All Kephart + Associates client web sites that use WordPress are being upgraded to version 3.1.2 this afternoon. This is a maintenance update that fixes a security issue. The issue doesn’t affect any K+A clients, however, we keep all WordPress installations up to date.

Downtime should be less than five minutes for each site.

UPDATE (5:15 p.m. EDT): All sites have been updated and are back online. Thanks for your patience.

Some websites hosted by Kephart + Associates may have been unavailable intermittently this morning due to a failure in the DNS nameservers at our service provider, MediaTemple. The problem began about 10:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday. As of 12:15 p.m. EDT Tuesday, it appears that services have been restored, though there may be some residual issues as the nameservers come back online.

DNS nameservers are a special type of web server that act as a main directory for the web, pointing requests for pages from browsers to the proper web server that holds that page. If the nameservers are unavailable, pages can’t be served properly.

In addition to web pages, this outage may have also affected email service during the downtime, however all email should be delivered once service has been completely restored.

Thanks for your understanding.

Just a reminder that most Kephart + Associates clients’ domain names are registered through us in your company’s name. We handle all of the registration and renewals, and do so at a lower cost than if you registered them yourself, due to quantity discounts.

If you get a notice in the mail about a domain name renewal from a company other than Kephart + Associates, please disregard it. These companies check the list of upcoming domain expirations and send notices to the owners, hoping that you will renew through them (at a higher rate). This also causes confusion at our end. Your annual domain name renewal is part of the overall hosting fees included in your invoice.

If you have any questions, use the Contact form and we’ll clear it up for you!

UPDATE: All sites have been upgraded and returned to normal operation.

All WordPress sites hosted by Kephart + Associates will be upgraded to version 3.1 this afternoon. There may be minimal downtime for each site as files are upgraded. Maximum downtime should be less than five minutes. We will add to this post when all upgrades are completed.

UPDATED (5:40 p.m. EST): All Kephart + Associates WordPress-hosted sites are now running WordPress 3.0.4.

We will be upgrading all WordPress-based sites hosted by Kephart + Associates to version 3.0.4 this morning. This update is considered critical. Downtime per site should be less than five minutes. We’ll post again when all upgrades are completed.