We have gotten quite a few reports from users on the East Coast that they cannot connect to their Web sites on our servers, to our Web site, or to our e-mail servers.
Analysis shows that the problem is with a network called nlayer.net which is between them and our servers. When you make a connection to a remote server, the connection travels from your ISP, through several different intermediary networks, and finally to the destination network and server. Each of these networks needs to properly “route” the connection to the next closest node to the destination. The current problem seems to be that the data packets are getting lost within the nlayer.net network.
You can verify this by running the command “tracert www.tigertech.net” on Windows, or “traceroute www.tigertech.net” on Mac (Terminal). You’ll see that your packets can get through your ISP, but after they get handed off to nlayer.net the packets get lost. (A line that ends with *** is a failure.)
While you may have a problem in the network route between your computer and our servers, most other people on the Internet use different routes and can continue getting to your site just fine. You can also verify this with third-party sites, such as checksite.us.
This sort of problem is not uncommon, but is usually resolved within a few minutes. It’s up to nlayer.net to fix their routing; we presume they are working on it.
Update 9:56 AM (Pacific time): It looks like nlayer.net has fixed their problem. We see that customers who had been having problems can now reach their Web sites (and our site) successfully. Please note that no incoming e-mail was lost during this. Any incoming e-mail would have queued up for later delivery, and will get redelivered to our mail servers (soon, if not already).
Even though the cause of this problem was out of our hands, we certainly regret the inconvenience that it caused those who were affected.
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday, June 7, each of our hosting servers will be restarted. This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 10 minutes) for each site at some point during this 2 hour period.
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2:49 AM Pacific time: We’re receiving scattered reports of intermittent problems when connecting to our servers from Europe, although all services on our end are working normally.
3:30 AM Pacific time: This issue appears to be a problem within the network of one of our upstream providers. We have temporarily disabled routing network traffic through that provider, and the trouble is resolved.
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday, May 24, each of our hosting servers will be restarted. This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 10 minutes) for each site at some point during this 2 hour period.
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We’ve updated the MySQL database software on our servers from version 5.5.35 to 5.5.37 for security reasons.
Customers should not notice any changes, as the update merely fixes bugs and doesn’t introduce new features. But as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.
At approximately 10:00 PM Pacific time Saturday April 5, 2014, the “web07” server will be restarted. This will cause a short interruption of service for Web sites on that server lasting less than 8 minutes.
Other servers will not be affected. Mail for customers on this server will be queued and delivered after a short delay.
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Between 10:41 and 10:49 AM Pacific time today (March 25, 2014), some MySQL database queries on the web12 server ran very slowly and caused “timeouts” for scripts. (No other servers were affected.)
The problem is fixed, and we’ve added an automated check to prevent it from recurring.
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Update: The maintenance described below was completed with less than 10 minutes downtime per server.
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday March 1 2014, the “web05“, “web07” and “web08” servers will be restarted. This will cause a short interruption of service on each of these three servers, lasting less than 10 minutes, at some point during this two hour period.
Other servers will not be affected. Incoming mail for customers on these servers will not be lost, but will be queued and delivered after the maintenance.
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At approximately 2:45 PM Pacific time February 6, 2014, the Apache Web server running on the web13 server hung and needed to be manually restarted. We fixed the problem at 2:56 PM.
Obviously this sort of problem should not happen. We are monitoring it closely, and investigating it in more detail to try to find the root cause, so that we can take corrective action as necessary to prevent it from happening again. We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this problem.
Over the next ten days (February 7-15, 2014), we’ll be upgrading the MySQL database on all of our servers from version 5.1.72 to 5.5.35. The upgrade requires that each Web server be taken offline for two minutes, causing brief scheduled “downtime”.
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