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.
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Customers on the “mom” server experienced a seven minute interruption in Web site and e-mail service between 4:26 and 4:33 AM Pacific time this morning (September 15).
Customers on other servers were not affected.
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Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time this Friday September 11, all our 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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Our business offices will be closed on Monday, September 7 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.
Some of our customers may have noticed “high packet loss” today from about noon to 12:25 PM (Pacific time). This could make it seem like Web sites hosted on our servers were loading slowly, or even timing out.
The problem has been resolved by our upstream provider, but we are working with them to make sure it doesn’t recur.
If you use WordPress blog software on your site, be sure to upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4 as soon as possible. The upgrade contains important security fixes.
Although all WordPress users should upgrade right away, 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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Customers on the “flexo” server experienced a four-minute interruption in Web site service between 9:48 and 9:52 AM Pacific time this morning (August 12).
E-mail was not affected, and customers on other servers were not affected.
The problem happened when the Apache Web server did not respond to a “graceful reload” command when we installed a “mod_security” update to block certain attacks against the WordPress blog software.
We are looking into the root cause of this incident and will take steps to prevent it from recurring. We don’t consider any kind of service interruption acceptable, and we sincerely apologize for the problem.
One of the most frustrating things we deal with is helping customers transfer domain names from other “registrars” (domain name companies) to us. To do this, we ask the old company to release the domain name, and they then have five business days to either release it or reject the transfer.
There’s an obvious potential conflict-of-interest here. An unscrupulous company could easily make more money by rejecting the transfer and forcing the domain name owner to renew it there instead.
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For the last several years, we’ve offered PHP versions 4 and 5 on our servers. This made sense when PHP 5 was new: Even though PHP 5 is faster and more secure than PHP 4, a small handful of scripts were originally incompatible with version 5, and we wanted to give customers a choice.
However, PHP 5 is now more than five years old, and the PHP developers declared version 4 obsolete in 2007. All our new customers have been using PHP 5 by default for more than a year, and we’ve received no complaints about incompatibilities.
No PHP script should require the obsolete PHP version 4 any more. Because of that, we’re beginning the process of removing it from our servers.
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