We’re pleased to announce that we’ve dramatically lowered our price on SSL certificates — they’re now just $19.00.
What’s an SSL certificate? It activates the “padlock” icon for your site in a Web browser, showing that the connection is encrypted for security. You should use an SSL certificate if your visitors type sensitive data such as usernames, passwords or credit card numbers, because it ensures that “hackers” can’t intercept that data.
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time this Saturday, May 22, all our hosting servers will be restarted. As a result, 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”.
In the last few days, there’s been a lot of talk on the Internet about the security of WordPress blog software.
Several shared hosting companies apparently allow customers to view the text of other customer’s files by default, and that allows malicious customers to discover the database password of another site (from the “wp-config.php” file) and alter the site.
We’re receiving reports of network connectivity problems from a couple of customers using the “Global Crossing” Internet backbone to reach our primary data center, although most customers are unaffected. We’re investigating this issue.
Update 12:35 PM: Our upstream provider reports that an 8 minute network interruption for some connections, beginning at 11:11 AM Pacific time, was caused by a router failure at Global Crossing. The problem has been resolved.
We’ve recently heard from several customers who have received what appears to be a domain name renewal invoice from a company called “Domain Registry of America”.
These “invoices” are a scam. Domain Registry of America is unrelated to our company, and has been cited by the FTC for “deceptive conduct”.
If you look closely at the “invoices”, they actually say something like “This notice is not a bill, rather an easy means of payment should you decide to renew your domain with us.” However, that small print is easy to miss.
We have a page about Domain Registry of America scams with much more information. We encourage you to make sure that whoever pays your invoices is aware of it.
We recently added the Spamhaus Domain Block List (dbl.spamhaus.org) to our spam filters.
The Domain Block List is an extremely reliable list of domain names that are used only in spam. Blocking most mail that advertises these domain names improves our spam filtering: we’re now blocking about 1% more spam as a result.
That may not sound like much, but it represents about 150 more blocked spam messages per year for each customer. (We block an average of over 15,000 spam messages per year per customer.)
Between 7:00 and 7:45 PM Pacific time Thursday night (March 11), we received two reports of slow or nonexistent network connections to sites on our servers.
Our automated monitoring systems didn’t detect any general problems, so the majority of customers were certainly unaffected — but we suspect that one of the “Internet backbones” between the affected customers and our data center had high packet loss during that period.
Both customers reported that the problem resolved itself by 7:45, and we haven’t received similar reports since, so there does not appear to be be an ongoing problem. We’ll continue to monitor it closely.
If you use a MySQL database with large tables, it’s possible to accidentally run queries that try to sort millions of rows (usually through some kind of programming error, such as an “unconstrained table join”).
Those runaway queries can slow down the MySQL server for many minutes on end, causing performance problems.
To prevent the worst of that, we’ve set the max_join_size setting to 1,000,000 on our MySQL servers.
We keep coming across WordPress customer sites that have hurt their performance by switching from the “WP Super Cache” plugin we recommend to a newer plugin named “W3 Total Cache”. Unfortunately, their site often ends up being far slower after switching to W3 Total Cache.
If you care about the performance of your site, please stick with WP Super Cache unless you have a very good reason to switch. It works, and it works well.
Some people tell us that W3 Total Cache works just as well if it’s properly configured, and they may well be right — but it seems like it’s difficult to configure properly. Our experience is showing that it’s easy to get wrong, and performance ends up suffering. WP Super Cache makes it easy to get great performance.
The “calculon” Web server will be restarted at 11 PM Pacific time tonight (February 19). This will cause a five-minute interruption of Web and e-mail service for customers on that server.
Other servers will not be affected, and incoming mail will only be delayed, not lost.
We apologize for the problem and for the short notice: the restart is necessary to replace a disk in the RAID array.
Update 11:03 PM Pacific time: The restart was completed with less than 3 minutes “downtime”.
