Public and member UI sites scheduled downtime today

We will need to take some of our internal servers down briefly today: a couple of times for about 10 minutes each between 6pm and 10pm Arizona time (1am and 5am UTC).
Continue reading Public and member UI sites scheduled downtime today…

Surprise WordPress Upgrade

We received a note from Technorati today about a serious security problem with old versions of WordPress, including the version we were running, that is now being exploited on a widespread scale. We’ve thus hastily upgraded to WordPress 2.5. That did cause a brief bit of disruption to the “News & Announcements” portion of our member site, which is now resolved.

If you want to run WordPress, you too may want to check whether you’re running the most current version with the latest patches. Better safe than sorry!

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.
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Bug with MSNBot/1.1

Recently, Microsoft announced the release of MSNBot/1.1, which is designed to save bandwidth and improve their search rankings. We applaud this effort. However, we’ve discovered what we believe to be a bug in MSNBot/1.1.
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Wikileaks: What would you do?

A NearlyFreeSpeech.NET member posted a clip of a news article about the Dynadot / Wikileaks situation in our member forum, asking what we would have done about it.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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…