Posted December 31st, 2009	by Robert Mathews	in Blog Highlights, Business Announcements.
To celebrate the new year, we're offering a special deal: a full year of Web hosting service for $20.10. That's more than a 75% savings over the standard price of $83.40 — you'll save over $63!
Our Web hosting plan includes e-mail accounts, free domain name registration, and free WHOIS privacy (an option that often costs $8.99 or more elsewhere). Get the full details here.
This offer is available through January 15 at 5 PM Pacific time, and it's for new accounts or transfers only — so sign up now if you're in the market for Web hosting service.
This plan is still eligible for our Referral Rewards program (you'll get 33% of the $20.10). So if you have friends who need hosting service, be sure to let them know about this special offer.
Posted July 16th, 2009	by Robert Mathews	in Blog Highlights, System Status, Tech Corner. Tags: php.
For the last several years, we've offered PHP versions 4 and 5 on our servers. This made sense when PHP 5 was new: Even though PHP 5 is faster and more secure than PHP 4, a small handful of scripts were originally incompatible with version 5, and we wanted to give customers a choice.
However, PHP 5 is now more than five years old, and the PHP developers declared version 4 obsolete in 2007. All our new customers have been using PHP 5 by default for more than a year, and we've received no complaints about incompatibilities.
No PHP script should require the obsolete PHP version 4 any more. Because of that, we're beginning the process of removing it from our servers.
Posted May 19th, 2009	by Ken	in Blog Highlights, Tales From the Support Team, Tech Corner. Tags: ftp, Gumblar, security.
An earlier blog post described how several of our customers got their personal computers infected by a new virus that has been spreading across the Internet. Initial versions of the virus spread themselves by reading a Web site's FTP username and password stored on the PC, then downloading Web pages, inserting an "iframe" tag, and re-uploading the Web pages back to the server. As a proactive measure, we started scanning all uploaded files and stripping out any malicious "iframe" tags.
Posted April 23rd, 2009	by Robert Mathews	in Blog Highlights, Tech Corner. Tags: logs.
We've added a new feature to hosting accounts: Live, realtime access to the Apache Web server "error log", both in the "My Account" control panel and as raw files you can access through FTP/ssh/etc.
To view the most recent 200 lines of the error log, login to the control panel (having trouble?), click "Statistics and Logs", and look at the new "Web site error logs" section.
To download the full raw error log files, see this page.
Posted April 17th, 2009	by Robert Mathews	in Blog Highlights, Tales From the Support Team, Tech Corner. Tags: ftp, Gumblar, security.
Recently, several customers have told us that pages on their Web sites have been modified without their knowledge. Upon investigation, the customers found their computers had been infected with a virus that steals saved FTP passwords, such as the "Gumblar" or Trojan.PWS.Tupai.A virus.
We've taken a step to protect you against this problem (described below), but it's wise to protect yourself, too.
Posted April 2nd, 2009	by Robert Mathews	in Blog Highlights, System Status. Tags: elzar, linux, status, zapp.
At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time on Friday, April 3, the "flexo", "mom" and "elzar" servers will be restarted. As a result, Web site and e-mail service for some customers will be unavailable for approximately five minutes.
No e-mail will be lost, of course; incoming mail will just be slightly delayed.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. This maintenance is necessary to install an updated "kernel" on our servers, as described in an earlier post.
Update: We're also going to include the "zapp" server in this maintenance to replace a disk in the RAID array.
Update 2: The maintenance was completed with less than five minutes of "downtime".
Posted March 31st, 2009	by Ken	in Blog Highlights, Business Announcements.
We are pleased to announce that all of our customers are now eligible for a $25 credit to start advertising with Google AdWords™.
AdWords ads run alongside or above Google™ search results, so you can reach new customers right at the moment when they are searching for keywords related to the products and services you offer.
This offer expired December 31, 2009.
Posted January 30th, 2009	by Robert Mathews	in Blog Highlights, System Status. Tags: maintenance, status.
At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time on Saturday, January 31, all of our Web hosting servers (except the "hypnotoad" and "mom" servers) will be restarted. As a result, Web site and e-mail service for some customers will be unavailable for approximately five minutes.
No e-mail will be lost, of course; incoming mail will just be delayed for a few minutes.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. This maintenance is necessary to install an updated "kernel" on our servers, as described in an earlier maintenance announcement.
Update: the maintenance was successfully completed on all servers with less than 5 minutes of "downtime".