Large Mail Import

January 2, 2008

Birdhouse is currently importing a very large volume of mail for a new customer. The import process is, unfortunately, consuming a lot of resources and is slowing some services down noticeably. We apologize for the inconvenience; normal system performance should be restored sometime during the day.
Update Jan. 2, 2008: Making progress — we’ve [...]

Data Center Outage

December 27, 2007

The datacenter housing our server is currently experiencing a network outage due to a routing problem. They expect to have all services back online shortly.
 Update: Two minutes later… problem solved

Status Server Moved

September 26, 2007

Welcome to the new Birdhouse Status Server. It’s exactly like the old status server, but relocated to a machine completely unconnected to anything else run by Birdhouse. Therefore, it should now be easy to get up-to-date information on Birdhouse systems even in the unlikely event of a server or DNS outage on our main machines.  Please [...]

Server Upgrade

September 16, 2007

We experienced a 30-minute outage today as we upgraded to a faster server with more memory and storage. Thanks for your patience! The upgrade went flawlessly, and load averages are at their lowest levels ever. Onwards and upwards.

Let Us Install WordPress For You!

August 21, 2007

We [heart] WordPress. But we also consider it essential to keep WordPress up to date as soon as new security updates become available. We have built a custom system to automate this process, so you’ll never need to think about it. However, to take advantage of this system, we need to install WordPress in a [...]

Storage Limits Raised

August 21, 2007

We have raised the storage limit for Plan C from 1,000 to 1,500 MBs. Plan D storage has been increased from 1,500 to 2,500 MBs. These storage increases are automatic; there is no extra cost.

SSL Certificate Renewed

July 30, 2007

We have just renewed and re-installed our GeoTrust SSL certificate, so browsers won’t complain when visiting cPanel or webmail, and mail clients won’t complain about faulty certificates when using POP/IMAP/SMTP. This does not make our services any more or less secure than they were before – it just means that [...]

Shell Access Limited

July 23, 2007

Birdhouse has always enabled shell access for all users by default, primarily to promote SFTP usage. However, this practice has become untenable, primarily because too many users opt for easily guessable passwords. Effective immediately, Birdhouse grants shell access only to selected users, after a trust relationship has been established. Please contact us to request shell [...]

Performance Improvements

July 19, 2007

Our conversion to cPanel 11 is complete, and we’ve done a ton of work over the past few weeks to improve server performance, bring down loads, and further secure the server. Please enjoy our new, improved Birdhouse!

Tip for IMAP Users

June 28, 2007

If you use Apple’s Mail.app with IMAP for your email and you’ve noticed that you sometimes get errors “Could not save Draft,” and that your Sent emails are no longer stored in the usual Sent box, try this tip:
Go to Preferences, Advanced, and use INBOX as your IMAP Path Prefix. Problem solved!
If you find that [...]