File server “f1” replacement

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 all been prepped now, and what we’re going to do is automatically migrate everyone during the month of April. If you have affected sites, you can get a specific time for each site from our member interface, and the main sites page will star any site scheduled for an upgrade on your list of sites so you can see at a glance which sites are affected.
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Scheduled Downtime for Friday, November 20

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 almost everything down briefly, just long enough to move it.

The maintenance window will be from 10am to 4pm MST (5pm to 11pm UTC) on Friday, November 20th, 2009.
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A PHP Include Exploit Explained

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 code that people write themselves.

Cleaning up the resulting messes is getting a little tedious and so, even though this is hardly a new exploit, I wanted to write a little bit about what the vulnerability is, how it works, how spammers exploit it, and how to keep your site safe.
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Service & pricing changes finalized

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 plans have now been finalized, and we will begin phasing them in this month.
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Pricing changes incoming

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 “big company” restrictions that come from pleasing investors, debtors, and shareholders. Therefore, all the fees we charge are designed to cover the costs of the resources it takes to provide the service.

One of the things we are running into with our pricing model is that the resource-based pricing we currently use doesn’t take everything into account, and doesn’t always do so accurately. That’s something we need to address.
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Small member interface upgrades

We have a few small member interface upgrades to announce.
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Quick WordPress Performance Tip: Create a favicon

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 of a favicon.ico file.
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PHP 4: Still standing in the doorway, telling everyone it’s leaving

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 we’re taking appropriate, measured steps to curtail PHP 4 support on our network as well. We’ve removed most public references to PHP 4, and using our interface it’s no longer possible to switch a site to PHP 4, only away from it. With that done, we’re not making specific plans to go out and yank PHP 4 out from under our members whose sites are still using it before they are ready.
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Small change to URL processing

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 robust support for very active PHP-driven sites that need to integrate with caching functionality, we have elected to stop doing this. By default, the output of PHP and CGI scripts will still not be considered cache-eligible, but you now have the option to override this using an Expires: or Cache-Control: header if you want.
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CGI/ssh Upgrade

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 ground.

Second, we have updated Perl in the CGI/ssh environment from 5.8.8 to 5.8.9. Despite being a minor-version upgrade, this required the rebuild of nearly 1,000 CPAN modules and dozens of supporting libraries. Thus, we wanted to let people know to be on the lookout for resulting weirdness or incompatibilities. A few CPAN modules bought the farm on this upgrade, and we’ll list those below.
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