PHP 4 and Apache 1.3 end-of-life

This is just a short announcement to let people know that both PHP 4 and Apache 1.3 are well past their supported lifetimes from the developers. We’ve been maintaining them internally (updated as recently as last week), but it’s getting more and more difficult; our development resources are not unlimited and our efforts in this area are veering dangerously close to necromancy.

Both Apache 2.3 and PHP 5.4 are on the horizon, and we think it will best support our members if we focus more on developing new technology and less on reanimating zombies.

As a result, we are now warning those customers who are still using server types based on PHP 4 and/or Apache 1.3 that they should upgrade their site type to a newer version (the current default is Apache 2.2 with PHP 5.3) as soon as possible. Anytime after January 1, 2012, we may start performing involuntary upgrades on sites still using these outdated technologies.
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Scheduled maintenance November 22 and December 15

We are scheduling two maintenance windows in the next month to move some equipment:

Date: November 22nd, 2010
Window: 9am to noon UTC (4am to 7am US Eastern, 1am to 4am US Pacific)
Affecting: MySQL nodes m2, m3, and m21

Date: December 15th, 2010
Window: 8am to 1pm UTC (3am to 8am US Eastern, midnight to 5am US Pacific)
Affecting: File servers f2 and f5

Each server should be offline for about one hour, not the whole window. This will cause some downtime. While the MySQL nodes are offline, those MySQL processes hosted on them will be unreachable. While the file servers are offline, sites hosted by those file servers will show an official maintenance page.
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Removing deprecated IP block

Many years ago, we were assigned the IP address block 64.238.220.0/23 by one of our upstream network providers. We officially deprecated the use of that block way back in 2008, and we will be returning it on December 1st, 2010, so it will not work after that point.
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Brief Network Maintenance July 20-22

This is just a quick announcement about some upcoming network maintenance.

Due to our load-balancing capabilities, most of this will be done with no disruption to our services. There are a few exceptions, though. We’ll be doing maintenance over the next few days in the early morning hours (between 1am and 5am US Eastern time — 5am and 9am UTC), the following services will be briefly disrupted (should be about 5-10 minutes each):
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Pools: Arbitrary HTTP Servers, Resource Reservation and Scalability

We are pleased to announce that we are beginning the beta of our new “pools” service. Pools are a way to reserve memory and CPU power for one or more web sites. This approach makes it possible to discard many of the limitations traditionally associated with our service.
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A RespectMyPrivacy discount, a few UI upgrades, and Twitter?

We’ve released a minor update to our member UI with a few new features, one of which is of particular note: a 10% discount on RespectMyPrivacy service is now available in exchange for prepayment.
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File server “f1” replacement

Our venerable old file server “f1” had some problems last month that left us with some doubt as to the viability of its redundant power supplies over the long term. Since then, we’ve been planning and preparing to migrate all the sites it handles to other, newer file servers.

That’s all been prepped now, and what we’re going to do is automatically migrate everyone during the month of April. If you have affected sites, you can get a specific time for each site from our member interface, and the main sites page will star any site scheduled for an upgrade on your list of sites so you can see at a glance which sites are affected.
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Service & pricing changes finalized

Our recent announcement that we were preparing to make pricing changes provoked quite a bit of discussion that resulted in significant improvements to our plans. (Please see both links if you want more information about the rationale and justification for these changes; both have been discussed in exhaustive detail.)

Those plans have now been finalized, and we will begin phasing them in this month.
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Pricing changes incoming

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET was founded with no intention of ever turning a profit. There are no investors to pay off, no debt to service, and no short-term-focused shareholders measuring ROI with three-month horizons. NearlyFreeSpeech.NET exists because I want to provide as many people as possible with affordable hosting free of “big company” restrictions that come from pleasing investors, debtors, and shareholders. Therefore, all the fees we charge are designed to cover the costs of the resources it takes to provide the service.

One of the things we are running into with our pricing model is that the resource-based pricing we currently use doesn’t take everything into account, and doesn’t always do so accurately. That’s something we need to address.
Continue reading Pricing changes incoming…

Small member interface upgrades

We have a few small member interface upgrades to announce.
Continue reading Small member interface upgrades…