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Maintenance on Thursday morning

We’re beefing up our servers on Thursday (12 June 2008) morning and need to take SynthaSite offline between 1am and 4am PST as part of this upgrade.  During this time, you will not be able to make changes or updates to your sites.  But don’t worry, visitors to your published sites will not have any interruption and will still be able to see all the great stuff you’ve been publishing.

Thanks for your patience as we scale SynthaSite to meet the needs or our ever growing user community!

Labels: Operations | 4 Comments »

Service Restored

The problem that prevented some users from creating sites has been resolved and the service is fully restored.

Our user base has grown substantially over the past few months and we have been working hard to make sure that our infrastructure can accommodate the increased traffic. Last night we unexpectedly reached capacity on one of our servers which is why new users were temporarily unable to create new sites. It is important to note that this issue did not affect existing sites in any way.

Now that we have resolved this limitation we will continue to improve our service with the aim of providing the highest possible uptime and availability. Once again, we apologize for any inconvenience.

Labels: News,Operations | 17 Comments »

Problems creating new sites

We are aware of an issue affecting our service that is preventing some of our users from creating new sites.

Our engineers are working hard and fast to resolve this and will keep you updated.

We take the quality of our service very seriously and problems such as this one are just not acceptable – please accept my apologies if you have been affected by this issue. We will keep you up-to-date and learn from our mistakes.

Labels: News,Operations | 12 Comments »

Service disruption within the Site Builder

Between about 10h00 and 13h00 PST on Saturday 1 March, users trying to create, edit or publish sites would have experienced service interruptions.

This was due to a failure in  DNS (Domain Name Services) that are managed at a third-party service provider.

We apologize for the disruption and want to assure you that we have taken precautions to prevent a recurrence of the problem.

Thanks to those of you who mailed to let us know that you were having trouble – we appreciate hearing from you about all aspects of the SynthaSite experience. In this case we were immediately aware of the problem and acting to fix it, but it is good to know that our users demand excellent service.

The reliability of both our Site Builder tool and hosting service is of utmost importance to us, and we have an excellent team dedicated to constantly monitoring and improving the uptime and response time of the services. We have some exciting plans underway to bring you additional features and reliability that you will be hard-pressed to find at a paid-for service, but with SynthaSite they will remain free.

Labels: Operations | 13 Comments »

Amazon Web Services Restored

The problem that we experienced earlier today with Amazon’s S3 service has been resolved. There is no official notice as yet to explain what the problem was. All functionality has however been restored and site publishing is now enabled. We apologize yet again for any inconvenience caused and assure you that we will be taking steps to ensure that this problem is not repeated.

Labels: Operations | 4 Comments »

Amazon Web Services Outage

We are currently experiencing technical problems that affect our publishing server. Although all sites are safe it is currently not possible to publish any site. This problem is due to an upstream issue with the Amazon S3 service. We are looking into the problem and will let you know as soon as it is resolved. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

Labels: Operations | No Comments »

Auto Save Temporarily Disabled

A number of people have reported problems with the auto-save feature which is why I have temporarily disabled it. I will re-introduce the auto-save once these problems have been resolved. I apologize to everyone who has been inconvenienced by this and will be sure to let you know once the problem has been fixed.

Labels: Operations | 2 Comments »

Deciding Office Server Names

Today we decided on a naming scheme for our office servers. There were a lot of good ideas…

• Dictators
  • Mugabe
  • Castro
• Ice Cream Flavors
  • Strawberry
  • Vanilla
  • Bubblegum
• Famous Net Personalities
  • Larry
  • Steve
  • Kevin
• Cartoon Characters
  • Spongebob
  • Scooby
• Evil Cartoon Characters
  • Skeletor
  • Megatron
  • Mr Burns
• Body Parts
  • Toe
  • Leg
  • Duodenum
• Moons
  • Phobos
  • Titan
• Hot Chick Names
  • Joanna

In the end we all took a vote and… *drum-roll*… Evil Cartoon Characters came out on top.

So we named our first four servers…

• Skeletor (Development Server 1)
• Beastman (Development Server 2)
• MrBurns (Backup Server)
• Megatron (Files Sever)

We’re all quite pleased

Labels: Operations | No Comments »