We’ve received reports from some of our customers about errors or delays sending mail to or from Gmail on September 23, 2013.
This was caused by a general problem at Gmail that they’ve since resolved, and wasn’t related to our servers.
The PHP developers recently released version 5.4.20 that fixes several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.4 on our servers as a result.
We’ve also introduced support for the new PHP 5.5 series, making PHP 5.5.4 available as a new option in our My Account control panel.
Finally, we’ve updated all versions of PHP to use the latest versions of the ionCube Loader (4.4.3), ImageMagick (3.1.0) and SourceGuardian (9.5) PHP extensions. These changes should be transparent to customers.
In the unlikely event you experience any issues, don’t hesitate to let us know.
At 7:59 AM Pacific time on September 13, we tweeted this:
7:59 AM Pacific time: We're investigating a possible network outage affecting some customers. http://t.co/TySP4KGNY1
— Tiger Technologies (@Tigertech) September 13, 2013
However, this was a false alarm. The problem was in our independent external monitoring system, not a real problem with any of our servers or network.
WordPress 3.6.1 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 WordPress, you should update it from within your WordPress Dashboard.
The new version of WordPress is described as a security release that prevents “hackers” from modifying your site if you use “a popular plugin“, whose name has not yet been revealed so that everyone has a chance to upgrade first. While we may be able to add additional protection against this vulnerability when the details are revealed, updating now guarantees your site will stay protected.
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, September 2 to observe the US Labor Day 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 Tuesday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent issues.
At approximately 11:00 PM Saturday August 23, 2013, the “web06” server will be restarted. This will cause a short interruption of service for Web sites 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.
There’s been a lot of discussion recently about a critical Joomla security bug that allows “hackers” to upload malicious PHP script files to Joomla sites, then run them. This would allow hackers to use your site to send spam, or to replace any file on your Web site.
Although our customers running Joomla should always upgrade to the latest versions when available, we’ve also put rules in place to protect against this vulnerability.
WordPress 3.6 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 WordPress, you can (and should!) upgrade it from within your WordPress Dashboard.
Between 7:41 PM and 8:04 PM Pacific time August 4, 2013, one of our network providers experienced high packet loss, causing intermittently slow or unavailable connections for some customers.
All services are now running normally, and we’re working with that network provider to determine the root cause and prevent a recurrence. We apologize for the inconvenience this caused customers who were affected.
Update at 9:33 PM Pacific time: Our provider reports that their network in San Jose, California was overwhelmed by a large denial of service attack directed at another one of their customers (unrelated to our company). They believe they have resolved the problem.
Between 9:50 AM and 9:59 AM Pacific time August 1, 2013, the “web08” server experienced a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, causing Web pages to load slowly or not at all.
The attacks are continuing, but we are blocking the IP addresses involved and all services are operating normally. We’re monitoring things closely to avoid problems, and we apologize for the inconvenience this caused customers.
