New Year’s (2010/2011) Holiday Hours

Our business offices will be closed on Friday, December 31 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, our support staff will be providing 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 Monday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.

AOL e-mail outage December 21 (resolved)

AOL.com had an outage lasting about 3 hours last night (from 11:24 PM Pacific time December 20 to 2:28 AM Pacific time December 21). This problem — a failure of AOL’s DNS servers — affected many people sending e-mail to AOL, and wasn’t related to our service (see this report and this one).

However, if you sent mail to an aol.com address during this time, your messages probably “bounced” with an error saying “Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=aol.com”. If so, you should try sending the message again, and it will work normally. As always, we’ll continue to monitor AOL deliveries closely.

Christmas 2010 Holiday Hours

Our business offices will be closed on Friday, December 24 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, our support staff will be providing 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 Monday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.

Network issues December 12, 2010 (resolved)

Between 2:35 PM Pacific time and 3:03 PM Pacific time, our monitoring systems detected that connections to our primary data center from some locations on the Internet were slow or failing due to problems at an Internet “backbone”. Connections from other locations were unaffected.

We’re waiting for a full report from the data center team, but the problem appears to have been resolved, and all services are operating normally. We’re continuing to monitor it closely, and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this caused our customers.

Mail server SSL certificate renewed

We’ve renewed the SSL certificate on our mail servers (because it was due to expire soon).

Almost all customers shouldn’t notice any change, but if you read e-mail using a secure connection with an unusual mail program that doesn’t handle SSL connections properly, you might be asked to “accept” the new mail.tigertech.net certificate.

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WordPress 3.0.2 update (and mod_security rule)

If you use WordPress blog software on your site, be sure to upgrade to WordPress 3.0.2 as soon as possible. The upgrade contains an important security fix for a vulnerability that allows any WordPress “author” to become an “administrator”.

Although all WordPress users should upgrade right away, we’ve added security rules to our servers to protect our Web hosting customers who haven’t yet upgraded. Other people may find the rules useful if they use mod_security on Apache Web servers. The rest of this post contains more technical details.

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