SynthaSite will be exhibiting at the ISP Conference in Chicago tomorrow through Thursday. Myself & our VP of Marketing, Randy Almond will be manning the booth and we’re looking forward to meeting with any prospective partners that would be interested in working with us! Please feel free to stop by the booth and introduce yourself if you’re one of our existing users, or if you’re interested in working with us! See you at the conference!

Vinny Lingham
CEO, SynthaSite

We’ve just released the latest set of SynthaSite features. The highlight is that the color palette of many of our styles can now be changed. We were really keen to get this feature out as soon as possible so that we could get your feedback so please let us know what you think! In the future we will make it possible for you to set individual properties of the style so that you can customize the look of your site to your hearts content. We’ll be rolling out many more color palettes over the next couple of weeks so please check back soon for updates.

Another highlight is the File Widget which is useful if you want your site visitors to download a file from your website. We’ve also added map markers to the Google Map Widget. We don’t want anyone getting lost now do we!?

For detailed information about the latest changes and bug fixes please refer to our release notes.

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.

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.

Both the website and Site Builder were updated yesterday.

We always include a number of improvements that are not obvious, but that make the tools and hosting environment better. You can view a list of the tangible updates here. If I were to pick a personal favourite it would be that there are now 24 styles that allow you to change your banner image, something that a lot of you have been asking for.

Other highlights include some excellent tutorials and the ability to invite friends from your existing networks and address books. This means you can help us spread the word about SynthaSite, and in the future you can choose to connect to some of those people (if they agree) from within SynthaSite - doing things like letting them know about website updates and even collaborating on a site together.

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.

We have rolled out new updates to both the Site Builder and our website.

The Site Builder now boasts a bunch of new features which will allow you to add forms, maps, Google AdSense and other widgets and gadgets to your sites. There are new Styles to choose from and it is now easy to manage all types of resources and link to them.

We have also put some effort into making it easier to get going with your first SynthaSite - we have tutorials on how to create, populate and publish your site, as well as Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and searchable support. There are some site and profile management features accessible directly from the website once you have logged in.

You can read the release notes for full detail.

Let us know what you think.

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.

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.

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.