Every now and then, there can be problems or issues or surprises on our side that will produce errors of some sort. When that happens, clients want to know ''what went wrong'' and clients always feel they need to tell us ''you know, my website is important!!!"
We know. We undersatnd. OUR website is important to us as well. :) We frankly think that ALL websites - whether they are Corporate sites on our Gold or VPS packages, or someone's personal T-Shirt collection website on an econo pagkage - those ALL need to be online 100.0% of the time if possible, and that is our goal.
One example of a problem in 2012 was interesting - one of our servers suddenly started producing ''internal server errors'' on a large number of sites. This (understandably) caused concern for the sites owners and for us. That particular error message isn't worded all that well - because it's not really necessarily a real 'server error' exactly, but from the clients standpoint, it still causes concern.
So, for example, if you take a PHP file on a website right now, and if you CHMOD'd the permissions to make it a 777 instead of a 755 or whatever it is now, you would suddenly get the exact same ''500 server error''. Obviously there's nothing really suddenly wrong with the 'server', it's just the wrong permissions on your file that have produced the error. The server is basically saying ''I refuse to run that .php file because it's not secure... and I refuse to give you too many details as to why, because if you are a hacker, that wouldn't be secure either''. It displays as an ''internal server error'', but it's not really talking about the RAM or the CPU of the physical server having any errors. :)
In that particular case in 2012, the 'screw up' was in an automated update in MOD_SECURITY to some settings that were a bit too restrictive. You can think of this sort of like the normal Windows Updates or the Virus Database Updates that your home computer does all the time. Servers do a similar type of thing to keep the Kernal, Applications, Services, Rules, Firewall, etc, etc, etc all updated. In this particaular case, some rules in the MOD_SECURITY module were a bit too restrictive, and that caused some sites to produce these 'security' errors that were not really valid errors. They were ''false positives''. So that wasn't really something we did wrong - it was just a normal update that was too restrictive. Mostly, it caught sites that use FrontPage, PHP/MySQL, or CMS's like Joomla, WordPress, Drupal and things like that. For the most part, it wasn't a problem for most normal .HTML sites, so it didn't affect everything on the servers, but it did hit a fairly wide path and did take some time to figure out exactly what the problem was.
It's funny - we have thousands of websites, dozens of servers, and we manage, tweak, improve, enhance, optimize and update them all the time. It's a constant process of upgrading and improving and managing them, and it's ALMOST entirely invisible to the customers 99.9% of the time. Very occasionally, something in the management, tweaking, improving, enhancing, optimizing, updating or upgrading goes wrong 0.1% of the time, and that's (obviously) what the customers see. The good stuff we do is (by it's nature) should be and is invisible, and any screw ups (by their nature) are really obvious. :)
In any event - I wanted to write this article to say that we do appreciate your business - if you are a $3.99 / month Econo Customer or a $200 / month Dedicated Server Customer. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience that may happen, and appreciate your continued business. :)
ToddC
