We are happy to announce that we have found one of the major causes of the outages which have been plaguing our websites for the past four months, and have fixed that problem. We are hopeful that no other problems will reveal themselves during the coming days and weeks.

The problem was caused by the way we had installed a WordPress plugin called “miniOrange Login Security”. It was installed on most of our WordPress sites, but for some reason which we have not identified, it was failing to find the SQL database it needed to function correctly, and was continually making calls to the database.

These transactions called the web server to be limited by our host, GoDaddy, for all our websites, and the result was that users were unable to access these sites. We have now removed this plugin and the I/O transactions have fallen dramatically. At the time of writing we have had no errors for the past 73 hours.

We apologise to all visitors who have suffered inconvenience from these errors and sincerely hope they will not recur.