Recently, security researchers announced a bug that affects many web scripts, called the httpoxy bug.
Sites hosted on our servers are not vulnerable to this bug, because we’ve added a security rule blocking all HTTP requests that contain a “Proxy:” header. This completely blocks all malicious “httpoxy” requests, and our customers don’t need to do anything else.
We’ve updated the AWStats software we use to generate website statistics. The statistics beginning today use the latest version 7.5.
This version has support for newer browsers, operating systems, and search engines, and is somewhat better at identifying and filtering out traffic from non-human visitors.
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.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.8, 5.6.23 and 5.5.37 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.0, 5.6 and 5.5 series 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 contact us.
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, 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 business day (i.e., Tuesday), and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.7, 5.6.22 and 5.5.36 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.0, 5.6 and 5.5 series 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 contact us.
Effective September 1, 2016, the price of our “Silver Hosting” and “Basic Hosting / Gold Hosting” plans for existing customers will increase by $1.00 per month.
(The “Plus Hosting”, “Business Hosting” and “Add-On Hosting” plan prices will not change. New customers are already paying the new rates, as shown on our plans page.)
This will not affect all customers immediately. If you prepay annually for hosting, the price change won’t take effect until your current prepayment is used up, which will be sometime between September 2016 and August 2017. In addition, if you’ve opened an account with us in the last two years, the price increase won’t take effect until you’ve been with us a full two years, even if you’re paying month-to-month.
We’ll directly notify each affected customer by e-mail before any price increase takes effect, of course.
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, May 30 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 authors of the PHP scripting language stopped supporting the PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4 series some time ago.
Newer versions of PHP are generally more secure, have fewer bugs, and in some cases run far faster. Of course, that’s really just another way of saying that older versions of PHP are insecure, buggy, and slow.
Because of that, we are phasing out PHP versions earlier than 5.5 (we also offer the 5.6 and 7.0 series):
We have a page dedicated to explaining how, and why, to update PHP.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.6, 5.6.21 and 5.5.35 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.0, 5.6 and 5.5 series 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 contact us.
Between 9:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Wednesday, May 4, 2016, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded from version 5.5.47 to 5.5.49. 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 9:06 PM Pacific time: The maintenance was completed as planned and all services are running normally.
