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!…

Facility move post-mortem analysis

It has been a little over two weeks since our facility move. I believe at some point we promised some post-mortem analysis of what went right and what went wrong, and here it is.

The outcome of the move is a success. All of our core hardware is in one place, it is all working, and we are in a better position to grow and expand than we have ever been.
Continue reading Facility move post-mortem analysis…

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…

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.
Continue reading Optional MySQL 5.0 Upgrade (Partially) Available…

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.

Continue reading Domain renewal improvements…

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.
Continue reading Interface and API upgrades…

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.
Continue reading Trying to help RegisterFly refugees…

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.
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Revising member support to better support our members.

Here are some eye-opening support statistics:

• About 25% of our members have ever interacted with our support system.
• About 14% of our members have opened more than one support issue.
• Over 50% of our support issues come from under 5% of our members.
• Providing support is our single largest recurring monthly cost line item. That means it costs us more than we pay for bandwidth.
• The cost of providing support is growing at a faster rate than any other cost.

Continue reading Revising member support to better support our members….

Where do we go from here?

We need your help! We have some great ideas about how to make our service better. In fact, we have a lot of great ideas about how to make our service better. On top of that, our members often give us even more great ideas!
Continue reading Where do we go from here?…