http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net A blog from the staff at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. Mon, 15 Mar 2010 04:59:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Our venerable old file server "f1" had some problems last month that left us with some doubt as to the viability of its redundant power supplies over the long term. Since then, we've been planning and preparing to migrate all the sites it handles to other, newer file servers. That's ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2010/03/15/file-server-f1-replacement/ We have some facilities maintenance scheduled for this Friday. As part of this maintenance, we will need to physically move a handful of critical file and database servers between racks in our Phoenix datacenter. Since that equipment forms the heart of our hosting service, we'll need to shut ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2009/11/18/scheduled-downtime-for-friday-november-20/ We are having a fairly consistent problem with spammers auto-exploiting a very common type of scripting vulnerability that appears on our members' sites. Unlike most vulnerabilities that stem from a faulty version of some app a lot of people use, this one crops up primarily on sites containing PHP ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2009/11/05/a-php-include-exploit-explained/ Our recent announcement that we were preparing to make pricing changes provoked quite a bit of discussion that resulted in significant improvements to our plans. (Please see both links if you want more information about the rationale and justification for these changes; both have been discussed in exhaustive detail.) Those ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2009/08/01/service-pricing-changes-finalized/ NearlyFreeSpeech.NET was founded with no intention of ever turning a profit. There are no investors to pay off, no debt to service, and no short-term-focused shareholders measuring ROI with three-month horizons. NearlyFreeSpeech.NET exists because I want to provide as many people as possible with affordable hosting free of ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2009/07/18/pricing-changes-incoming/ We have a few small member interface upgrades to announce. Site Canonical Names Site canonical names and types can now be set from the member interface by selecting the "Set Canonical Name" action from the site info panel. No more waiting for support requests! For your information... The site information panel for each ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2009/06/21/small-member-interface-upgrades/ One of our members' WordPress blogs got heavily FARKed a bit ago. Alarms went off, we thought the server was going to crash. That's pretty unusual, of course, so we looked into it and found something really interesting: the blog's performance problem was entirely caused by the lack ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2009/06/16/quick-wordpress-performance-tip-create-a-favicon/ On January 1st of this year, developer support for PHP 4 ended; only PHP 5 is supported these days. Our system still works with PHP 4, and we still have about 32.5% of our active hosted sites running on PHP 4. But its days are clearly numbered, so ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2009/06/09/php-4-still-standing-in-the-doorway/ As many of our members know, our network uses edge technology (reverse proxies) to deliver static content at high speeds. One thing we have always done is ensured that URLs that contain ? or .php or .cgi could not be processed by the reverse proxies. In order to provide more ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2009/03/10/small-change-to-url-processing/ This is just a short note to reflect a couple of upgrades. First, we have upgraded the ssh environment to more powerful hardware in order to allow for continued growth and to make sure scheduled tasks (still coming soon) will have enough resources to run without driving anybody's site into the ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2009/02/13/cgissh-upgrade/