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.
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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.
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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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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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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!
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MySQL pricing changes effective 1/1/2007

Since we started, we have never imposed a charge for MySQL processes, choosing instead to fund MySQL out of the general hardware fund provided by the storage charge.

However, as time goes on, MySQL is becoming more of an issue. Not only is each successive release more demanding in terms of CPU and memory, but as time goes by, the things our members are doing with MySQL become more intensive as well.
Continue reading MySQL pricing changes effective 1/1/2007…