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.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.4.27 and 8.0.14 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.4 and 8.0 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
If you use WordPress, and you allow strangers to register for WordPress accounts (which isn’t usually a good idea, but some plugins require it), it’s possible to accidentally configure it so that those new users get created as WordPress administrators. That can happen simply by doing this:
Allowing this is a serious flaw that was supposed to be fixed in WordPress itself some time ago, but the problem still exists.
We don’t think it’s reasonable to ever create new users as “Administrators” by default, regardless of whether you have “anyone can register” turned on. (Even if “anyone can register” is turned off now, it would be easy to turn it on later without remembering to change the default role back.)
To make sure our customers’ sites stay secure, we’ve added some protections against this:
Nobody should notice any changes as a result of this, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or difficulties.
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.
Customers have asked us whether our servers are vulnerable to the recent serious security bug (called “Log4Shell”) in software named “Log4j”.
The good news is that we don’t use the Log4j software anywhere on our servers, and never have. We’ve verified in multiple ways that our servers are not vulnerable to this problem.
That said, we always believe in “defense in depth” when it comes to security, so we’ve also added rules to our web application firewall that will block any IP addresses making attempts to exploit this bug.
Between 5:18 PM and 5:41 PM Pacific time today, our “My Account” control panel was intermittently unavailable. This problem has been fixed and services are operating normally; we apologize for any inconvenience this caused.
