Between 11:00 PM and 11:30 PM Pacific time this Friday, September 24, some of our hosting servers will be restarted. As a result, some customers will find that Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes at some point during this maintenance “window”.
Even if a Web site hosted with us doesn’t have an SSL certificate, our servers used to accept improper secure SSL connection attempts that start with “https://” instead of “http://” in the beginning of the URL (note the extra “s”). We’re changing that.
We got a couple of messages today from customers who sent e-mail to other people that was rejected — they got an error saying that all our mail servers are listed on the “ReputationAuthority” anti-spam blocklist.
Yikes! We take things like that very seriously — we go to great lengths (some would say extreme lengths) to make sure this doesn’t happen. So we investigated… and it turns out that the ReputationAuthority list actually has a technical problem that’s making it reject all mail from all servers, not just from ours (see complaints on Twitter [1, 2] and elsewhere). People who use that list to block spam aren’t getting any mail at all.
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, September 6 to observe the US Labor Day 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 Tuesday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent issues.
Three of our Web hosting servers (amy, flexo, and leela) experienced high load earlier today that caused some customers to see “503 errors” on their Web sites for a few minutes.
This was caused by an upgrade to the eAccelerator PHP caching system that removed all the cached files at once, which doesn’t normally happen.
The problem has been permanently resolved and will not recur.
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time this Saturday, August 28, all our hosting servers will be restarted. As a result, Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes at some point during this maintenance “window”.
The WordPress folks recently announced that next year’s planned WordPress 3.2 will require at least PHP version 5.2 and MySQL database version 5.0.15. If you use WordPress, you might be wondering if this will be a problem.
Well, “Good news, everyone!” If you use Tiger Technologies to host your WordPress blog, you’re all set: we already use later versions of PHP and MySQL than that.
Our monitoring systems are showing that some people who reach our servers via an “Internet backbone” company called Global Crossing, including some Comcast cable customers, have been intermittently unable to connect over the last hour or so.
This isn’t an outage on our end; these visitors are also unable to reach other sites that Comcast routes through Global Crossing (and not related to us), such as www.globalcrossing.com. It’s something Comcast and Global Crossing need to address.
We’ll continue to monitor this issue closely and post an update when we’re confident that it’s been resolved.
By the way, if you ever find that you’re unable to connect to our servers (or anyone else’s), a very useful site is CheckSite.us. It shows you whether the destination servers are down, or whether the problem is just a local routing problem that isn’t affecting most other people.
Update 9 AM PDT August 13: According to our monitoring systems, Comcast resolved this shortly after our post, and the problem has not recurred in the ten hours since then.
Google FeedBurner is still hammering several of our customer sites with over 5,000 requests for the same URL per hour. We’ve blogged about this before. We’ve also reported it on the FeedBurner Help Group and seen similar reports from others going back to 2008.
Here’s the relevant log entries from a site that FeedBurner hit 5,836 times in one hour this morning (up to 8 times a second). There’s nothing unusual about the site: it’s on a single IP address with a single hostname, and the feed doesn’t change often.
Some sites run a PHP script for every request, so this FeedBurner problem generates high load for no useful purpose at all.
Google: Please fix this. Thanks!
One of the tools we offer our customers is the “wget” program, which can be used to fetch files from other Web or FTP servers.
It turns out that wget has a security bug that needs to be avoided. As a result, the behavior of wget has changed in some situations. If you use wget (most of our customers don’t), you should be aware of this change.
