Starting at about 1:30 PM (Pacific time) today, some of our internal database systems had an unexpected failure. This lead to problems with our control panel (“My Account”), support site, and blog. Some customers may have also had problems with some aspects of Webmail (in particular, with the address book).
No customer data or Web sites were affected, and no e-mail was lost.
All systems are running again, so no one should see any problems — please let us know if you do! Some things are running on backup systems, so we’re working on finishing up the fixes and restoring everything to its normal status.
This was an unplanned and fairly horrible (and embarrassing) problem. This is the first time our own account management database has completely failed in the 10 years we’ve been providing Web hosting service. Obviously, we consider this sort of thing to be unacceptable, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused.
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One of the features of our e-mail system is that we add SpamAssassin headers to incoming mail that isn’t whitelisted, as described on our SpamAssassin page.
A bug in the SpamAssassin software caused SpamAssassin scores to be incorrectly calculated for the first few days of this year: the scores were higher than they should have been.
We don’t use SpamAssassin scores as part of our spam filtering system, so this doesn’t affect most of our customers at all. However, some customers may have added custom rules to their mail programs that examine the SpamAssassin headers. If you do that, and you’ve directed high-scoring messages into a spam folder in your mail program that you don’t usually look at, you should look at all messages received between January 1 and the morning of January 6 to verify that they are actually spam.
Just so it’s clear, this bug affected everyone using SpamAssassin with any ISP or hosting company, not just our customers. That said, this bug unfortunately persisted on some of our servers for longer than it should have done, due to a technical issue with the way Debian Linux distributes SpamAssassin updates. We apologize for any problems this caused our customers; the problem was resolved on all servers early today.
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time this Sunday January 3, 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”.
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To celebrate the new year, we’re offering a special deal: a full year of Web hosting service for $20.10. That’s more than a 75% savings over the standard price of $83.40 — you’ll save over $63!
Our Web hosting plan includes e-mail accounts, free domain name registration, and free WHOIS privacy (an option that often costs $8.99 or more elsewhere). Get the full details here.
This offer is available through January 15 at 5 PM Pacific time, and it’s for new accounts or transfers only — so sign up now if you’re in the market for Web hosting service.
This plan is still eligible for our Referral Rewards program (you’ll get 33% of the $20.10). So if you have friends who need hosting service, be sure to let them know about this special offer.
Our business offices will be closed on Friday, January 1 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 January 4, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
Our business offices will be closed on Friday, December 25 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.
If you use WordPress blog software on your site, be sure to upgrade to WordPress 2.8.6. The upgrade contains important security fixes. Upgrading is usually easy with the built-in WordPress “update now” feature.
Although all WordPress users should upgrade, 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.
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Our own www.tigertech.net Web site and “My Account” control panel will be unavailable for approximately 15 minutes beginning at 9 PM Pacific time tonight (December 2). We’ll be replacing and upgrading some hardware.
Customer Web sites and e-mail will not be affected at all.
All of our customers are eligible for a $25 credit to begin advertising with Google AdWords. Any customers interested in this offer need to start advertising with AdWords by the end of the month, because the coupon codes will expire after December 31, 2009, and will not be renewed.
Our business offices will be closed on Thursday, November 26 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 Friday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
