Between 10:00 PM Pacific time on Saturday, June 8 and 5:00 AM on June 9, each of our hosting servers will be restarted. This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 10 minutes) for each site at some point during this 7 hour period.
Beginning at 10:38 AM, the “web12” server experienced high load that made sites on that server slow (or intermittently return “503 errors”) for several minutes. The cause of this problem (a user running a process that caused extremely high disk usage) has been identified and resolved.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this problem caused.
Between 9:45 PM and 10:05 PM Pacific time June 2, the “web01” server (which also hosts our own www.tigertech.net Web site) stopped responding normally due to a Linux kernel problem, leading to some sites and mail accounts on the server being unavailable during this period.
The server was restarted and is now operating normally. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this caused.
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, May 27 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.
Between 10:00 PM and 10:59 PM Pacific time Wednesday May 22, 2013, the “web05” and “web07” servers will be restarted. This will cause an eight minute interruption of service for each server at some point during this hour.
The PHP developers have announced the release of versions 5.3.25 and 5.4.15 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.3 and 5.4 on our servers as a result.
We’ve also updated the ionCube Loader PHP extension (which most of our customers don’t use) from version 4.2.2 to version 4.4.0.
These changes should be transparent to customers. In the unlikely event you experience any issues, don’t hesitate to let us know.
The “web04” server experienced extremely high load for several minutes beginning at 8:00 AM Pacific time on May 9. Sites on this server were slow or unavailable as a result.
Several people have asked us about the recent WordPress WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache plugin security vulnerability.
For the most part, sites hosted on our servers aren’t vulnerable to this because we block comments that contain the malicious code.
We’ve talked before about WordPress login rate limiting. Attempts to guess WordPress administrator passwords are an ongoing problem, getting worse all the time.
The average WordPress site we host has received tens of thousands of malicious login attempts this month, with hundreds of thousands of different IP addresses being used in the attacks. We try to block the IP addresses that are responsible, but the ever increasing number of addresses means we can’t block all of them — an individual address often attempts a login only once a day for a given site. We need to adopt other tactics.
1:31 PM Pacific time: Our technicians are investigating high load and slow page load times on the “web04” server.
2:09 PM Pacific time: This is being caused by a distributed denial of service attack on WordPress sites that is causing outages for many companies. We’re working to block it.
