WordPress 4.7 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 7.0.13 and 5.6.28 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.0 and 5.6 series on our servers as a result.
Between 9:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Friday, November 18, 2016, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded from version 5.5.52 to 5.5.53. This will cause an approximately 60 second interruption of service on each MySQL-using customer Web site at some point during this period.
This upgrade is necessary for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.
Update 9:43 PM Pacific time: The maintenance was completed as planned and all services are running normally.
Our business offices will be closed on Thursday, November 24 to observe the US legal holiday for Thanksgiving.
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 Friday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
Between 5:10 and 5:23 PM Pacific time today (Nov 14, 2016), the “web12” server was intermittently unavailable due to a hardware failure.
The problem has now been resolved, and other servers were not affected. We apologize for the inconvenience this caused our customers.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.12 and 5.6.27 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.0 and 5.6 series on our servers as a result.
For the PHP 5.6 and 7.0 series, we’ve also updated ionCube Loader to the current version 6.0.6, and SourceGuardian Loader to the current version 11.
These changes should not be noticeable, but in the unlikely event you experience any trouble, don’t hesitate to contact us.
The authors of the Joomla software announced that Joomla versions 3.4.4 through 3.6.3 have a critical security bug that allows “hackers” to take over a site by adding new administrative users (CVE-2016-8869).
The best solution for Joomla users is to update to version 3.6.4 immediately. However, we also added a rule to our servers this morning to block this attack. The rule should ensure that if you use our hosting service, hackers won’t be able to take advantage of this bug.
(And a tip o’ the hat to security researcher Melvin Lammerts, who published detailed technical information of the bug that allowed us to do this more quickly than usual.)
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Tuesday, October 25 2016, 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 2 hour period.
We’re receiving reports that some people visiting some SSL sites (including our site) are seeing security errors saying a “certificate has been revoked”.
This is an Internet-wide problem caused by an issue with one of the main Internet “certificate issuers”, a company called GlobalSign, and isn’t specific to us or sites we host. It’s affected many large Internet sites, such as Wikipedia. (Internet news site “The Register” has a report here.)
GlobalSign says the problem will soon be fixed. In the meantime, if your browser allows you to “click past” the warning about a “revoked certificate”, it is safe to do so.
Update 3:13 PM Pacific time: The problem is slowly resolving itself as the bad certificate information expires from “caches” around the Internet, but we’ve temporarily replaced our SSL certificates with new ones to make it stop immediately. This problem should now be resolved.
Between 4:38 and 5:11 AM Pacific time today (September 26, 2016), one of our upstream network providers had intermittent packet loss that may have caused slow performance when accessing our servers.
This problem has been resolved by the provider. Please accept our apologies for any trouble this caused.
