iPhone e-mail setup instructions available

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.

Don’t rely on PHP file upload permissions

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Brief scheduled maintenance on Saturday, August 11

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

MySQL 5 upgrade complete

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.

Slow server response for some customers (resolved)

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.