Most customers won’t notice any change recently, because we’ve been working on this project for a long time. We finished converting all MySQL database storage arrays to SSDs around a year ago, and many of our hosting and e-mail servers have used only SSDs for several months. But at some point, all sites hosted with us have gotten noticeably faster.
Using SSDs instead of spinning disks makes a big difference for shared hosting. It removes almost all cases of “latency”, which is when a script, database or mail program has to first wait for another site’s data to be read or written. For hosting servers, the drive access pattern consists of lots and lots of small operations scattered around the drives, requiring high IOPS. On spinning mechanical disks, this means waiting for the disk head assembly to move to the right place for each new file, during which time it can’t do anything useful. With SSDs, that “seek time” is completely eliminated, making the drives hundreds of times faster at small reads and writes. Hard disk seeks were once the main cause of delays and load on our servers, but that’s been almost completely eliminated. WordPress sites run faster, database writes finish more quickly, and mail loads without any delays.
Large SSDs aren’t cheap — they currently cost about the same per GB as hard drives did in 2008, and we’re storing more than ten times as much data per customer as we did then — but the result is worth it. We’re proud to offer high performance hosting to everyone.
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Thursday, May 25 2017, two of our hosting servers will be restarted: “web06” and “web12”. (This page explains how to find which server a site is on.)
This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 5 minutes) for each site on these two servers at some point during this 2 hour period. Sites on other servers will not be affected.
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, May 29 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.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.19 and 7.1.5 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.
