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.

Customers do not need to change anything, and no data or configurations will be affected.

Thanks for your patience.

Update: The migration is unfortunately taking far longer than expected. Nothing has gone wrong, but the engineer who provided the original time estimate was unfortunately way off. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Update 2: All systems came back online around 9:00 am PST.

Update 1: The server has failed to come back from a reboot. Two engineers at the datacenter are working on it. Stay tuned.

Update 2: Unfortunately, the problems appear to be quite severe – we appear to have a major disk problem. Engineers are restoring to another server in the datacenter, and we should be back up within an hour. However, be advised that we’ll lose data created between 8:53pm and 12:30 pm.

Update 3, 7:45 a.m: We are back online now, on our original server. However, there is a possibility that we may experience more downtime today if it is determined that the disk problem is unrepairable, as that will necessitate moving to another host machine in the datacenter. We’ll have information on that soon.

We’ve swapped our SpamAssassin spam filtering system with a much more sophisticated system called ASSP. Unfortunately, we’re experiencing a temporary resulting problem that prevents users from sending outbound through Birdhouse over SSL. We expect to have this worked out by this evening. In the meantime, please use the Birdhouse webmail systems if this affects you.

If you find that the new anti-spam system is being too aggressive, please let us know of any email senders that have been blocked, so we can train the filters.

Soon we’ll provide you with information on how to train the filters yourself. Stay tuned and thanks for your patience.

Update 6:30 pm: This problem has been solved! Unfortunately, the fix involves making a few tweaks to your SMTP server settings.  The change should be easy and quick. Please let us know if you need a hand making those changes.

In addition, we’ve now documented our shiny new spam controls – please have a look!

Update: This issue was resolved within 10 minutes. All systems are functioning normally.

Update 12:30 pm PDT: All systems are back up and working normally. Again, apologies for the inconvenience.

Note that it IS safe to accept the self-signed certificate and continue with your work.

Virtually all modern 3rd-party / open source PHP applications will run fine under PHP5 without modification.