This post describes a small technical change to the way e-mail is stored on our servers. The change is unlikely to affect anyone and does not affect normal e-mail access at all — we’re documenting it just in case any customer is doing something very unusual.
Last year, we started compressing some stored mail on our servers, and our page about mail storage mentioned that compressed mail files would have a capital “Z” in the filename.
Our servers now compress all new mail, and as a side-effect of that change, compressed files won’t always have the “Z” in the filename. The page has been updated to reflect that.
As it says, we never recommend accessing the raw mail storage files anyway: All mail access should always be done through standard SMTP, POP or IMAP protocols. Doing things that way will ensure that changes the mail storage format won’t affect you.
Between 9:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Friday October 30 2015, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded from version 5.5.44 to 5.5.46. This will cause an approximately 60 second interruption of service on each MySQL-using customer Web site at some point during this period.
This upgrade is necessary for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.
Update 10:25 PM Pacific time: The maintenance was completed as planned and all services are running normally.
The authors of the Joomla software announced today that every version of Joomla between 3.2.0 and 3.4.4 has a critical security bug that allows hackers to take over a site (the bug is known as “CVE-2015-7857”).
The best solution for Joomla users is to update to version 3.4.5 immediately. However, we’ve also added a rule to our servers to protect our customers until they do this. The rule should ensure that if you use our hosting service, “hackers” won’t be able to take advantage of this bug.
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The PHP developers are about to release a major update to PHP, version 7.0.
The main new feature (as far as most of our customers will be concerned) is vastly improved performance. Our testing shows it can run WordPress sites around twice as quickly, lowering the site’s CPU resource usage significantly. Sites that use it will be able to handle close to twice as many visitors per second.
Although a “stable” version of PHP 7 has not yet officially been released, a “release candidate” preview version is available, and we’ve installed that on our servers for customers who want to test it.
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The PHP developers recently released versions 5.5.30 and 5.6.14 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.5 and 5.6 on our servers as a result.
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