January 22, 2012
This weekend we’ll be changing the way customer domains interact with PHP on the main web server. After we make this change, rather than everyone sharing a common PHP process, each PHP request will be owned by the user who owns the files in that directory.
This technique, known as PHPSuExec, has benefits for both you the customer and us as system administrators. For you, it means you’ll be able to use WordPress’ built-in updater for core, plugins, and themes (among other benefits). For us, it means we’ll be able to see at a glance which Apache processes are consuming a lot of resources – we’ll be able to know immediately who has the busy sites. This will greatly add in trouble shooting.
And for all of us, it means more security.
Your site may experience a brief bit of downtime while this conversion happens. We’ll manually check all sites after the upgrade it complete to make sure all sites are working properly.
January 14, 2012
We are back online as of early this morning, but to ensure that we are not at risk of further outages from disk failure, we have opted to move our hosting environment to a different physical server in the same datacenter. This will work will take place between midnight and 3am, PST tonight. Customers do [...]
January 13, 2012
Unfortunately, we are experiencing an issue with the main Birdhouse web and mail server that is disrupting all services. We are working on this and hope to be back online soon. Update 1: The server has failed to come back from a reboot. Two engineers at the datacenter are working on it. Stay tuned. Update [...]
January 9, 2011
PHP has been upgraded to the latest version available as of today. If you notice anything not working properly, please let us know.
October 15, 2010
Update: After a month of operation, ASSP was later removed. It was causing SMTP problems for many users, and was somewhat unreliable. We have returned to cPanel’s built-in SpamAssassin configuration. The original information is preserved below. We’ve swapped our SpamAssassin spam filtering system with a much more sophisticated system called ASSP. Unfortunately, we’re experiencing a [...]
October 1, 2010
The datacenter used by Birdhouse servers is currently experiencing a network switch failure affecting all of our hosting services. We’ll update this space with more information when we have it. We apologize for the inconvenience. Update: This issue was resolved within 10 minutes. All systems are functioning normally.
July 26, 2009
The MySQL database engine on Birdhouse has been upgraded from version 4 to version 5. Sites were offline for just a few minutes during the transition. Please let us know if you encounter any issues.
April 8, 2009
All web services are temporarily down, as we compile some additional modules and options into Apache. We apologize for the unscheduled downtime. We’re working to bring service back online as soon as possible. Update 12:30 pm PDT: All systems are back up and working normally. Again, apologies for the inconvenience.
June 22, 2008
While our SSL certificate is currently valid and current, the server suddenly started handing out a self-signed certificate instead. This means users will likely be seeing “untrusted certificate” warnings from their web browsers (when connecting to webmail or cpanel) or from their email clients when using POP or IMAP connections. We’re currently working with the [...]
April 21, 2008
We have completed the process of upgrading Apache and PHP to the latest versions, and everything appears to be running normally. In rare instances, some home-brew PHP scripts may break in unexpected ways. These breakages are generally quite easy to fix – contact us and we’ll take a look. Virtually all modern 3rd-party / open [...]