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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A lot faster for a lot less money? Who wants that?

We are now officially soliciting beta testers for our new high-capacity high-volume service for static content. It has just gone live and it is not just fast, it is insanely fast. We’re talking ludicrous speed here, people! An experimental download was just clocked at 43 megabytes per second, but real-world downloads will probably be constrained by the size of off-network pipes.
Continue reading A lot faster for a lot less money? Who wants that?…

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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API New Year!

To help ring in the new year, we’ve been hard at work on a major new requested feature. (Well, several actually, but one at a time….)

We are pleased to announce that the NearlyFreeSpeech.NET API is about to enter beta. What is the NearlyFreespeech.NET API? In a nutshell, it’s a way to control your hosting services from a program or script.
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AWstats bugfix and domain UI improvements

We’ve fixed a long-standing bug with our nfsn-awstats script that caused it to ignore your access_log.old file if you didn’t check your statistics at least once per update cycle, and occasionally even if you did.
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We’ve changed our blog URI

To make it easier to use RSS feeds, which apparently do not travel well via SSL URIs in some cases, we’ve moved the blog to a better location.

It’s now blog.nearlyfreespeech.net. If you subscribed to any RSS feeds, be sure to grab the new addresses for them. (Note that the new addresses are not SSL-enabled, so be sure they say “http://” instead of “https://”.)

CGI/ssh upgrade coming on 11/22

Since we have completed the underlying operating system upgrade in our hosting cluster, we are now in a position to upgrade our aging CGI/ssh environment. The current environment was based on FreeBSD 4, and the new environment will be based on the “latest and greatest” FreeBSD 6. This should have no long-term impact on most members, but if you have compiled your own binaries, they may need to be recompiled once this update is complete.
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News & Announcements moved to blog

The source for our “News & Announcements” feed on the member home page has moved to our new blog, located here. The old forum posts will be maintained for posterity in the support section. We hope this new flexibility will help us keep you better informed about what’s going on with our service.

If you’re currently subscribed to email notifications, that feature is not currently implemented. There is a News & Announcements RSS feed available, and we’ll be adding an email option (possibly through a third party so we can still email you if our service goes down) in the near future.