Due to software updates on our servers, most Web hosting customers will experience about ten minutes of scheduled maintenance downtime between 11 PM and 1 AM Pacific time starting on one of the following nights, depending on which server your site is on:
- Friday, August 22 (servers beginning with letter “l-z”)
- Saturday, August 23 (servers beginning with letter “a-k”)
(The servers named “bender” and “lrrr” have already been upgraded, and those customers are not affected.)
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As you may know, we perform nightly backups of each Web hosting customer’s data, including your Web site, databases, log files, and any e-mail stored on our servers. Until recently, however, you usually needed to write to our support team if you wanted to get something restored.
We’re pleased to announce that we have recently made it easier for you to access your backups. Now you can easily browse through all the backups available for your site and retrieve any files using a simple FTP or SSH connection. In addition, our control panel lets you quickly see exactly which backup sets are available.
See our support page for full details.
We’ve updated the default version of Ruby on Rails on our servers to version 2.1.0.
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Around 11:26 AM (Pacific time) this morning, one of our mail servers encountered an unusual load, became unresponsive, and needed to be restarted. This affected our users’ ability to read e-mail and to use our Webmail system for several minutes.
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Recently, the Web hosting industry has been abuzz with talk of companies trying to outsource their mail service. One of our largest competitors recently announced that because half of their customer requests for help were about e-mail, and because e-mail is difficult to get right, their customers should just use GMail instead.
The problem is that GMail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail and other free mail services have no real support. If you have trouble, there’s no way to talk to the people running the mail system and ask them about individual messages.
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Our business offices will be closed on Friday, July 4 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 business day, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
The “calculon” Web server needed to be restarted at 1:36 Pacific time today, resulting in a five-minute interruption of service for Web sites and e-mail on that server.
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Due to what appears to be a DNS issue at a third party, a small number of messages that weren’t actually spam may have been incorrectly blocked by our mail filters over the last few hours.
We’ve made changes to our system to ignore these errors, making sure no other messages will be blocked.
The number of affected messages was small enough that this wasn’t an issue for most customers. However, if someone tells you they sent a message that was initially blocked with an error message about “red.uribl.com”, but which later went through without problems, this problem was the cause of that.
We sincerely apologize to anyone who had trouble.
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, May 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 the next day, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
This afternoon at 3:49 PM (Pacific time), one of the cabinets at our data center tripped a circuit breaker, causing all of the servers in that cabinet to lose power. Power was restored nine minutes later.
Customer Web sites on the calculon, lrrr, and zapp Web servers were unavailable during this time. The ability to send and receive e-mail was also interrupted (no mail was lost, of course). Other servers were not affected.
We pay close attention to the power load in each cabinet to avoid this sort of problem. The previously measured peak load of that cabinet had been 12 amps. Since the circuit allows 15 amps, this issue surprised us (we’ve been using the same setup in the same data center for seven years and this has never happened before). It appears that a combination of several servers experiencing unusually high CPU loads led to power usage beyond what we previously considered possible.
We will take immediate steps to make sure the problem doesn’t happen again, and we sincerely apologize to customers who were affected by this incident.
Update 7:26 PM: We have removed a server from the cabinet in question, lowering the power use.
Update 10:38 PM: We have removed a second server from the cabinet, ensuring that power use is well below any level that could cause further trouble. The problem will not recur.
