Our business offices will be closed on Wednesday, July 4 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 business day, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
The “web11” server became very slow and needed to be restarted at approximately 2:00 a.m. Pacific time this morning (June 25). This caused a brief outage for Web sites on that server. Other servers were not affected.
Between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday June 23 2012, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded to version 5.1.63 and restarted. This will cause an approximately 30 second interruption of service on each customer Web site at some point during this hour.
This upgrade is necessary for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.
Update 11:12 PM June 23: The maintenance was completed as planned.
Between 5:10 and 5:22 A.M. Pacific time this morning (June 15), one of our upstream network providers experienced a large distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) targeted at one of their other customers, overwhelming their core network routers. This resulted in many people being unable to connect to our network during this period.
The problem has been resolved (the provider has blocked the attack), and they tell us it should not recur. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this caused.
WordPress 3.4 was released yesterday, with some nice new features. Our WordPress one-click installer automatically installs the latest version for new sites. If you’ve previously installed WordPress, you should upgrade it from within your WordPress Dashboard.
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, May 28 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.
There’s been a lot of talk in the last few days about a nasty PHP security bug that allows “hackers” to compromise some Web sites that use the PHP scripting language.
Our customers are not vulnerable to this problem because of the way PHP is set up on our servers. You don’t need to worry about it.
Between 1:53 AM Pacific time and 2:09 AM on May 1, the disk load on the “web11” server became very slow, requiring that server to be restarted. We did so, and normal service was resumed at 2:10 AM. Other servers were not affected.
WordPress 3.3.2 was released today, and it contains an important security update to keep your site safe.
Our WordPress one-click installer automatically installs the latest version for new sites. If you’ve previously installed WordPress, you should upgrade it right away from within your WordPress Dashboard. (You should always do that when WordPress tells you there’s a new version available.)
Lots of people (and lots of our customers) use WordPress to run their Web sites. This unfortunately means that lots of “hackers” also try to guess the passwords of those sites.
That’s a problem, so we’ve had WordPress login “rate limiting” in place for a long time. When a single IP address tries loading the WordPress “wp-login.php” script many more times than a human would, we temporarily block that IP address from accessing the “wp-login.php” page until the requests stop for a while.
This works pretty well: we’ve blocked literally millions of password attempts this way. However, last week one of our customers had his site hijacked by someone who did indeed simply guess his WordPress password.
