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.
If you use WordPress blog software on your site, be sure to upgrade to WordPress 2.8.6. The upgrade contains important security fixes. Upgrading is usually easy with the built-in WordPress “update now” feature.
Although all WordPress users should upgrade, we’ve added security rules to our servers to protect our Web hosting customers who haven’t yet upgraded. Other people may find the rules useful if they use mod_security on Apache Web servers. The rest of this post contains more technical details.
Our own www.tigertech.net Web site and “My Account” control panel will be unavailable for approximately 15 minutes beginning at 9 PM Pacific time tonight (December 2). We’ll be replacing and upgrading some hardware.
Customer Web sites and e-mail will not be affected at all.
Customers on the “amy” server experienced a nine minute interruption in Web site and e-mail service between 5:58 and 6:07 PM Pacific time today (November 16).
Customers on other servers were not affected.
We’ve updated the default version of Ruby on Rails on our servers to version 2.2.3.
In a previous post, I talked about how some domain name registrars have been violating the ICANN transfer policy for years, preventing domain name holders from easily transferring domain names.
I lamented the lack of detailed statistics about how many transfers each registrar rejected. However, it turns out that some of those numbers are actually available right on the ICANN Web site.
We’re making a number of changes to our service:
The rest of this post has more details.
