Modwest Blog

Email Delays Resolved

Mail on the Modwest shared hosting system is flowing again now. Nothing was lost, but throughout the day yesterday (Friday), incoming messages could have been delayed several hours, webmail didn't work for most customers, and about half the mailboxes we host were totally unavailable for several hours last night.  A blow-by-blow is available on our offsite status page.

At the high-water mark for yesterday's problems, close to 200,000 messages were hung up in the queue, awaiting delivery to customer mailboxes. That included messages coming in to our support team, so it wasn't until late last night that a bazillion support request emails came in. Needless to say, we're a little behind.

The problem, as best as we could tell, was some sort of deadlock issue with our Cyrus IMAP software. The resulting behavior was all the 'stuff the message in a mailbox' processes believed they needed to wait for access to do so. All of them. I can sort of imagine them all politely saying "no please, I insist, you first" to each other, with no deliveries happening at all.

Anyway, the situation is resolved now; not necessarily in a permanent way, but everything is working at the moment and we're monitoring servers closely. Sorry about the trouble.

-JM

E-Mail Delays

We are currently working on an issue that has caused email delivery delays today. For updates, See the Modwest System Monitor at http://status.modwest.com/.

A Holiday Message (and Gift!) from Modwest

Whichever holiday you celebrate, the team at Modwest would like to wish you a happy one! We look forward to serving you in the new year, and as a gesture of our appreciation, have decided to double our disk and bandwidth limits on our shared hosting Value plans and above. The new configurations will be applied immediately and automatically.

Also, some details about our phone support availability over the holidays:

• We'll be closed on December 25th and January 1st
• From December 24th to December 31st, phone support will be available M-F from 9-5PM (Mountain Time)

Naturally, operations staff will be tending to the servers as needed, and email support will be available throughout.

-JM

Howdy! And Network maintenance tonight

An introduction first - I'm John Masterson, a Modwest co-founder and general overseer of Support and Operations around here.

As recently announced in OnSite and our Status Page, we'll be taking our network offline briefly this evening for a router upgrade. This affects "everything": shared accounts, managed servers, and our new VPS accounts. Maintenance begins at 11PM Eastern Time and will last from 15-30 minutes.

This is a vendor-recommended upgrade from Juniper and offers numerous fixes and features, including "80,000 microsecond packet buffers", "ultimate-hop popping", and other network sorcery that ensures continued secure, reliable communication between your visitors' browsers, and our servers.