Our business offices will be closed on Monday, September 1 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.
Between 5:11 and 5:46 PM Pacific time today, some people who reach our servers via an “Internet backbone” called Global Crossing (including some Comcast cable customers) were unable to connect to our data center. Other users weren’t affected.
Global Crossing has apparently corrected the problem, and everything is now operating normally. We’ll continue to monitor this issue closely.
Due to software updates on our servers, most Web hosting customers will experience about ten 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:
(The servers named “bender” and “lrrr” have already been upgraded, and those customers are not affected.)
We’ve updated the default version of Ruby on Rails on our servers to version 2.1.0.
Recently, the Web hosting industry has been abuzz with talk of companies trying to outsource their mail service. One of our largest competitors recently announced that because half of their customer requests for help were about e-mail, and because e-mail is difficult to get right, their customers should just use GMail instead.
The problem is that GMail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail and other free mail services have no real support. If you have trouble, there’s no way to talk to the people running the mail system and ask them about individual messages.
The “calculon” Web server needed to be restarted at 1:36 Pacific time today, resulting in a five-minute interruption of service for Web sites and e-mail on that server.
Due to what appears to be a DNS issue at a third party, a small number of messages that weren’t actually spam may have been incorrectly blocked by our mail filters over the last few hours.
We’ve made changes to our system to ignore these errors, making sure no other messages will be blocked.
The number of affected messages was small enough that this wasn’t an issue for most customers. However, if someone tells you they sent a message that was initially blocked with an error message about “red.uribl.com”, but which later went through without problems, this problem was the cause of that.
We sincerely apologize to anyone who had trouble.
If you use the WordPress 2.5 blog software on your site, be sure to upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1 as soon as possible. The upgrade contains an important security fix. (We’ve updated our own blog, and it was painless.)
Although all WordPress users should upgrade right away, we’ve also added a security rule to our servers to try and protect our customers who haven’t yet upgraded. Other people may also find the security rule useful if they use mod_security on Apache Web servers. The rest of this post contains more technical details.
A heads-up if you use Ruby on Rails: We’re going to be upgrading the default version on our servers to 2.0.2 soon. We want to give you plenty of notice, because when we tried upgrading some older test applications, they didn’t work without changes.
The “farnsworth” Apache Web server had an outage lasting approximately five minutes at 11:36 AM Pacific time today, resulting in an interruption of service for Web sites and e-mail on that server. Other servers were not affected.
The problem occurred when the Apache web server process failed to gracefully restart when a new SSL certificate was added. We have discovered why this happened and will take steps to prevent it in the future.
We sincerely apologize to anyone affected by this.
Update: We have added a new automated step to our certificate installation process that checks for problems with SSL certificates, guaranteeing that this problem will not recur.
