Our hosting customers can now get free SSL certificates to secure their site.
What’s an SSL certificate? It activates the “padlock” icon for your site in a Web browser, showing that the connection is encrypted for security. You should use an SSL certificate if your visitors type sensitive data such as usernames, passwords or credit card numbers, because it ensures that “hackers” can’t intercept that data.
SSL certificates used to cost a lot of money, but an organization called Let’s Encrypt is now providing them for free, trying to encourage the widespread use of encryption on the modern Internet.
We believe that encryption should be widely available, so we’ve changed our SSL certificate system to provide free Let’s Encrypt certificates to our hosting customers. You can get one now in our “My Account” control panel.
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The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.2, 5.6.17 and 5.5.31 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.
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10:16 AM Pacific time January 10: The problem described below has been fixed by Cogent Communications, and we are no longer detecting any packet loss. There should be no further problems. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you still have any trouble.
9:54 AM Pacific time January 10: We’re receiving scattered reports of intermittent problems when connecting to our servers, although all services on our end are working normally.
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Our business offices will be closed on Friday, 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 Monday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
Some of our customers are still using the PHP 5.3 series, even though it’s obsolete and not recommended.
We’ve “rebuilt” the old PHP 5.3.29 software to patch a serious security bug it contains. This bug is the partial cause of a recent Joomla security problem.
The rebuilt version will be deployed on all our servers within the next few hours. No changes should be noticeable, but in the unlikely event you experience any trouble, don’t hesitate to contact us.
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Our business offices will be closed on Friday, December 25 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 Monday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
The PHP developers recently released version 7.0.1 that fixes several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 7.0 on our servers as a result.
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The authors of the Joomla software announced today that every version of Joomla below 3.4.6 has a critical security bug that allows “hackers” to take over a site.
The bug was in use by hackers for two days before the Joomla authors patched it, and we found several Joomla customer sites that had been modified as a result. We’ve restored backups of those sites and notified those customers directly, but we recommend that all Joomla users change their password to be safe, even if we didn’t notify you of a problem.
The best solution for Joomla users is to update to version 3.4.6 immediately. However, we also added a rule to our servers this morning to block any more attacks until our customers can update. The rule should ensure that if you use our hosting service, and your site hasn’t already been modified, hackers won’t be able to take advantage of this bug.
WordPress 4.4 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.
We’ve had reports of an error message like this in Outlook when using Windows 10:
error (0x800CCC13): Cannot connect to the network. Verify your network connection or modem.
If this happens to you, it’s because of a problem with Windows 10, not with Outlook or our servers. According to the Microsoft page about it, updating Windows 10 should fix it. If it doesn’t, they suggest using a “workaround” to repair corrupted files on your computer.
