Our business offices will be closed on Monday, February 17 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.
At approximately 2:45 PM Pacific time February 6, 2014, the Apache Web server running on the web13 server hung and needed to be manually restarted. We fixed the problem at 2:56 PM.
Obviously this sort of problem should not happen. We are monitoring it closely, and investigating it in more detail to try to find the root cause, so that we can take corrective action as necessary to prevent it from happening again. We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this problem.
Over the next ten days (February 7-15, 2014), we’ll be upgrading the MySQL database on all of our servers from version 5.1.72 to 5.5.35. The upgrade requires that each Web server be taken offline for two minutes, causing brief scheduled “downtime”.
The PHP developers recently released versions 5.4.24 and 5.5.8 that fix several bugs. We’ve updated PHP 5.4 and 5.5 on our servers as a result.
The PHP 5.3 version (5.3.28) was not changed.
These changes should not be noticeable, but in the unlikely event you experience any trouble, don’t hesitate to let us know.
At approximately 9:30 PM Pacific time, all of our servers began to experience a large “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attack via attempts to login to blogs using the standard WordPress wp-login.php script. This attack was very broad: it attacked thousands of sites across all of our servers, and it came from a huge number of IP addresses.
Processing these requests caused the overall load on all servers to increase. On “web04” the increase was enough to cause the server to start returning “503” errors for Web page requests.
Our servers already have a set of rules to protect against attacks on wp-login.php, but the rules were not quite sufficient to block tonight’s attack. We added a new rule to match tonight’s attack, and it fixed the problem.
We apologize for the time that the “web04” server returned 503 errors. As you can see by reviewing our blog posts we try to be very proactive to protect our customers’ WordPress sites, and hope that the new security rule will prevent future attacks with the same characteristics.
We occasionally hear from customers saying “my WordPress site suddenly got so slow it’s unusable”. When we look into these, the usual cause is that:
Our business offices will be closed on Wednesday, 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 Thursday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
Update 5:00 PM December 27: AOL has resolved the problem described below. All delayed mail has been delivered, and all services are operating normally.
Our business offices will be closed on Wednesday, 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 Thursday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
The PHP developers recently released versions 5.3.28, 5.4.23, and 5.5.7 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5 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 let us know.
