May 15, 2010: DR1 Server installed Just a quick note that the new DR1 server is now installed and has passed initial burn-in testing. Like most of our new machines, DR1 has dual quad Xeon cpus and 100mb/sec SATA3 drives, so it's nearly double the speed in every respect than our older shared hosting servers. DR1 is running Apache 2.2.x, PHP 5.2.x and Mysql 5.x, so it will be perfectly appropriate for newer sites not relying on legacy code.

April 13, 2010: PHP 4.x support ending SRO Hosting support for PHP 4.x will be ending as of May, 2010. Tests indicate some clients may still be running scripts which do not work under PHP 5. While we do not wish inconvenience, we can't continue to support PHP 4 as neither it nor its extensions are supported by the authors. We will attempt to contact customers whom we expect to be affected by the end of PHP 4.x support, however it is the responsibility of site owners/managers to keep software up to date and all applications not already updated for PHP 5.2/5.3 compatibility should be updated immediately.

March 24, 2010: Network/server maintenance IMPORTANT: There will be a 3-hour maintenance window this evening from 9:00pm to 12:00am PST for network and server repairs/upgrades.   A primary ethernet switch is being replaced, so all users will experience some network down time.   Two servers also require cooling system maintenance, so these servers may experience outages of up to an hour. Status messages will be posted at http://bk1.srohosting.com during maintenance. 03/25/2010: Maintenance complete.   All servers are online and operating normally.   Thanks for your patience.

January 17, 2010: (3:15pm) Mail recovery One more step in return to normalcy: IMAP folders are being synchronized from the DG1 backup server to DB1. We weighed a number of options for doing such a large transfer without scheduled planning and in the end opted to err to the side of redundancy. ALL mail on the DG1 backup server is being copied to DB1. That means you may encounter duplicate messages and you may see folders/mail which you deleted after Jan 16th return. We appologize for any inconvenience this may cause, however it is the best way to ensure nobody loses mail which was received between the last time they checked mail and the date the server went down.

January 17, 2010: (4:00am) Database recovery In spite of drive array failure, we have made progress in recovering Mysql databases from the DG1 backup server. As installed, DB1 only had data from Thursday, January 14, however new data recovered from the failed MYSQL array is currently being uploaded. This data spans to a few hours before the failure on January 16th around noon. Thank you for your patience during this time. Having a primary and backup server fail within weeks has been a bit trying, however we will continue to work to preserve our customer data to the greatest extent possible.

January 17, 2010: (Midnight) DB1 server installed The DB1 hosting server which was scheduled to be re-installed later this month was installed tonight (Sat, Jan 16 at 10:30pm). This was necessary as the DG1 backup server's MYSQL storage failed unexpectedly a few hours prior. DB1 was fortunately synchronized during testing a few days ago, but there are several days of missing data. It will take some time to determine if/when the missing data on DG1 from the last few days will be restored. News will be updated as data is restored.

January 16, 2010: (6:30pm) Failover server failure Around 5pm this evening, the DG1 (failover) server experienced an unknown problem causing MYSQL database failure. This will cause database driven sites to fail and cause mail authentication errors. Fortunately, we had already finished repairs to the DB1 server and will simply move the installation date forward (to tonight). Status will be updated here as soon as more information is available.

January 4, 2010: Outage Status update All clients on the db1.srohosting.com server should have been successfully migrated to the mirror server ('dg1') by now. For most sites, this was automatic and painless. IMPORTANT: Shared hosting customers not using SRO DNS need to point their domain DNS (A records) to the new server IP '64.235.233.36'. Basically, wherever you see '64.235.233.35', change the last number from '35' to '36'). If you have a dedicated IP address, it will not need to be changed. UPDATE: According to our logs, some customers are still having trouble with IMAP over SSL on the new server. If your mail client is displaying errors, please let us know.

January 2, 2010: Server Outage Due to problems on the DB1 hosting server, customers have been migrated to the DG1 failover server at this time. There may be intermittent outages for some time, so please be patient during the migration process. Please do not hesistate to email support@srohosting.com with any additional information or trouble and we will respond as soon as possible. We will update this news page as status changes. Note: As this is the second failure on DB1 in less than two months, the server is being removed from service and critical components replaced.

November 10, 2009: Outage Status update Repairs have been made to TIG and DB1 servers and customers who were temporarily moved to failover servers have been quickly moved back to their primary server to avoid lengthy database resynchonization issues. We have temporarily suspended mirroring, so if you require resyncronization with the mirror server database (used between 7pm and 11pm November 9th), please let us know as soon as possible. Please be advised, this outage may cause some email to be re-downloaded several times as switching between servers confuses the 'last read' timestamps.

November 9, 2009: Outage Status update We are in the process of migrating customers to backup servers at this time. Some live failover backups were corrupted, so we are doing everything manually and this may take until morning to complete. We thank you for your patience during this difficult time.

November 9, 2009: Outage Status Outages have been reported on multiple servers (TIG, TC1, DB1) beginning at around 3pm this afternoon. Please be advised that we are still investigating the cause and are working to restore customer services to normal.

October 10, 2009: Email delivery failure (resolved) Please note that email delivery troubles reported by many customers (a side effect of the server migration) have been addressed. If you have had reports of "user not found..." or "not in my validrptto..." errors, any email you missed will have begun arriving as of approximately 7:40am this morning.

October 9, 2009: Emergency maintenance IMPORTANT: Due to power infrastructure issues, the previously rescheduled server migration was rescheduled to occur between 11pm and 2am (PST) TONIGHT. We appologize for the short notice, however we will do everything we can to minimize downtime during the move. UPDATE: All servers were successfully moved to the new location by 3:00am Saturday morning and residual effects of moving all servers (dns and email issues) are now being addressed.

August 11, 2009: Network issue (resolved) Our appologies for the trouble some users experienced this morning between 7:30 and 9:00am.  The firewall on DB1 (64.235.233.35) was recently reconfigured to block certain web based attacks.  One of the firewall rules used to do this was inadvertently broken this morning, and this prevented many users from accessing their sites and email.  The server was not 'down', it was simply unavailable from many locations. Please be assured that our security software will be updated today to avoid such a failure in the future.

April 22, 2009: Control panel backups It was reported that a recent glitch in the hosting control panel 'backups' section was preventing manual, 'on-the-fly' database backups. This problem has been fixed as of 04/22, so you should again be able to create and download html and database backups at any time.

February 19, 2009: Easier spam training We have updated our servers to allow simpler spam training. To report spam, you only need create a "Spam" or "Junk" folder (using Webmail or IMAP) and put spam you receive into it. The server learns spam from these folders daily, so just leave spam there for a few days to make sure it gets into the system. This should replace redirecting mail to 'spam-trap' addresses, but external reporting to Spamcop or other agencies is still encouraged. For more spam prevention options, please see the Associated FAQ Reference and be sure to check your webmail (ie: yourdomain.com/mail) 'options' section for additional spam reporting and filtering controls.

August 31, 2008: Power failure A power circuit feeding our racks had an outage this morning. The power distribution unit feeding TIG and DB1 servers experienced a surge, causing a brief outage on the SRO website and a 40 minute outage on DB1 as it corrected disk errors caused by the power loss. Customer sites were briefly re-routed to the DG1 fail-over unit as DB1 completed its disk check, however the outage was not long enough to justify database resynchronization. Some data loss may have occurred between 08:15 and 08:30am. Please contact us if you require database repair or resynchronization.

May 10, 2008: Mail admin fix Qmailadmin was recompiled today to fix broken spell checking and a few other minor bugs. Mail administration login was temporarily disabled during the update, however email delivery was unaffected.

February 20, 2008: Email updates All email servers were updated yesterday to allow several new features including; domain specific SMTP IP addressing and DomainKeys digital signatures (email content and source authentication) for outgoing mail. Mail servers were down for only a few seconds and service was not affected by the upgrade.

February 13, 2008: Software Upgrades Most shared hosting servers were updated this afternoon to install Apache (1.3.41), add IonCube loader and Image Magick (PECL) support as well as tweak FastCGI options. This update required Apache and PHP be recompiled and caused 10-20 seconds of down time while PHP and Apache were restarted.

October 22, 2007: So Cal Fires While hosting services were not directly affected by the California fires, several employees were evacuated and doing business from motels while waiting for mandatory evacuations to end. Evacuations ended as of the first week of November and we appreciated your patience as new hosting orders were delayed during evacuation.

September 22, 2007: Webmail change RoundCube has replaced SQWebmail as our basic webmail program. If you use http://your.domain/webmail, you will now be directed to RoundCube. If, for some reason, you prefer SQWebmail, you can still reach it at http://your.domain/oldmail. Squirrelmail is still available at http://your.domain/mail.

September 15, 2007: Software upgrade Servers running Apache 1.3x have been updated to version 1.3.39 with simultaneous updates for eaccelerator, mod_ssl, mod_security and other security software. Some users may experienced up to a minute of PHP downtime as various PHP modules had to be recompiled before Apache was restarted.

August 5, 2007: Maintenance complete DB1 was rebooted this morning after the addition of a new 100GB primary hard disk partition. The reboot caused approximately 3 minutes of service downtime and caused no data loss.

July 31, 2007: Scheduled maintenance Servers DB1 and DG1 will be rebooted on Sunday August 5th in the early A.M. for primary drive partition resizing which will increase available disk space by over 100gb. The reboot itself will take only a minute or so, however startup disk checks are variable and may take up to 10 minutes to complete.

July 20, 2007: Network Outage A brief network outage occurred when an Equinix employee pinched our Mzima fiber when doing nearby work, cutting off primary SRO IPs. Mzima IPs are used only for shared hosting, so dedicated customers and shared customers with dedicated IPs were not affected. The feed is being rerouted to be "more tech monkey proof".

July 15, 2007: Software update PHP 5.2 is now installed on all shared servers. Customers have the option to use either 4.4.x or 5.2.x. Our implementation of PHP 5.2 requires different file permissions than 4.4, so you may need to contact support for conversion on an existing account. [More info]

July 7, 2007: Greylisting Although we've been experimenting for many months, this week we officially integrated Greylisting into our email system for spam prevention (see 'Mail Botnets' below). For more information about greylisting, please see this Wikipedia entry and this whitepaper. In a nutshell, greylisting delays the first email from any unknown IP address until the sender tries again. Valid SMTP servers always try again. Most bots will not. Bots which do try again will often be blacklisted before they get back. Thus, a very large quantity of bot generated spam is outright blocked. For more details about SRO Hosting spam prevention methods, please read this page.

June 22, 2007: DDos/routing issues At 8:10 this morning, we received notice from network monitors that some IPs were unreachable. We notified network engineers and though there were two more outages, the problem was resolved around noon. These outages appear to have been the result of a DDos attack against our network providers. The attacks were not directed against SRO and technicians were able to mitigate the issue. SRO servers continued operating normally throughout with no data loss. One positive side effect (in a quote from a network provider): "We have allocated immediate resources and directed engineering to upgrade our edge routers to add significantly more capacity and protection for our clients. These changes and upgrades will assure the network can handle over 10 times its current capacity."