Create a free website with Yola

An apology, an explanation and a commitment

In the last 30 days Yola has had far too many incidents of downtime. The engineers at Yola who create the systems and take responsibility for them being up and available find this unacceptable.

Let me highlight the area where we performed worst in terms of uptime – the Published Sites. This means your site that you have created and host with us. In the past 30 days, if you have a live site, it has been unavailable for a total of 3 hours. The longest time it was unavailable was 43 minutes, and the shortest time was just one minute.

As engineers, we take the uptime of your site very seriously, even personally. We are extremely proud when we get to the end of a month and there has been no downtime. It is usually the area where we have the least downtime – because we put an extraordinary amount of effort into keeping your site up and fast. We know what it means when your site is unavailable – it could be at a time critical to your business or personal brand and you could be losing money. When your site is unavailable you feel helpless and frustrated.

As the engineer who takes responsibility for everyone involved in keeping your site up, I would like to apologize to you, explain why it has been such a rough month and tell you what we are doing to make sure it never happens again.

There has been no disaster in our service infrastructure, as you might expect after such a bad month. In fact most of the issues have been unpredicted (and honestly, completely unlikely) side effects of some real, meaningful upgrades to the infrastructure that runs our millions of hosted sites. There is always a very small chance that no matter how well you plan for upgrades to happen ‘transparently’ and professionally, something could go wrong. It feels like we have have been quite unlucky in this regard.

The upgrades we have been doing involve a process of removing our reliance on infrastructure that is known to fail sometimes, so that we are left with infrastructure that can cope when things go wrong and does not cause downtime. But more than once in the last month, that failure-prone infrastructure would fail as we were removing it, causing downtime. For those of you interested in detail, the issues have included operating system failures and network filesystem failures.

Here is a commitment to you.

• Your site’s availability and uptime is our number one priority.
• Your site data is safe and secure. We take care of backing it up and making sure we can recover it in the event of things like natural disasters.
• We will continue to improve your site’s uptime and response time.
• We strive for 100% uptime on your site.
• The same applies to our Site Builder and MyYola, although the uptime of your site will always take precedence over these if we need to make that call.

Please contact me if you have any questions whatsoever.

Lisa Retief
VP of Engineering at Yola

Labels: Operations,Service,Upgrades | 12 Comments »

Yola Silver has landed

It is with excitement that we announce the release of our brand new subscription package, Yola Silver.  In this post I will outline the features included in the package, and then explain how our existing customers can take advantage of special Yola deals to upgrade to Yola Silver.

What’s in Yola Silver?

Yola Silver replaces our existing subscription package, Yola Pro.  It includes all the great features of Yola Pro, plus some great additions, all at the same price of $49.95/year - that works out to about $4.16/month.  Yola Silver includes the following features:

• A credit for a custom domain name so that you can own your own piece of the web (value $19.95 / year)
• Private registration for your custom domain name (optional – value $9.95 / year)
• A credit for a Premium Style to help your website stand out
• Yola Link Removal — the Yola link at the bottom of free styles removed from all your sites
• Create up to 25 sites, get 5 GB of storage per site, and upload files of up to 100MB
• Plus some one-time bonuses:
  • Advertising credits with Yahoo! and Facebook (value $25 each)
  • 10 credits for stock photos at Fotolia (value $10)
  • A credit to make your own logo through HP Logomaker (value $50)

What’s new in Yola Silver?

Let me call out some of the new features we are in including in Yola Silver:

• Credit for a custom domain name + private registration.  You can now get a custom domain name as part of Yola Silver – no need to buy a domain separately any more.  This means that you pay one low yearly price for all these features, without having to renew your domain separately.
  • What if you have an existing domain?  Well, then you can use your Yola Silver domain credit to extend your existing Yola domain for the period you buy Yola Silver for.  We’ll associate your existing Yola domain with your Silver account so that you only have one renewal to remember and pay every year.
• HP Logomaker credit.  Having a logo for your business further helps you to stand out from the crowd.  With this $50 credit and our partnership with HP you’re able to easily create a unique logo for your business.  You can use this on your website, letterheads, business cards… anywhere you need to build up brand recognition!
• Fotolia stock photography credits.  With this release we are also changing our stock photography provider to Fotolia, and we think you’re going to like this change.  We now give you 10 credits, so you can get more images than in the past.  Fotolia credits are also cheaper than our previous provider, so you can get more stock images for fewer credits.

What about existing customers?

For our existing paying customers who wonder how this is going to affect them, don’t fear – you’re in for a treat!

• Existing Yola Pro users.  Existing Yola Pro users will be upgraded to Yola Silver automatically, and at no extra cost.  But that’s not all.  To say thank you for being such loyal customers, we are giving you a 1-year domain credit immediately – again, at no extra cost to you.  You can use this credit to get a custom domain for your site, or to extend your existing Yola domain by 1 year.  (Yes, really – at no extra cost to you!)
• Existing Custom Domain / Premium Style / Yola Link Removal customers.  If you have bought a domain name, a premium style, or link removal from us in the past, congratulations!  You are now a Yola Bronze user!  To thank you for your business, our Yola Bronze customers will be able to upgrade to Yola Silver at a special discount of 30% of the regular price for the first year.  This brings your cost to upgrade to Yola Silver to only $34.95 for the first year!
• Existing Yola Link Removal customers.  As part of the release of Yola Silver, we are no longer going to sell Yola Link Removal as an a-la-carte option.  From now on, if users want to remove the Yola link from their pages, they will have to upgrade to Yola Silver (and get all the great features that come with it!).  But what about those of you who have purchase Yola Link Removal from us before?  Don’t worry – you’re safe.  You will continue to have the link removed from all pages at no extra yearly cost.

And that’s about it from me.  If you have questions or comments about Yola Silver, please let us know below, or head over to our community forum where our wonderful support team will answer your questions in no time.

We hope you enjoy Yola Silver.  Why not check it out now?

Rian van der Merwe
Sr. Product Manager

Labels: News,Product,Releases,Upgrades | 7 Comments »

Save 20% this week on everything at Yola

The seasons are changing, and we’re pleased to announce a sitewide sale here at Yola. For one week only, everything is 20% off. That’s right, everything.

This includes our popular Custom Domain Names (get a .com, .org, or even the new local domains, co.uk, ca and .eu), a Yola Pro account upgrade, Premium Styles and Yola Link Removal.

So if you want your site to stand up and get noticed, now’s the time to stock up – there’s no limit to how much you can buy of domains or styles.  As a matter of fact, you’ll save even more if you buy a multi-year domain plan – for a 5-year domain, you’ll save 36%.  Even if your domain isn’t expiring for a little while,  renew now to take advantage of the savings.

So choose one of the links above, or shop while on Yola and use promo code YolaSave. This offer ends Tue, Mar 30, 2010.

Labels: Domains,Styles,Upgrades | 11 Comments »

Introducing Yola Pro

When we started out, we wanted to bring you the absolute best website building software on the planet. Since then, we’ve come a very long way, and yet we have so much more we want to offer to you. Today, we have announced the launch of our “Pro” package – which is the next phase of Yola, focusing on the needs of small business customers.

By offering enhanced features and tools, such as Premium Styles, advertising credits & bigger file sizes as part of our Pro package, we are able deliver real value for your money – while continuing to offer an extremely robust free option. In creating this package, we’ve made some changes to our free service. With Yola Free, you can create 5 websites with unlimited pages with 1GB of storage per site. This is more storage than most of our users will ever need, but in order to ensure that we can maintain a reliable and robust offering for everyone, we will charge for usage in excess of that. The Pro version of Yola will allow users to build up to 25 sites with 5GB of storage per site, upload files as big as 100MB, and upload HTML files to their site. In addition, Yola Pro customers will get a Premium Style, removal of the Yola Link and over $50 in advertising and stock photo credits. For more info, see the package details and our FAQs.

As a result of these changes, we are able to focus our development resources on the needs of our small businesses customers who are using Yola to promote their businesses. We’re excited to be launching Yola Pro and are looking forward to feedback on how we can improve our offering.

Vinny Lingham
Founder and CEO

I want to thank all our users and customers for all the input relating to the launch of our recent “Pro” package.  Your feedback is very valuable to us.  As a result of all the interactions and feedback from our users, we’re considering making some changes to our offering to ensure that everyone sees the huge value in what Yola is doing.  Thanks for all the productive & constructive comments.

We are a small company and are very passionate about our product and our users, so it’s important that we offer a paid package to meet the needs of a certain portion of our userbase in order to ensure that we can offer a free package to those who cannot afford to pay for it.

Right now, we’re in the process of gathering data and analyzing it.  Once we complete this, we will be in a better position to understand what your needs are and customize our Pro package to suit the needs of our paying customers, without significantly reducing the value of our free package.  In order to maintain a free service for everyone, we do need a small portion of our users to pay for our premium packages to ensure that it’s financially viable.

We really value our community and trust that you will understand that as a startup company, we need to experiment to figure out what works and eventually come up with a win-win solution.

So, in the interim, please be patient as we deliberate – we are working around the clock to understand your needs better so please keep sending us feedback!

Regards
Vinny Lingham
CEO, Yola

Labels: Releases,Small Business,Upgrades | 23 Comments »

Customize your site

We know Yola site owners really like being able to modify and personalize their sites to meet their needs, so we’ve added some new features that provide even more choices. We’ve improved banners and backgrounds, added an option to take out the Yola Link, and added new Styles.

Change your background

We’re greatly expanding the number of Styles that let you change the background of your site. We also added Apply to All, so you can easily use the same background and banner image throughout your site – makes it so simple to update everything at once. To learn more, go to Personalize your Style.

Remove the footer

We love the Yola Link at the bottom of every page, but realize it might not be for everyone. With the new Yola Link Removal feature, you can take out the Yola Link from all current and future sites in your account for only $9.95/year. If you choose to remove it, you can do it from the bottom of your page within the Sitebuilder.

Try out a new Style

Check out two fantastic styles that take advantage of the above new features. They are named Flowershop and Victoria – try them out with the next site you build.

We have lots more features coming to give you even more customization, so check back on the blog, or better yet, join our community.

Labels: Releases,Upgrades | 10 Comments »

Free, high-quality images for your site

iStock Images used in a website

We’ve all heard the expression “A picture is worth a thousand words”. On your web site, the right images can quickly convey your site’s topic and create an impression for your business.  We created this site using iStock photos.

We’re making it easy to get great photos and images for your site, by partnering with iStockphoto. They have an easy-to-search library full of royalty-free (no licensing costs) images. Prices are as low as US $1.00.

As a special offer for Yola users, you can get 5 images for free (from a selection of 30), and 20% off your first order. Sign up with iStockphoto and find some great pictures for your site.

Labels: Upgrades | 4 Comments »

Latest SynthaSite Release

SynthaSite just rolled out another release of new features today.

1) Layouts!
You asked for a way to create more professional looking sites.  We listened.  Click the new “Change Layout” button on the far left of your screen and select from 9 different options!  You can start with a blank page, or use a preset layout with drop zones to give you greater control over your content.  Drag and drop widgets vertically OR horizontally to easily achieve the best look and feel.  You can use the same layout for your whole site, or a different one on each page, as you prefer.  The layouts work with all of our existing styles, so whether you are new to SynthaSite, or an old hand, you can start making use of this feature today.  We look forward to seeing what all you wonderfully creative site builders do with it!

2) A new style!
We have added a new style called “Burlap” which is optimized for the new layouts.  The Burlap style supports custom banner and background images, and there are four beautiful color palettes to choose from.  There has never been a better time to build a new website, or give an old one a “make over”!

3) Searchable help topics!
SynthaSite has always offered tutorials and FAQs, but as we have grown into a more complex, feature rich tool we have recognized the need to grow our library of help files and make them searchable.  Check out our new support page, and use the searchbox to ask any site building questions you have.  If the answer isn’t there – drop us an email.  We will be sure to add it.
Additional features: submit a support query and check the updates online using your private code.  Vote on the most and least helpful topics.  Just read the basics or click through to other related topics if you want to learn more.

We are committed to making site building easier and more fun for all our customers.  We look forward to your feedback on our latest release!

Labels: Upgrades | 25 Comments »

We’re adding new features to SynthaSite

We’re releasing a bunch of new features today and the update is taking a bit longer than we expected.  We’ve had so many new users join us over the past couple of months that its taking a while to update everything.

In the meantime, your published sites are available and we expect to have the site builder available for login soon.  Thanks for your patience.  You’ll love the new features we’re releasing.

Labels: Operations,Releases,Upgrades | 38 Comments »

Improvements to SynthaSite and some downtime

We’re making some exciting changes to our user interface and need to take down the site builder this Thursday (July 10, 2008) between 1am and 4am PST.  During this time, you will not be able to make changes or updates to your sites.  Your published sites will stay up and your visitors will still be able to visit your sites.

Thanks for your patience.  We think you’ll really like the changes we’re making!

Labels: Operations,Releases,Upgrades | 10 Comments »