As a result of an error on our part, a small handful of PHP 4 scripts on the “elzar” Web server may have displayed an error message or a blank page for up to 14 minutes today (from 12:48 to 1:02 PM Pacific time in the worst case). The problem has been resolved for any customers who were affected.
This happened because of a mistake we made in an upgrade to our sitewide PHP4/FastCGI configuration file, which our pre-upgrade testing failed to detect. We have added a new check to our automated testing system to ensure this cannot happen again.
We sincerely apologize to any customers affected by this problem.
We’re pleased to announce that our new Webmail pages are available for public “beta testing”. The new Webmail system is a modified version of the popular SquirrelMail software, which has many features the older system lacks.
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The “farnsworth” and “lrrr” Web hosting servers will be restarted at approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time on Saturday October 13, and customer Web sites on those two servers will be unavailable for approximately five minutes. (See “Which server is my account on?” if you aren’t sure.) E-mail service, and customers on all other Web servers, will not be affected at all.
The restart is necessary so we can increase the memory (RAM) on those two servers to 4 GB, as we described here. After this, all our hosting servers will have 4 GB of memory.
By comparison with many other reasonably priced hosting companies, we keep the load on our servers pretty low to start with, so 4 GB is “overkill” probably 99.99% of the time — but we want to cover the other .01%. (Our unofficial motto should probably be something like “Tiger Technologies: We’re paranoid so you don’t have to be.”)
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Update: Note that the maintenance time has been changed from 10:00 PM to 11:00 PM.
In response to customer suggestions, we’ve changed the appearance of Mailman invitation/address verification messages a little. Most notably, the messages now include your domain name in the subject, which should make it easier for people to recognize who you are and why you’re sending them the message.
You can see a sample on our page describing Mailman invitation messages.
In an earlier post, we talked about how we use a monitoring system that forwards test e-mail to other large ISPs, then checks to make sure the message was promptly delivered.
We already check delivery to AOL, Comcast, GMail and Verizon, and we’ve now added AT&T/SBCGlobal and Yahoo mail. We’ll continue to expand it in the future.
An extensive monitoring and alert system is at the heart of our reliability, really; it’s what allows us to know that things are working properly. We can guarantee that if our customers send mail to those ISPs right now, it’s being delivered. That’s something few other companies even bother to check.
We’ve updated phpMyAdmin to version 2.11.0. (In case you aren’t familiar with phpMyAdmin, it’s a Web-based system for managing MySQL databases without requiring you to use the command line; you can find more details on the phpMyAdmin home page.)
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, September 3 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.
In an effort to keep up with the cool kids, I blew this year’s gadget budget on one o’ those fancy iPhones. It’s pretty darn nifty, and now that I’ve had a few weeks practice, I can almost completely prevent myself from collapsing to the floor, sobbing “I spent $600 on a phone! My God, what have I done?!”
Anyway, it turns out that Apple convinced some of you to take leave of your financial senses, too, and you’ve been asking us how to set up your iPhone to read your e-mail. So we’ve spent many hours voiding the warranty on our phone, getting it to the point where we could extract detailed screen shots showing exactly how to set up iPhone mail. If you have an iPhone, give it a try! Our servers handle iPhone e-mail connections just fine — and the connections are fully encrypted by default, making sure your e-mail and passwords stay secure as you roam the world on strangers’ WiFi networks.
If you write your own PHP scripts that allow file uploads, we’ve discovered an unusual issue that might affect you. The “permissions” PHP gives to newly uploaded files aren’t always the same — and a recent change to our servers may have altered the permissions your script sees.
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Between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday August 11, all Tiger Technologies Web hosting servers will be restarted. As a result, customer Web sites, as well as the Tiger Technologies Web site, will be unavailable for approximately five minutes. E-mail service will not be affected.
This brief maintenance is necessary for two reasons. First, we’re upgrading the operating system “Linux kernel” to a newer version for security reasons. Secondly, we’re adding more memory to our hosting servers, so that each server will have 4 GB of RAM instead of the current 2 GB.
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