Scheduled Maintenance: IP Renumbering In Progress

We are in the process of renumbering out of our current IP addresses and into a larger block of addresses. The effect of this change will be better routing performance and more room for us to grow and expand our service.
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SSH RSA host key changed

After a review of our security practices brought on by the recent Debian ssh key security issue (which does not affect our FreeBSD-based service), we’ve decided to upgrade the strength of our RSA ssh host key from 1024 bits to the same length that we recommend you use, 4096 bits.

The correct/current RSA host key:

fc:89:a1:64:74:70:a4:82:58:c1:73:4e:72:59:63:56

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Experimental FreeBSD 7 + ZFS + MySQL technology trial

For most of our production servers, we run FreeBSD 6.3, which is a well-tested, stable, and excellent-performing release. However, the FreeBSD world moves on and FreeBSD 7.0 was released earlier this year. The primary benefit to the new version is supposed to be vastly improved performance, ranging from 350% to 1500% faster, under heavy workloads.

Hey, we have some heavy workloads…
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New offsite dead-drop backup service

It’s often hard to think about disaster planning. The thing about all disasters is that they’re really unlikely, but the consequences of winning the disaster lotto are, well, disastrous.

We don’t want anything horrible to happen to our service, we don’t expect anything horrible to happen, and (for the paranoid among us) aren’t aware of any horrible about to happen. Prudence simply dictates that we acknowledge that disasters are possible and take reasonable precautions to ensure that, were our disaster ticket to get punched that we would be eventually able to recover. (We’re talking about large scale the-entire-datacenter-is-permanently-gone-or-unusable disasters here.)

For us, this means keeping heavily encrypted offsite copies of our key databases, all of our custom server source code, and a lot of configuration information. That’s all the stuff we would need to rebuild our service, member and account balance records from scratch. What it does not include is offsite copies of our members’ content. While we would love to be able to do that automatically, there’s so much of it that the expense would be considerable. We’ve chosen instead to allow people to choose for themselves whether they feel that level of additional protection (and cost) is justified. In a lot of cases, it probably won’t be, but it’s something we need to do for our data so we want you to have the option to do it for yours as well.

Therefore, we’ve entered into a relationship with highly-regarded backup provider rsync.net to offer an innovative (we think) kind of offsite backup service for hosted sites and MySQL processes.
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Public and member UI sites scheduled downtime today

We will need to take some of our internal servers down briefly today: a couple of times for about 10 minutes each between 6pm and 10pm Arizona time (1am and 5am UTC).
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Contest to redesign our public website!

If you’ve ever seen our public website, you may have notice that it… (cough) blows. We’d like to fix that but, well, we don’t exactly have an impressive track record of award-winning web design. We’re also chronically short on available time. Thus, we’ve decided to throw a redesign out there as a contest for anyone who thinks they can do a better job. (And if you don’t think you can do a better job, please consider self-esteem classes.)
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Major Reliability Upgrade / Scheduled Downtime

I’m pleased to report that we have completed the roll-out of upgrades to our master database server and front-end servers that will allow fully distributed operation. The primary effect of this is that in the event of a critical failure of our master database, your hosted sites will continue to operate.
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Breaking through the bandwidth barrier

One of the things that we have always wanted to do is deliver bigger bandwidth discounts to our members. Our 1GB/$1 pricing is ideal for sites that don’t use much bandwidth. But we’re painfully aware that as the gigabytes pile up, the costs pile up proportionally.

What if they didn’t?
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PHP Update: Five, finally: fast and flexible!

As many of our members know, we’ve been beta-testing PHP 5 for a really long time. The PHP 5 Beta is now over; PHP 5 has become the default for new sites created on our service.
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Domain prices increasing October 12, renew now!

As you may be aware, most registries have announced they are increasing prices by the maximum their contracts with ICANN will allow. We’ve finally received information about when and how this change will affect us.

On October 12th, our pricing for all the top-level domains we support will increase from $7.50/year to $7.99/year for all domain registrations, renewals, and transfers. All other pricing, including RespectMyPrivacy.COM, will remain the same.
Continue reading Domain prices increasing October 12, renew now!…