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.
Customers on the “amy” server experienced a nine minute interruption in Web site and e-mail service between 5:58 and 6:07 PM Pacific time today (November 16).
Customers on other servers were not affected.
Our “bender” server encountered had an extremely high load starting at about 1:36 PM (Pacific time) today, and lasting until about 2:00 PM. Due to unusual circumstances, a runaway customer script caused the RAID disk array to become overloaded with writes, causing scripts that write to the disk to run slowly. The server may have seemed slow or unresponsive to customers at some point. We don’t consider this type of event to be acceptable, and apologize for the inconvenience.
We fixed the problem, and modified the server’s settings to hopefully prevent a recurrence. The changes were propagated to all similar hosting servers to protect them as well.
Starting just after 9AM (Pacific time) today, the “bender” server experienced some very high loads (for about 40 minutes). It seemed to be coming from a combination of severe database, e-mail, and Web server access. Sort of a “perfect storm” of unusual load.
We work very hard to run all of our servers at a reasonable level, with excess capacity to spare. Even though the load was unusual, we don’t consider this type of limitation acceptable. We are reviewing the server’s configuration files to see if we can make changes to avoid this sort of problem in the future.
We’ve updated the default version of Ruby on Rails on our servers to version 2.2.3.
In a previous post, I talked about how some domain name registrars have been violating the ICANN transfer policy for years, preventing domain name holders from easily transferring domain names.
I lamented the lack of detailed statistics about how many transfers each registrar rejected. However, it turns out that some of those numbers are actually available right on the ICANN Web site.
We’re making a number of changes to our service:
The rest of this post has more details.
We are now on Twitter! Our Twitter user name is TigerTech – follow us!
We’re just getting started on Twitter, and will be trying to figure out its best uses for our customers. Please note that if you ever need technical support your best bet is still to use our support pages. You can easily search our support pages using the “Search” box at the top of every page. If you can’t find the answer on one of our many support pages then your next best bet is to send us an e-mail (rather than using Twitter and trying to diagnose a problem 140 characters at a time).
We will be manning our Twitter account during normal phone hours (Monday – Friday, 9 AM – 5 PM Pacific time).
Update January 2011: Our Twitter username is now the more memorable “TigerTech” (we previously used a different one). This post has been updated to avoid confusion.
Our Web hosting customers who use FastCGI have been seeing extra “500 internal server” errors in their logs and statistics since September 12.
The good news is that this is just a logging bug caused by a recent Apache Web server update. Visitors to your site are seeing exactly what they always saw, and there isn’t any problem besides the incorrect logging.
