Having trouble sending mail to aol.com? (resolved)
The aol.com mail servers have been having problems for the last 24 hours, according to the AOL blog and the AOL Twitter feed.
Get an SSL certificate to guard against FireSheep
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’s mod_pagespeed module
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”.
Brief scheduled maintenance on flexo server (completed)
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.
Wildcard SSL certificates now available
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.
Webmail bug fix for Japanese characters
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.
Format of compressed old access log files changing to bzip2
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.
Brief scheduled maintenance Friday, September 24 (completed)
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”.
Blocking improper SSL connections
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.
Why you shouldn’t rely on a single anti-spam “blocklist”
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.
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