Our business offices will be closed on Monday, February 15 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.
After upgrading our systems to PHP 5.2.6, we received reports of an incompatibility with Joomla. Some URLs do not work when Joomla is configured to use “Search Engine Friendly URLs”, but to not have “Use Apache mod_rewrite” turned on.
We’ve investigated this, and it’s caused by Joomla assuming that PHP has a bug that makes it work incorrectly, when in fact it’s supposed to work differently (and is clearly documented to work differently). Older versions of PHP had this bug, but the new version doesn’t.
To help our customers work around this, we’ve “patched” PHP to intentionally reintroduce the old bug for now, thus keeping it “compatible” with Joomla. If you were having trouble with Joomla’s “Search Engine Friendly URLs”, it should be fixed.
We’ll provide more technical details (and a more robust long-term solution) in the near future.
Update: We’ve also reported this problem to the Joomla developers and suggested a solution.
Due to software updates on our servers, Web hosting customers will experience about seven minutes of scheduled maintenance downtime between 11 PM and 1 AM Pacific time starting on one of the following nights, depending on which server your site is on:
We’ve finished upgrading our network so that all of our customer Web hosting and mail servers have full, direct gigabit links to Internet peering points, with no 100 megabit Ethernet segments anywhere. This involved replacing old Ethernet switches and retiring old servers, and now we’re more than ready for the future.
If you use the WP Super Cache WordPress plugin (and you should, if you use WordPress), it has a settings page section titled “Expiry Time & Garbage Collection”. It sets the “Cache Timeout” to 3600 seconds by default, and warns that you should set it lower on a busy site.
That advice makes sense if you have a sudden surge of traffic to a single page. However, if your site is generally very busy across all pages (for example, if you have an archive of hundreds or thousands of posts that are constantly being indexed by search engines), we’ve found that you should do the opposite to improve performance: set it much higher. We recommend setting it to 172800 seconds (which is 48 hours). This can cut your CPU usage in half, which will speed up your site.
On Friday, a problem made our “My Account” control panel system unavailable for about three hours, and caused some other problems as well. We promised we’d follow up with more details.
At approximately 10:00 PM Pacific time tonight, January 16, the “amy” Web server will be restarted.
As a result, for customers on the “amy” server (only), Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes. Customers on other servers will not be affected.
One of the features of our e-mail system is that we add SpamAssassin headers to incoming mail that isn’t whitelisted, as described on our SpamAssassin page.
A bug in the SpamAssassin software caused SpamAssassin scores to be incorrectly calculated for the first few days of this year: the scores were higher than they should have been.
We don’t use SpamAssassin scores as part of our spam filtering system, so this doesn’t affect most of our customers at all. However, some customers may have added custom rules to their mail programs that examine the SpamAssassin headers. If you do that, and you’ve directed high-scoring messages into a spam folder in your mail program that you don’t usually look at, you should look at all messages received between January 1 and the morning of January 6 to verify that they are actually spam.
Just so it’s clear, this bug affected everyone using SpamAssassin with any ISP or hosting company, not just our customers. That said, this bug unfortunately persisted on some of our servers for longer than it should have done, due to a technical issue with the way Debian Linux distributes SpamAssassin updates. We apologize for any problems this caused our customers; the problem was resolved on all servers early today.
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time this Sunday January 3, 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”.
To celebrate the new year, we’re offering a special deal: a full year of Web hosting service for $20.10. That’s more than a 75% savings over the standard price of $83.40 — you’ll save over $63!
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 through January 15 at 5 PM Pacific time, and it’s 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 $20.10). So if you have friends who need hosting service, be sure to let them know about this special offer.
