WordPress “one-click” installer

We’re pleased to announce our WordPress “one-click” installer. Using this new feature in our “My Account” control panel, you can easily install WordPress on your Web site.

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Memorial Day 2011 holiday hours

Our business offices will be closed on Monday, May 30 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.

Comcast routing problems (resolved)

Some Comcast users in California had trouble connecting to some of our servers beginning at around 7 AM Pacific May 21, 2011. Non-Comcast users were not affected at all, and even people who were affected were able to reach some of our servers with no trouble.

This was caused by a technical problem at Comcast, and not related to us specifically. It appears Comcast was incorrectly filtering some combinations of IP addresses and ports in one of their California network routers, preventing their customers from reaching some sites.

The issue was apparently resolved by Comcast at 10:07 AM Pacific time, and we are not aware of any ongoing problems. As always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.

Sites on “farnsworth” server moved to “zapp”

All Web sites on the “farnsworth” Web server have been moved to a new server named “zapp”.

This change was made for reliability; our monitoring systems detected potential hardware problems with the “farnsworth” server earlier today, and the sites were moved so it can be replaced before it causes any problems.

This doesn’t cause any downtime, and customers shouldn’t notice any change — but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Brief scheduled maintenance on pazuzu server (completed)

At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time tonight, May 14, the “pazuzu” Web server will be restarted.

As a result, for customers on the “pazuzu” server (only), Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes. Customers on other servers will not be affected.

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High packet loss for some connections (resolved)

A router failure at an upstream Internet “peer” that we connect to caused high packet loss for some Internet connections between 5:18 PM and 5:28 PM Pacific time.

The packet loss grew worse through that period until it exceeded 25%, which is enough to cause pages to fail to load within a browser’s timeout period if your connection was one of the affected ones. (Connections that go through different routers were not affected.)

Network engineers have routed all connections around the failed hardware until it’s replaced, so the problem is resolved. If your part of the Internet was one of the affected ones, please accept our apologies for the problem.

Service outage May 6, 2011 (resolved)

May 6, 4:43 AM Pacific time: An outage at our primary data center caused a complete service interruption for all customers.

Update 5:08 AM: All services have been restored and are working normally.

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