At approximately 10:00 PM Pacific time tonight, October 23, the “flexo” Web server will be restarted.
As a result, for customers on the “flexo” server (only), Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes. Customers on other servers will not be affected.
Back in May, we posted that we now offer basic SSL certificates for just $19.00 a year, allowing you to protect your Web site without going broke.
Today, we’ve added another option: you can optionally choose a “wildcard” AlphaSSL certificate instead for just $49.00 a year.
We’ve fixed a bug in our Webmail system that could, in rare cases, make Japanese language symbols display incorrectly. This change shouldn’t affect anything else, but as always, feel free to contact us if you have any trouble.
When we store older Apache Web server access logs for your site — those that are more than two months old — we re-compress the original logs into single monthly files. These take up less disk space for your account when you have a lot of them. (We have some customers with log files going back more than ten years!)
Until now, we’ve re-compressed these files using gzip compression. However, we’re going to switch to a different modern compression format, bzip2 compression, which reduces the size even more. The resulting files are about half the size of gzip.
Between 11:00 PM and 11:30 PM Pacific time this Friday, September 24, some of our hosting servers will be restarted. As a result, some customers will find that Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes at some point during this maintenance “window”.
Even if a Web site hosted with us doesn’t have an SSL certificate, our servers used to accept improper secure SSL connection attempts that start with “https://” instead of “http://” in the beginning of the URL (note the extra “s”). We’re changing that.
We got a couple of messages today from customers who sent e-mail to other people that was rejected — they got an error saying that all our mail servers are listed on the “ReputationAuthority” anti-spam blocklist.
Yikes! We take things like that very seriously — we go to great lengths (some would say extreme lengths) to make sure this doesn’t happen. So we investigated… and it turns out that the ReputationAuthority list actually has a technical problem that’s making it reject all mail from all servers, not just from ours (see complaints on Twitter [1, 2] and elsewhere). People who use that list to block spam aren’t getting any mail at all.
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, September 6 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.
Many years ago, Microsoft’s “FrontPage” Web design software was a popular choice for creating small Web sites. However, Microsoft discontinued FrontPage in 2006, and you can’t buy the FrontPage program any more.
Quite a few of our customers are still using FrontPage to design and upload their Web sites, though. We’re starting to see more and more problems from customers who have upgraded to a new computer running Windows Vista or Windows 7 but can no longer run FrontPage. (Sometimes their old computer just suddenly crashes and can’t be recovered.) Their old computer probably had a copy of FrontPage installed by the manufacturer, but their new computer doesn’t.
It can be difficult or impossible to get FrontPage running on a new PC if you can’t find the original installation CDs, or you aren’t licensed to use FrontPage on the new PC. In some cases, the old FrontPage software doesn’t install or work well on the latest versions of Windows. In these situations, you can’t even open the old FrontPage files on the new computer.
Three of our Web hosting servers (amy, flexo, and leela) experienced high load earlier today that caused some customers to see “503 errors” on their Web sites for a few minutes.
This was caused by an upgrade to the eAccelerator PHP caching system that removed all the cached files at once, which doesn’t normally happen.
The problem has been permanently resolved and will not recur.
