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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We’ve finished upgrading all our Web hosting servers to use MySQL 5.0.32, as we explained in this earlier post. The total time that MySQL databases were unavailable averaged about ten minutes per server. Again, we regret any downtime — this was unavoidable for such a major upgrade.
You should not notice any difference in how your site operates. In the unlikely event you have any problems, please contact us by opening a ticket so we can help.
Since about 9:00 AM (Pacific time) this morning, we’ve been seeing network routing problems to some destinations on the Internet that use the “xo.net” backbone. For some customers, this will have the effect of making any access to your web site extremely slow — it may even be so slow as to seem completely non-responsive. Most customers will have no problems.
Our data center technicians are working on this problem. We’ll update this post as soon as the issue is resolved.
Update: This issue was resolved at approximately 10:20 AM, and all systems are operating normally.
This coming Saturday (August 4th), we’ll be upgrading the MySQL database software on all our servers from version 4.1.11 to version 5.0.32 (plus appropriate security updates). MySQL 5 adds many features that customers have requested, and some Web site scripts now require it.
The upgrade will take place between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time (the times will be slightly different for each server). We’ll be making a full backup of all databases on each server before the upgrade, and as a result, customers should expect MySQL to be unavailable for about 15 minutes during this period. In addition, large databases may be slow for several minutes after the upgrade, because MySQL automatically converts databases to the new version format the first time they are accessed, which can be time consuming.
If your site doesn’t use MySQL databases, it won’t be affected at all. If it does, you almost certainly won’t see any effects other than the 15 minute outage. That said, we do recommend checking your scripts for MySQL 5 compatibility.
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We’ve been increasing our mail server capacity lately, and as a result we’ve doubled the number of Mailman messages that hosting customers can send each month. Our Silver plan now includes up to 60,000 deliveries, our Gold plan includes 120,000, and our Platinum plan includes 300,000.
More details about what’s included on each plan are always available on our plans page.
