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.
If you use the WordPress 2.5 blog software on your site, be sure to upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1 as soon as possible. The upgrade contains an important security fix. (We’ve updated our own blog, and it was painless.)
Although all WordPress users should upgrade right away, we’ve also added a security rule to our servers to try and protect our customers who haven’t yet upgraded. Other people may also find the security rule useful if they use mod_security on Apache Web servers. The rest of this post contains more technical details.
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A heads-up if you use Ruby on Rails: We’re going to be upgrading the default version on our servers to 2.0.2 soon. We want to give you plenty of notice, because when we tried upgrading some older test applications, they didn’t work without changes.
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Starting at 10:14 AM this morning, our elzar server experienced an unexpectedly high server load that effectively made some processes on the server unusable for about 10 minutes.
Web sites using scripts or databases on the elzar server may have seemed unresponsive during that time. Also, any customer hosted on elzar who was reading their e-mail during this time may have felt the system was slow or unresponsive (no e-mail was lost, of course).
Customers on other servers were not affected.
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The “farnsworth” Apache Web server had an outage lasting approximately five minutes at 11:36 AM Pacific time today, resulting in an interruption of service for Web sites and e-mail on that server. Other servers were not affected.
The problem occurred when the Apache web server process failed to gracefully restart when a new SSL certificate was added. We have discovered why this happened and will take steps to prevent it in the future.
We sincerely apologize to anyone affected by this.
Update: We have added a new automated step to our certificate installation process that checks for problems with SSL certificates, guaranteeing that this problem will not recur.
