Birdhouse Hosting News and Updates
Note: In the event of a system outage, this News page may not be available. Our status system, however, lives on a completely independent server and will always be available. Please bookmark status.birdhousehosting.com.
Barracuda RBL Added
In our ongoing effort to stomp out as much spam as possible, we’ve added the Barracuda reputation blacklist (RBL) to our arsenal of spam tools. So far, the results have been outstanding – let us know how it’s going for you!
More information here.
emacs installed
We have installed the emacs text editor into the Birdhouse shell environment, for users who want something more sophisticated than nano, and harder to use than vi 
PHP Updated
Apache and PHP were recompiled on Birdhouse to bring PHP support up to the latest stable version, and to ensure that PDO and PDO+mysql support are fully enabled. All PHP-based sites appear to be working normally.
PHP Updated
PHP on Birdhouse has been updated to the latest version. This was a security update, which should have no impact on features or functionality. Let us know if you experience any issues.
Conversion to SuPHP
This weekend we’ll be changing the way customer domains interact with PHP on the main web server. After we make this change, rather than everyone sharing a common PHP process, each PHP request will be owned by the user who owns the files in that directory.
This technique, known as SuPHP, has benefits for both you the customer and us as system administrators. For you, it means you’ll be able to use WordPress’ built-in updater for core, plugins, and themes (among other benefits). For us, it means we’ll be able to see at a glance which Apache processes are consuming a lot of resources – we’ll be able to know immediately who has the busy sites. This will greatly add in trouble shooting.
And for all of us, it means more security.
Your site may experience a brief bit of downtime while this conversion happens. We’ll manually check all sites after the upgrade it complete to make sure all sites are working properly.
Update: This work has been completed and all is well, as near as we can tell. Please let us know if you encounter any unexpected issues with your site(s).
Updated Mail Send/Receive Instructions
Birdhouse no longer recommends or supports making non-encrypted connections to our mail server — SSL connections are strongly recommended, and we will not support users making non-secure connections.
Since we can’t set up a dedicated SSL certificate for every customer domain, all users should configure their mail clients to connect to our main hostname, gong.birdhouse.org. If you’ve been using mail.yourdomain.com as your POP, IMAP, or SMTP server, please change it now. You’ll probably also need to check the port addresses used in your email application.
We’ve updated our POP/IMAP and SMTP FAQs with updated settings. For more information, please see:
POP/IMAP settings
SMTP settings
PHP Upgraded
PHP has been upgraded to the latest version available as of today. If you notice anything not working properly, please let us know.
New spam controls
We’ve made some changes to the way users configure spam controls and manage their spam setups. Read about it on our new Configure Spam Controls FAQ page.
Storage Up, Prices Down!
We’ve just greatly increased the amount of disk storage and bandwidth available to all accounts, and have dropped prices for all hosting plans at the same time. Have a look!
Switching to GMail FAQ
Considering having all of your custom domain email move through GMail rather than Birdhouse? We’ve prepared a guide for that.
