PHP 5.4.22 and 5.5.6

The PHP developers recently released versions 5.4.22 and 5.5.6 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.4 and 5.5 on our servers as a result.

In the unlikely event you experience any issues, don’t hesitate to let us know.

Thanksgiving 2013 Holiday Hours

Our business offices will be closed on Thursday, November 28 to observe the US legal holiday for Thanksgiving.

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 Friday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.

Brief outage on web04 server November 11, 2013 (resolved)

Between 11:32 and 11:36 AM Pacific time on November 11, 2013, the “web04” server experienced very high load that led to an outage for sites on that server. (Other servers were not affected.)

The high load was caused by a RAID array hard disk that suddenly became very slow to respond to requests. The disk was automatically reset and the server resumed working normally. We’re keeping a close eye on this and doing further testing, and will replace any defective hardware if necessary.

We sincerely apologize to our customers affected by this problem.

Updates: MySQL 5.1.72, PHP 5.4.21, PHP 5.5.5 (completed)

We’ve updated MySQL from version 5.1.66 to version 5.1.72. This upgrade was necessary for security reasons.

We’ve also updated the PHP 5.4 series from 5.4.20 to 5.4.21, and the PHP 5.5 series from 5.5.4 to 5.5.5, to fix several bugs.

These updates should be invisible to customers, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

WordPress 3.7.1

WordPress 3.7.1 was recently released, and as always, we’ve updated our WordPress one-click installer to automatically install the latest version for new WordPress sites.

If you’ve previously installed a version of WordPress earlier than 3.7, you should update it from within your WordPress Dashboard.

The 3.7 series of WordPress introduces a feature that automatically applies security updates and bug fixes without you needing to take any action at all — as the WordPress authors put it, you get “updates while you sleep”. It’s a great new feature.