We saw an interesting problem today. One of our customers’ Web sites uses WordPress with WP Super Cache to (dramatically) improve its performance. Every time the customer posts new content, though, the site is immediately swarmed by search engines, feeds, robots, and other non-humans retrieving the new post. There are a lot of unnecessary duplicate requests, but even excluding the duplicates there are hundreds of requests arriving almost simultaneously.
Unfortunately, WP Super Cache is configured by default not to serve cached results to any request that contains an “equals sign” in the query string — and the plugin that notifies the other sites of new content is including an equals sign.
So rather than being immediately served from the cache, all of the new requests were run through WordPress PHP scripts, driving up the script usage and causing “503 Service Unavailable” errors for up to two minutes on that Web site (not for other Web sites on the same Web server, though; we have protection against that).
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The “elzar” Web server will be restarted at 10 PM Pacific time tonight (February 25). This will cause a five-minute interruption of Web and e-mail service for customers on that server.
Other servers will not be affected, and incoming mail will only be delayed, not lost.
This restart is necessary to fix a memory problem. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Update 10:03 PM: The maintenance was completed with less than 3 minutes downtime.
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, February 21 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.
We now offer Sieve e-mail filtering software on our mail servers. Sieve allows you to process incoming e-mail when it arrives in your Inbox on our server. This is great for anyone who uses a mail program (such as an iPhone) that doesn’t have its own filtering capabilities, or anyone who runs multiple mail programs and doesn’t like having duplicate copies of their filters. It’s also very useful because Sieve filters always run immediately on our server, rather than requiring your mail program to be always running.
If you are happy with the filtering rules available in your mail program (such as Thunderbird, Outlook, or Webmail), then you probably don’t need to use Sieve.
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Between 3:29 PM Pacific time and 3:33 PM Pacific time, our monitoring systems detected that most Internet users could not connect to our primary data center. E-mail delivery was properly queued up and delayed during this period.
We will follow up with 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.
Updated: connectivity was lost for four minutes because the data center was fighting off a severe DoS attack.
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.
Our primary data center had another power interruption this morning at 7:28 am (Pacific time). All of our servers lost power and then had it restored, thus rebooting them. All customer web sites were unavailable during this time. Incoming email would have simply been delayed during the downtime, not lost. When the servers came back online e-mail may have seemed sluggish to some customers for a while but this should also be fixed now.
This incident follows another power incident the previous Saturday night. We are working with the data center to get more details, including an estimate of when they will have replaced any faulty equipment. We will update this post as more information becomes available.
Update Nov. 29: The final data center report is that on the night of November 20, lightning strikes damaged both of the redundant UPS systems, interrupting data center power for a few seconds. The UPS manufacturer scheduled replacements for November 23, but another PG&E utility power interruption lasting a few seconds occurred that morning before it was finished. The UPS manufacturer has since replaced all damaged parts, restoring full redundancy. In addition, the UPS manufacturer has overhauled each unit, replacing and upgrading other parts to increase robustness. We take this very seriously — it’s at the core of what we do — and we will continue to work with the data center to ensure that their infrastructure meets our high standards.
The aol.com mail servers have been having problems for the last 24 hours, according to the AOL blog and the AOL Twitter feed.
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A recently published Firefox add-in named “Firesheep” can be used by “hackers” to easily hijack the connection of any nearby WiFi users visiting many popular Web sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or Hotmail. This vulnerability is a basic artifact of the way the Internet works. In order to prevent this problem, these sites will need to properly implement SSL (https) security.
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Many years ago, Microsoft’s “FrontPage” Web design software was a popular choice for creating small Web sites. However, Microsoft discontinued FrontPage in 2006, and you can’t buy the FrontPage program any more.
Quite a few of our customers are still using FrontPage to design and upload their Web sites, though. We’re starting to see more and more problems from customers who have upgraded to a new computer running Windows Vista or Windows 7 but can no longer run FrontPage. (Sometimes their old computer just suddenly crashes and can’t be recovered.) Their old computer probably had a copy of FrontPage installed by the manufacturer, but their new computer doesn’t.
It can be difficult or impossible to get FrontPage running on a new PC if you can’t find the original installation CDs, or you aren’t licensed to use FrontPage on the new PC. In some cases, the old FrontPage software doesn’t install or work well on the latest versions of Windows. In these situations, you can’t even open the old FrontPage files on the new computer.
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