Planned downtime for Monday, September 10

On Monday, September 10, 2007 at around noon Arizona time (3pm Eastern, 7pm UTC), we will temporarily shut down our entire network to complete a migration of our equipment to a new datacenter. We anticipate that it will take four to eight hours to complete the move. All our services will be offline during that time.
Continue reading Planned downtime for Monday, September 10…

Declaring independence from spam attacks

I don’t like spammers. At all. In fact, as some may know, I have the dubious distinction of being the original spam fighter.

Spam has come a long way since then, but it’s still a tactic reserved to the lowest category of exploitive, thieving vermin. And we still deal with our share of spam issues at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET.
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Fresh TACOS

We have made our first update to our Terms & Conditions of Service in over a year, moving from version 1.0.4a to 1.0.5. As the version number suggests, it’s a minor update, but as we have done in the past, we’re making an announcement about it just because we don’t want there to be any ambiguity about it. (This is our “attempt to notify you through reasonable means when the TACOS change.”)
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Optional MySQL 5.0 Upgrade (Partially) Available

We have done a lot of testing on making MySQL 5.0 available for our members (and not just because it’s something we want to use ourselves!). We’ve finished our base testing, and the upgrade is now optionally available to most members.
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Domain renewal improvements

Hot on the heels of our last upgrade, we’ve done some follow-on work to fill in the blanks:

• Improved domain renewal/expiration emails.
• More options for domain renewals.
• More power for the Renewal Monitor.

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Interface and API upgrades

We’ve completed a number of upgrades to our member interface and API. We’ve implemented some enhanced reporting features, some help for domain renewals, and DNS API functionality.
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We love our members. I have proof.

We received this in our inbox a bit ago. Somehow it made it past the spam filter, and we just couldn’t turn it away. It’s not “real” spam since they do appear to be a legitimate company, for some minimal definition of “legitimate.” But it absolutely was unsolicited commercial email, and we really would rather not have received it at our operational support address.
Continue reading We love our members. I have proof….

Trying to help RegisterFly refugees

This ICANN link came across my desk today. We’ve been monitoring the situation with RegisterFly, hoping that they would pull it out, but this latest news isn’t too encouraging.

For the rest of March, we’re going to offer RegisterFly refugees looking to get away a break: $6.75 per domain transfers (a 10% reduction from our usual price) for .com, .net, .org, .info, and .biz.
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A lot faster for a lot less money? Who wants that?

We are now officially soliciting beta testers for our new high-capacity high-volume service for static content. It has just gone live and it is not just fast, it is insanely fast. We’re talking ludicrous speed here, people! An experimental download was just clocked at 43 megabytes per second, but real-world downloads will probably be constrained by the size of off-network pipes.
Continue reading A lot faster for a lot less money? Who wants that?…

Offsite Network Status Page

We know that when there is a problem with our services, one of the most important things for us to do is communicate effectively with you about what the problem is and when we expect it to be fixed. Nothing sucks more than being left in the dark.

Ordinarily, we use System Problem Reports on the Support panel in our member interface to let you know about problems with the service. In most cases, this works well.

However, certain categories of outages, like upstream network failures, can render us unable to post such reports, or leave you unable to read them until after the problem is resolved. While such events should be rare, that’s the most important time for us to be letting you know what’s going on.

To that end, we’ve created an offsite network status page at http://status.nearlyfreespeech.net/. This site runs on one of our servers located in Dallas. That server doesn’t depend on our Phoenix hosting cluster at all, and will continue to operate even if everything else is offline.
Continue reading Offsite Network Status Page…