Our “bender” server encountered had an extremely high load starting at about 1:36 PM (Pacific time) today, and lasting until about 2:00 PM. Due to unusual circumstances, a runaway customer script caused the RAID disk array to become overloaded with writes, causing scripts that write to the disk to run slowly. The server may have seemed slow or unresponsive to customers at some point. We don’t consider this type of event to be acceptable, and apologize for the inconvenience.
We fixed the problem, and modified the server’s settings to hopefully prevent a recurrence. The changes were propagated to all similar hosting servers to protect them as well.
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Starting just after 9AM (Pacific time) today, the “bender” server experienced some very high loads (for about 40 minutes). It seemed to be coming from a combination of severe database, e-mail, and Web server access. Sort of a “perfect storm” of unusual load.
We work very hard to run all of our servers at a reasonable level, with excess capacity to spare. Even though the load was unusual, we don’t consider this type of limitation acceptable. We are reviewing the server’s configuration files to see if we can make changes to avoid this sort of problem in the future.
We are now on Twitter! Our Twitter user name is TigerTech – follow us!
We’re just getting started on Twitter, and will be trying to figure out its best uses for our customers. Please note that if you ever need technical support your best bet is still to use our support pages. You can easily search our support pages using the “Search” box at the top of every page. If you can’t find the answer on one of our many support pages then your next best bet is to send us an e-mail (rather than using Twitter and trying to diagnose a problem 140 characters at a time).
We will be manning our Twitter account during normal phone hours (Monday – Friday, 9 AM – 5 PM Pacific time).
Update January 2011: Our Twitter username is now the more memorable “TigerTech” (we previously used a different one). This post has been updated to avoid confusion.
Some of our customers may have noticed “high packet loss” today from about noon to 12:25 PM (Pacific time). This could make it seem like Web sites hosted on our servers were loading slowly, or even timing out.
The problem has been resolved by our upstream provider, but we are working with them to make sure it doesn’t recur.
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, May 25 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.
An earlier blog post described how several of our customers got their personal computers infected by a new virus that has been spreading across the Internet. Initial versions of the virus spread themselves by reading a Web site’s FTP username and password stored on the PC, then downloading Web pages, inserting an “iframe” tag, and re-uploading the Web pages back to the server. As a proactive measure, we started scanning all uploaded files and stripping out any malicious “iframe” tags.
We are now seeing newer versions (commonly called “Gumblar”) which spread by inserting “script” tags with encoded JavaScript code. Because there are several variations of this approach, and because some legitimate commercial scripts use the same technique to hide their source code, we cannot perfectly identify and strip out these infections. Therefore, we will not automatically strip out the “script” tags from any upload file that looks suspicious.
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We are pleased to announce that all of our customers are now eligible for a $25 credit to start advertising with Google AdWords™.
AdWords ads run alongside or above Google™ search results, so you can reach new customers right at the moment when they are searching for keywords related to the products and services you offer.
This offer expired December 31, 2009.
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, February 16 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.
And Happy Birthday to Charles Darwin, too!
To celebrate the new year, we’re offering a special deal: a full year of Web hosting service for $20.09. That’s a 76% savings over the standard price of $83.40!
Our Web hosting plan includes e-mail accounts, free domain name registration, and free WHOIS privacy (an option that often costs $8.99 or more elsewhere). Get the full details here.
This offer is available for a limited time only, for new accounts or transfers only — so sign up now if you’re in the market for Web hosting service!
This plan is still eligible for our Referral Rewards program (you’ll get 33% of the $20.09). So if you have friends who need hosting service, be sure to let them know about this special offer.
Update Jan 23: this special offer has concluded. Welcome to our new customers!
Our business offices will be closed on Thursday, January 1 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 Friday January 2, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
