WordPress 3.8 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 5.4.22 and 5.5.6 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.4 and 5.5 on our servers as a result.
In the unlikely event you experience any issues, don’t hesitate to let us know.
Our business offices will be closed on Thursday, November 28 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 11:32 and 11:36 AM Pacific time on November 11, 2013, the “web04” server experienced very high load that led to an outage for sites on that server. (Other servers were not affected.)
The high load was caused by a RAID array hard disk that suddenly became very slow to respond to requests. The disk was automatically reset and the server resumed working normally. We’re keeping a close eye on this and doing further testing, and will replace any defective hardware if necessary.
We sincerely apologize to our customers affected by this problem.
We’ve updated MySQL from version 5.1.66 to version 5.1.72. This upgrade was necessary for security reasons.
We’ve also updated the PHP 5.4 series from 5.4.20 to 5.4.21, and the PHP 5.5 series from 5.5.4 to 5.5.5, to fix several bugs.
These updates should be invisible to customers, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.
WordPress 3.7.1 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 a version of WordPress earlier than 3.7, you should update it from within your WordPress Dashboard.
The 3.7 series of WordPress introduces a feature that automatically applies security updates and bug fixes without you needing to take any action at all — as the WordPress authors put it, you get “updates while you sleep”. It’s a great new feature.
Between 11:59 AM and 1:13 PM Pacific time on October 23, 2013, there was an outage on the “web11” server due to a hardware problem. Other servers were not affected.
The hardware has been replaced and the server is running normally again. During the outage, incoming email was queued for delivery. All incoming email has now been delivered to the appropriate mailboxes. No email was lost.
This post is technical, and intended for programmers and security experts — it doesn’t affect our customers.
A few weeks back, one of our hosting customers had a PHP script that would constantly crash an Apache Web server process. We spent a while tracking down the cause, and eventually found a bug in the excellent Apache mod_fcgid FastCGI software that was causing it.
At approximately 11:00 PM Saturday September 28, 2013, the “web06” server will be restarted. This will cause a short interruption of service for Web sites on that server lasting about 8 minutes.
Other servers will not be affected. Mail for customers on this server will be queued and delivered after a short delay.
When you create an e-mail address in our control panel, you can usually choose the level of spam filtering we apply to incoming mail. One of those options is to turn off the filtering completely.
If you’re just delivering mail to a mailbox on our servers, this may cause your mailbox to fill up with junk, but beyond that, it doesn’t usually cause any problems for us.
But if you’re forwarding all your mail to another service, this can cause problems, and you may find that we apply some filtering anyway.
