We occasionally hear from customers saying “my WordPress site suddenly got so slow it’s unusable”. When we look into these, the usual cause is that:
Update 5:00 PM December 27: AOL has resolved the problem described below. All delayed mail has been delivered, and all services are operating normally.
The PHP developers recently released versions 5.3.28, 5.4.23, and 5.5.7 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5 on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but in the unlikely event you experience any trouble, don’t hesitate to let us know.
WordPress 3.8 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 an older version of WordPress, you should update it from within your WordPress Dashboard.
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.
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.
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 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.
This post is technical, and intended for programmers and security experts — it doesn’t affect our customers.
A few weeks back, one of our hosting customers had a PHP script that would constantly crash an Apache Web server process. We spent a while tracking down the cause, and eventually found a bug in the excellent Apache mod_fcgid FastCGI software that was causing it.
At approximately 11:00 PM Saturday September 28, 2013, the “web06” server will be restarted. This will cause a short interruption of service for Web sites on that server lasting about 8 minutes.
Other servers will not be affected. Mail for customers on this server will be queued and delivered after a short delay.
