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.)
Continue reading Contest to redesign our public website!…

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.
Continue reading Major Reliability Upgrade / Scheduled Downtime…

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?
Continue reading Breaking through the bandwidth barrier…

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.
Continue reading PHP Update: Five, finally: fast and flexible!…

Just say “no” to blog spam

In an earlier blog post, I wrote about some of the benefits we’ve reaped from our facility move. Here’s a cool concrete example of those changes at work.
Continue reading Just say “no” to blog spam…

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…

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.
Continue reading Declaring independence from spam attacks…

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…