PHP 5.3 upgraded to 5.3.17

The PHP developers have announced the release of version 5.3.17 that fixes several bugs.

We’ve upgraded PHP 5.3.16 to PHP 5.3.17 on our servers as a result.

web04 server restarted (resolved)

At 3:33 PM Pacific time September 12 2012, our “web04” server became unstable and needed to be restarted. This led to an 8 minute outage of Web sites and e-mail hosted on that server.

All services are now working normally, and other servers were not affected.

This isn’t normal or acceptable. We take server reliability seriously, and we’re investigating the underlying cause to avoid a recurrence of this problem.

WordPress 3.4.2

WordPress 3.4.2 was released yesterday, and it contains important security updates 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.

In fact, you should always update immediately when WordPress tells you there’s a new version available. Don’t let yourself get behind, because it gets more difficult to update smoothly if you’re several versions out-of-date.

September 3, 2012 Labor Day holiday hours

Our business offices will be closed on Monday, September 3 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.

PHP 5.2.6 being phased out

This post was updated November 30, 2012 to reflect the additional availability of PHP 5.2.17.

We currently offer PHP versions 5.2.6, 5.2.17, and the 5.3 series. You can choose which version your account uses in the “PHP Settings” section of our “My Account” control panel.

PHP 5.2 has been obsolete for many years. Because of that, we’re beginning the process of removing PHP 5.2.6 from our servers and encouraging customers to switch to PHP 5.3. (PHP 5.2.17 is still available for now, but discouraged.)

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PHP 5.3 upgraded to 5.3.16

Shortly after we made PHP 5.3.15 available to hosting customers, the PHP team announced the release of version 5.3.16 that fixes several bugs.

We’ve upgraded PHP 5.3.15 to PHP 5.3.16 on our servers as a result.

PHP 5.3.15 available

PHP 5.3.15 is now available on all hosting accounts. It’s the default for new customers, and existing customers can update their PHP version using the “PHP Settings” link in our “My Account” control panel.

If you’re an existing customer using an older version of PHP, we haven’t yet changed your PHP version. However, we will begin doing that in about 30 days (we’ll announce that separately), so we recommend that you upgrade now. That way, if you find you’re using an outdated PHP script that isn’t compatible, you can set PHP back to the previous version and work to update the script. The old PHP 5.2 series will be removed from our servers by the end of 2012.

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Even my five-year-old son thinks you should always choose a .com domain name

We’re occasionally contacted by customers who report that mail isn’t arriving (when we can see that it is), or that their Web site is down (when we can see that it isn’t)…. and the mystery is eventually solved by the customer saying “Oh! Never mind. I own something.org [or something.net, or something.biz, etc.], but the person who had the problem was typing something.com”. Sometimes people even make this mistake with their own domain name.

As far as most people are concerned, “.com” means “the Internet” (and vice-versa). You can tell people “something.biz” till you’re blue in the face, but they’ll still often remember it as “something.com”. That’s a real problem if you own one but not the other.

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Server “web08” restarted (resolved)

At 12:50 AM Pacific time, the web08 server experienced extremely high disk load and needed to be restarted as a result, resulting in approximately 5 minutes downtime for sites on that server. Other servers were not affected, and the server is now working normally.

Network attacks July 26, 2012 (resolved)

Today at about 12:26 PM and 12:34 PM (Pacific time), our network was briefly attacked by an extremely high volume of data — a “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attack using forged (“spoofed”) source addresses. The volume of the attack was more than 50 times greater than the usual peak inbound data rate to all our servers combined. This caused Web sites and e-mail we host to be very slow or timeout completely for a few minutes. (All services are working normally now.)

The same attack happened a week ago. Based on what we learned previously, we were able to trace the attack in more detail, and we have identified a specific controversial site that the attackers are targeting. We have moved that site to a different section of our network that can fail without affecting other sites, and we will work with the site owner to move it to a dedicated DDoS protection service.

We apologize for the problems caused by this incident. We know that achieving maximum uptime and availability is important for all of our customers.