PHP 5.3 upgraded to 5.3.16

Shortly after we made PHP 5.3.15 available to hosting customers, the PHP team announced the release of version 5.3.16 that fixes several bugs.

We’ve upgraded PHP 5.3.15 to PHP 5.3.16 on our servers as a result.

PHP 5.3.15 available

PHP 5.3.15 is now available on all hosting accounts. It’s the default for new customers, and existing customers can update their PHP version using the “PHP Settings” link in our “My Account” control panel.

If you’re an existing customer using an older version of PHP, we haven’t yet changed your PHP version. However, we will begin doing that in about 30 days (we’ll announce that separately), so we recommend that you upgrade now. That way, if you find you’re using an outdated PHP script that isn’t compatible, you can set PHP back to the previous version and work to update the script. The old PHP 5.2 series will be removed from our servers by the end of 2012.

Read the rest of this entry »

Network attacks July 26, 2012 (resolved)

Today at about 12:26 PM and 12:34 PM (Pacific time), our network was briefly attacked by an extremely high volume of data — a “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attack using forged (“spoofed”) source addresses. The volume of the attack was more than 50 times greater than the usual peak inbound data rate to all our servers combined. This caused Web sites and e-mail we host to be very slow or timeout completely for a few minutes. (All services are working normally now.)

The same attack happened a week ago. Based on what we learned previously, we were able to trace the attack in more detail, and we have identified a specific controversial site that the attackers are targeting. We have moved that site to a different section of our network that can fail without affecting other sites, and we will work with the site owner to move it to a dedicated DDoS protection service.

We apologize for the problems caused by this incident. We know that achieving maximum uptime and availability is important for all of our customers.

System status update – brief connectivity problems (resolved)

We had a couple of brief network interruptions today (at about 8:50am and 12:49pm Pacific time). We are investigating them, and will update this post with more details later.

Updated 2012-07-19 2:23PM Pacific: One of our upstream network providers has traced this to what appears to be some very brief, very high-packet-per-second attacks. The attacks have not recurred, and we are continuing to monitor all systems.

Brief scheduled maintenance for MySQL update March 9, 2012 (completed)

Between 10:00 PM and 11:00 PM Pacific time on Friday March 9, 2012, we’ll be updating the MySQL database software on all our hosting servers. This will cause a Web site service interruption of about 30 seconds for some customers at some time during this period. E-mail will not be affected.

This maintenance is necessary to install a mandatory MySQL security update that will upgrade the MySQL version to 5.1.61. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes.

Update 10:13 PM: The maintenance was completed with less than 30 seconds downtime on each server. Customers should not notice any changes, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions or problems.

Brief scheduled maintenance February 18, 2012 (completed)

On Saturday, February 18, 2012 between 10:00 and 11:00 PM Pacific time, we’ll be upgrading the Apache Web server software on each of our Web servers.

Most customers will not notice anything, but the upgrade will cause approximately 30 seconds of slow Web page loading at some point during that hour as we delay incoming connections at the network level.

This maintenance is necessary to apply security and reliability fixes released by the Apache developers. (We’ve been using the upgraded version on our Webmail servers for several days, so it’s well tested.)

Update: The maintenance was completed at 10:03 PM Pacific time.

Outage December 12, 2011 (resolved)

Between 5:34 PM and 6:10 PM Pacific time December 12, many customers experienced a complete outage of their sites (and of our own www.tigertech.net and mail.tigertech.net sites).

This was caused by the failure of a hardware Ethernet switch in one of our server cabinets, cutting off all access to the servers that plug into it. The Ethernet switch began working after being physically unplugged and plugged in again, but since we do not know why it failed, it will be completely replaced tonight as a result of this incident.

This is the same model of Ethernet switch that we’ve been using in all our cabinets for years, so we don’t believe it is a general problem with the hardware in question.

We sincerely apologize for this incident. We take reliability seriously, and we don’t consider it acceptable.

Update 1:20 AM: The failed Ethernet switch was replaced with no further downtime.

New data center status 2011-10-03

Our previously-announced move to the new data center is continuing. The old data center was hit with a lot of network attacks throughout the day today. We are very glad to be moving to the new center!

E-mail should be fully working for everyone. Many customers have been moved to the new data center, and we’ll be continuing to move the remaining sites as quickly as possible (while of course being very careful about data integrity and site uptime). Sites which have not yet been moved are still working at the old data center. The old data center has been up for several hours now with only very occasional interruptions (due to attacks). They might still experience occasional bouts of downtime if the attacks continue.

If you want to know if your Web site has been moved to a server at the new data center, please see the update at the bottom of this page.

Network problems for some connections (resolved)

Between 10:32 AM and 10:47 AM Pacific time this morning (October 3), our monitoring systems detected high “packet loss” from one “network backbone”, which may have caused slow connections or timeouts for some customers. The monitoring systems show that this issue is resolved.

Short scheduled maintenance (completed)

The data center that experienced network problems earlier today has just informed us that they’ll be performing emergency maintenance on all their network routers tonight (Thursday, September 29, 2011) between 6:00 and 7:00 PM Pacific time.

During that hour, there may be up to five minutes total of network connectivity problems that makes some sites load slowly or fail to load.

Read the rest of this entry »