We only post on this site when something that might affect Birdhouse services has occurred, or when we’re expecting a planned outage.  Sometimes we go for many months  without posting here. That’s a good thing – it means things are running smoothly!

Everything below this post refers to a service-affecting event.

We’ve recently had some issues sending outbound mail to Comcast users. The issues that caused the temporary blacklist have been fixed, and Comcast has lifted the blacklist.

Birdhouse Hosting will be down for maintenance the evening of Saturday 10/20, starting around 5pm Pacific / 8pm EST. The outage will affect all web and mail services. The length of the downtime is indeterminate (depending on how long the datacenter takes to do their work), but is estimated to last between 1 and 8 hours  - almost certainly on the short side of that window.

All inbound mail will be re-tried by sending servers and will arrive safely once we’re back online.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 datacenter on getting this straightened out. We apologize for the inconvenience.

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