Brief scheduled maintenance on web04 server January 18, 2013 (completed)

Update: The maintenance described below was completed with less than 5 minutes downtime.

At 11:00 PM Pacific time January 18 2013, the “web04” server will be restarted.

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PHP eAccelerator change for low volume sites

One of the options we offer to speed up busy PHP sites is called eAccelerator. However, eAccelerator doesn’t usually help for low volume sites, so we’ve disabled it by default in those cases. The rest of this post explains more.

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WordPress 3.5

WordPress 3.5 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 WordPress, you can upgrade it from within your WordPress Dashboard.

As a reminder, you should always update immediately when WordPress tells you there’s a new version available in the Dashboard. Don’t let yourself get behind, because it gets more difficult to update smoothly if you’re several versions out-of-date.

PHP 5.3 upgraded to 5.3.20

The PHP developers have announced the release of version 5.3.20 that fixes several bugs.

We’ve upgraded PHP 5.3.19 to PHP 5.3.20 on our servers as a result.

Brief MySQL scheduled maintenance December 22 2012 (completed)

Between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday December 22 2012, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded to version 5.1.66 and restarted. This will cause an approximately 30 second interruption of service on each customer Web site at some point during this hour.

This upgrade is necessary for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.

Update December 22 11:17 PM: The maintenance was completed with less than 30 seconds downtime per server.

PHP 5.2.17 available

In an earlier post, we described how we’re phasing out PHP 5.2.6 in favor of the newer PHP 5.3 series.

Our original intention was to remove the long-obsolete 5.2 series entirely. However, a small number of customers have told us they’re unable to update their scripts to work with PHP 5.3, usually because the script is more than five years old and no newer version is available.

To help these customers, we’re making an extra version of PHP available: version 5.2.17. That’s still an outdated version, but for technical reasons we’re able to support it for a while longer than PHP 5.2.6, giving customers at least six extra months — perhaps even longer — before PHP 5.3 is the oldest version available on our servers.

We still recommend that all customers use the PHP 5.3 series. However, if you’re unable to do that, you can now use our “My Account” control panel to choose PHP 5.2.17 instead:

1. Login to the “My Account” control panel.
2. Click PHP Settings.
3. Choose the Use PHP 5.2.17 option.
4. Click Save Settings.

Our previously announced schedule to remove PHP 5.2.6 still applies, except that PHP 5.2.6 customers will be switched to version 5.2.17 (instead of all the way to the 5.3 series) if they don’t upgrade to 5.3 themselves.

PHP 5.3 upgraded to 5.3.19

The PHP developers have announced the release of version 5.3.19 that fixes several bugs.

We’ve upgraded PHP 5.3.18 to PHP 5.3.19 on our servers as a result.

Mail server SSL certificate renewed

We’ve renewed the SSL certificate on our mail servers (because it was due to expire soon).

Almost all customers shouldn’t notice any change, but if you read e-mail using a secure connection with an unusual mail program that doesn’t handle SSL connections properly, you might be asked to “accept” the new certificate.

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web10 server restarted (resolved)

At 9:45 PM Pacific time November 15 2012, our “web10” server became unstable and we eventually decided to restart it to resolve the problem. This caused a period of about 20 minutes where the server was intermittently not working reliably, then a four minute outage while it restarted.

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web12 server restarted (resolved)

At 11:00 PM Pacific time October 26 2012, our “web12” server experienced a “kernel panic” and needed to be restarted. This led to an 8 minute outage of Web sites and e-mail hosted on that server.

All services are now working normally, and other servers were not affected.

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