Update 1:41 PM Pacific time: A contact at Level 3 Communications confirms that their San Francisco Bay Area network was disrupted by a “configuration error”, causing problems for a great deal of Internet traffic that passes through Level 3 (not related to us in particular). Level 3 has corrected the problem, so we’re marking this issue as “closed”.
We had a couple of brief network interruptions today (at about 8:50am and 12:49pm Pacific time). We are investigating them, and will update this post with more details later.
Updated 2012-07-19 2:23PM Pacific: One of our upstream network providers has traced this to what appears to be some very brief, very high-packet-per-second attacks. The attacks have not recurred, and we are continuing to monitor all systems.
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.
