Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Tuesday, October 25 2016, each of our hosting servers will be restarted. This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 5 minutes) for each site at some point during this 2 hour period.
We’re receiving reports that some people visiting some SSL sites (including our site) are seeing security errors saying a “certificate has been revoked”.
This is an Internet-wide problem caused by an issue with one of the main Internet “certificate issuers”, a company called GlobalSign, and isn’t specific to us or sites we host. It’s affected many large Internet sites, such as Wikipedia. (Internet news site “The Register” has a report here.)
GlobalSign says the problem will soon be fixed. In the meantime, if your browser allows you to “click past” the warning about a “revoked certificate”, it is safe to do so.
Update 3:13 PM Pacific time: The problem is slowly resolving itself as the bad certificate information expires from “caches” around the Internet, but we’ve temporarily replaced our SSL certificates with new ones to make it stop immediately. This problem should now be resolved.
Between 4:38 and 5:11 AM Pacific time today (September 26, 2016), one of our upstream network providers had intermittent packet loss that may have caused slow performance when accessing our servers.
This problem has been resolved by the provider. Please accept our apologies for any trouble this caused.
Between 9:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Sunday, September 18, 2016, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded from version 5.5.50 to 5.5.52. This will cause an approximately 60 second interruption of service on each MySQL-using customer Web site at some point during this period.
This upgrade is necessary for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.
Update 10:48 PM Pacific time: The maintenance was completed as planned and all services are running normally.
Between 9:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Friday, August 12, 2016, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded from version 5.5.49 to 5.5.50. This will cause an approximately 60 second interruption of service on each MySQL-using customer Web site at some point during this period.
This upgrade is necessary for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.
Update 10:43 PM Pacific time: The maintenance was completed as planned and all services are running normally.
Between 9:50 PM Pacific time August 9, and 10:49 AM Pacific time August 10 (today), a third-party virus scanner we use incorrectly marked some Microsoft Word attachments as being a virus called “Win.Exploit.CVE_2016_3316-1” and returned them to the sender. This affected several of our customers.
We’ve “whitelisted” this virus pattern to prevent this from happening. However, our logs show that many other ISPs are still incorrectly rejecting this “virus pattern”, so you may still see some rejections if you send Word attachments outside our network until the other ISPs also fix it.
We apologize for the inconvenience this caused any of our customers.
Between 8:52 and 9:03 AM Pacific time today (August 10, 2016), some sites we host experienced an interruption of service. The problem is resolved, and will not recur.
Between 9:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Wednesday, May 4, 2016, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded from version 5.5.47 to 5.5.49. This will cause an approximately 60 second interruption of service on each MySQL-using customer Web site at some point during this period.
This upgrade is necessary for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.
Update 9:06 PM Pacific time: The maintenance was completed as planned and all services are running normally.
Between 10:09 and 10:25 AM Pacific time today (April 22, 2016), some customers reported trouble reaching their servers on our sites.
This was caused by a very large-scale network routing problem at a major Internet backbone company. It affected traffic to a significant percentage of the Internet, including Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and others.
Although it was not related to our servers, it affected anyone whose Internet traffic travels over that “backbone” to reach us. (Because traffic to various destinations travels over different Internet “backbones”, different people would have seen different outages.)
The problem was resolved by the other company at 10:25 AM. We apologize to our customers affected by this problem.
The MySQL database software on the “web14” server started becoming intermittently unstable at 4:29 PM (Pacific time). Web sites that use a database (such as WordPress sites) may have experienced problems until the problem was fixed at 5:03 PM.
