Recently, PayPal has been sending notifications to merchants who use the “PayPal API”, discussing some changes they’re making. If you are one of our customers and you have received this e-mail from PayPal, you may be wondering if you need to do anything. The short answer is that you don’t; the change is being made entirely on the PayPal servers, and our service is fully compatible.
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday, June 6, the “web13” and “web14” servers will be restarted. This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 10 minutes) for sites on these two servers at some point during this 2 hour period. No other servers will be affected.
The PHP developers recently released versions 5.4.41, 5.5.25 and 5.6.9 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6 on our servers as a result.
In addition, ionCube Loader has been updated to the current version 5.0.6.
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, May 25 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.
One issue we (unfortunately) have lots of experience with is fixing a WordPress site after we discover it’s been “hacked”. But while it’s one thing to try to clean a Web site after it got infected on our servers, it’s essentially impossible to try to clean a Web site that was infected on another server and is being transferred to our servers.
We have a page with more information, including:
The authors of the Mailman mailing list software we provide for customers have recently released versions 2.1.19 and 2.1.20 to fix several bugs.
We’ve upgraded the Mailman software on our servers from version 2.1.18 to 2.1.20 as a result.
Users of Mailman lists shouldn’t notice any changes, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or see any problems.
If you use an SSL certificate on a site you host with us, we now offer more control over the SSL/TLS protocol versions your site uses.
Old protocol versions, including SSL version 3 (“SSLv3”) and TLS version 1.0, are no longer considered secure. You can now disable these to improve security, at the expense of preventing some older, less-secure browsers from making SSL or TLS connections. Some credit card companies are starting to require that SSLv3 and TLS 1.0 both be disabled.
The PHP developers recently released versions 5.4.40, 5.5.24 and 5.6.8 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6 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.
In addition, the company that makes the Zend Guard Loader software has finally released versions compatible with PHP 5.5 and 5.6, so we’ve made that option available in the “PHP Settings” area of our My Account control panel (with all the usual caveats about why encoded scripts are inherently unreliable).
Between 9:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Friday May 1 2015, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded from version 5.5.41 to 5.5.43. 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.
The authors of WordPress today released version 4.2.1 that fixes a critical security bug.
While upgrading is always a good idea, we’ve blocked the attack for all versions of WordPress on all sites that we host. We’ve also verified using our MySQL binary logs that no sites were attacked before we started the blocking.
