We are pleased to announce that all of our customers are now eligible for a $25 credit to start advertising with Google AdWords™.
AdWords ads run alongside or above Google™ search results, so you can reach new customers right at the moment when they are searching for keywords related to the products and services you offer.
This offer expired December 31, 2009.
We recently had a server that twice “crashed” and needed manually restarting. We’ve identified the cause of that problem — an apparent bug in Linux kernel version 2.6.26 — and made some changes to ensure that it doesn’t affect our customers again.
However, we didn’t find any information about this problem when searching the Internet, so we’re describing the details here in the hope that it helps someone else.
The “flexo” Web server was unavailable between 9:54 and 10:02 PM Pacific time tonight, March 28. This resulted in an interruption of service for Web sites on that server. (Some e-mail activity was delayed, but no e-mail was lost.)
We sincerely apologize for this problem. We consider this type of failure to be unacceptable, and are looking into the cause of the problem so that we can take the appropriate steps to prevent it from happening again.
Update: The problem happened a second time on March 31 from 6:22 to 6:31 AM. However, the second incident gave our engineers enough details to determine the cause (which we’ve reported in a subsequent blog post), and we have made a technical change that will prevent it from happening again.
We host some pretty high-volume WordPress sites, and one of the questions that occasionally comes up is “How can I make WordPress faster?”. That’s really just another way of saying “What part of my WordPress site is slow?”, which translates to “What requests are using a lot of CPU time?”
This question is surprisingly difficult to answer, particularly because we encourage customers who run busy WordPress sites to use FastCGI and caching. A single FastCGI process can handle lots of different PHP requests, so it’s hard to break down which individual request used what amount of server resources.
To solve this problem, we recently patched our version of PHP to optionally log the CPU time used by each request, even under FastCGI, so we could see what was really happening (patch available here).
What we found was unexpected. On some busy WordPress sites, 20–30% of the CPU time was being used to handle requests for “favicon.ico”. What the deuce?!
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, February 16 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 the next day, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
And Happy Birthday to Charles Darwin, too!
We’ve made a technical change to the way our servers handle SSL connections (we’ve disabled 40 bit and 56 encryption ciphers). The change shouldn’t affect anyone, but we’re describing it here just for the record.
At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time on Saturday, January 31, all of our Web hosting servers (except the “hypnotoad” and “mom” servers) will be restarted. As a result, Web site and e-mail service for some customers will be unavailable for approximately five minutes.
No e-mail will be lost, of course; incoming mail will just be delayed for a few minutes.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. This maintenance is necessary to install an updated “kernel” on our servers, as described in an earlier maintenance announcement.
Update: the maintenance was successfully completed on all servers with less than 5 minutes of “downtime”.
At 11:00 PM Pacific time tonight (January 26), the “mom” server will be restarted. As a result, Web sites and e-mail service for customers using that server will be unavailable for approximately five minutes.
Other servers will not be affected. And no e-mail will be lost, of course; incoming mail will just be delayed for a few minutes.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
We’ve updated our servers with a Perl security bug fix and a Ruby security update.
The updates fix only security bugs, and customers should not notice any changes in how the Perl or Ruby programming languages work.
To celebrate the new year, we’re offering a special deal: a full year of Web hosting service for $20.09. That’s a 76% savings over the standard price of $83.40!
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 for a limited time only, 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 $20.09). So if you have friends who need hosting service, be sure to let them know about this special offer.
Update Jan 23: this special offer has concluded. Welcome to our new customers!
