Our business offices will be closed on Friday, December 24 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, our support staff will be providing 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 Monday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
Between 2:35 PM Pacific time and 3:03 PM Pacific time, our monitoring systems detected that connections to our primary data center from some locations on the Internet were slow or failing due to problems at an Internet “backbone”. Connections from other locations were unaffected.
We’re waiting for a full report from the data center team, but the problem appears to have been resolved, and all services are operating normally. We’re continuing to monitor it closely, and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this caused our customers.
We’ve renewed the SSL certificate on our mail servers (because it was due to expire soon).
Almost all customers shouldn’t notice any change, but if you read e-mail using a secure connection with an unusual mail program that doesn’t handle SSL connections properly, you might be asked to “accept” the new mail.tigertech.net certificate.
If you use WordPress blog software on your site, be sure to upgrade to WordPress 3.0.2 as soon as possible. The upgrade contains an important security fix for a vulnerability that allows any WordPress “author” to become an “administrator”.
Although all WordPress users should upgrade right away, we’ve added security rules to our servers to protect our Web hosting customers who haven’t yet upgraded. Other people may find the rules useful if they use mod_security on Apache Web servers. The rest of this post contains more technical details.
Our primary data center had another power interruption this morning at 7:28 am (Pacific time). All of our servers lost power and then had it restored, thus rebooting them. All customer web sites were unavailable during this time. Incoming email would have simply been delayed during the downtime, not lost. When the servers came back online e-mail may have seemed sluggish to some customers for a while but this should also be fixed now.
This incident follows another power incident the previous Saturday night. We are working with the data center to get more details, including an estimate of when they will have replaced any faulty equipment. We will update this post as more information becomes available.
Update Nov. 29: The final data center report is that on the night of November 20, lightning strikes damaged both of the redundant UPS systems, interrupting data center power for a few seconds. The UPS manufacturer scheduled replacements for November 23, but another PG&E utility power interruption lasting a few seconds occurred that morning before it was finished. The UPS manufacturer has since replaced all damaged parts, restoring full redundancy. In addition, the UPS manufacturer has overhauled each unit, replacing and upgrading other parts to increase robustness. We take this very seriously — it’s at the core of what we do — and we will continue to work with the data center to ensure that their infrastructure meets our high standards.
Our business offices will be closed on Thursday, November 25 to observe the US legal holiday for Thanksgiving.
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 Friday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
A major power failure at our primary data center in Fremont, California, caused a complete outage for nearly all services beginning at 8:32 PM Pacific time Saturday night. It lasted between six and 13 minutes, depending on the server. Only our blog and redundant DNS infrastructure was unaffected.
All services are now fully operational; please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this caused our customers.
The aol.com mail servers have been having problems for the last 24 hours, according to the AOL blog and the AOL Twitter feed.
A recently published Firefox add-in named “Firesheep” can be used by “hackers” to easily hijack the connection of any nearby WiFi users visiting many popular Web sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or Hotmail. This vulnerability is a basic artifact of the way the Internet works. In order to prevent this problem, these sites will need to properly implement SSL (https) security.
Google has announced that they’ve created a nifty new Apache Web server module called mod_pagespeed that can speed up some Web sites.
We’ve been asked if we’re going to offer it, and the answer is “probably, but not yet”.
