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

The Amazon EC2 infrastructure is treating us well; and server load remains constant and under control.

We’ve decided to open the doors to another 1000 signups; joining the 3800 who have already tested out the Tech Preview.

Welcome one, welcome all!

If you want to keep up to date with all the media coverage, a comprehensive list is being assembled here.

An all too familiar problem that Web startups face today is the need to cater for a sudden spike in traffic. We all want the traffic but can we handle the load? Funding a server farm pre-series A can be quite an expense! So when we had the opportunity to register for the Amazon EC2 closed beta we jumped at it.

This the official description of what EC2 offers:

“Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides re sizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud.”

The EC2 configuration that the Technology Preview is running on is rather modest and does not have the ability to scale automatically. Our initial estimate was that we could accommodate up to1500 users. So far, we have signed up 2000 users and have not had to worry about overloading the server. As a result, we have decided to release an additional 2000 accounts immediately.

Going forward, we will be working on improving our server infrastructure so that we can take full advantage of Amazon’s hosting service. We hope to achieve this soon so that we can completely remove the account limitation. We’ll keep you posted…

We have received an overwhelming amount of feedback, suggestions and yes, bug reports. I just want to thank everyone for their contributions. We have not yet been able to reply to each message but please know that your messages are really helping us and that we will try and get back to you as soon as possible.

To make sure that none of this valuable feedback is wasted, we will be publishing a community driven Feature Request List and Product Road Map. You will be able to suggest new features and rate the relative value of the features that are already on the list. We will also publish a list of the known bugs along with their status.

In the meantime, please continue to either post messages to the forum or use the feedback dialog inside SynthaSite.

-Brent

Thanks for sticking with us, the issue has been resolved. There might still be some problems with pages created during the downtime, please create new pages / projects to see if the problem persists.

Special thanks to everyone who gave us such speedy feedback the issue, we greatly appreciate your support and enthusiasm.

Enjoy the preview!

We are currently experiencing some technical difficulties, the problem manifests itself in that users are unable to create pages. We are currently working on the problem and hope to resolve it within the hour. We will keep you posted.

Due to an unprecedented demand, we have decided to add an additional 500 seats to the tech preview. We received 877 registrations within the first 24 hours and with reviews hitting the web, they are just getting faster. We will keep a close eye on the situation, however the registrations will be limited, 1123 at the time of writing. So get one while stocks last!

I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the world of Synthasite. Over the next few weeks and months, we’re going to continue to build upon an exciting base, that we’ve just made public now - as an Alpha Release. Yes, we know it’s not perfect…yet, and we need YOUR help in driving Synthasite to become the de facto standard for Web Publishing. We’re looking forward to building our community of users and developers and your feedback in critical in this.

The Alpha release will give you a taste of what’s to come - and we’re continue to improve things like usability, speed, features & functionality - one step at a time!

I welcome you all to the future of software applications - on the Web!

Vinny Lingham
CEO, Synthasite

Official Press Release Follows:

Synthasite, an AJAX based Web Publishing Platform, emerged today from stealth mode. The 6-person startup based in Cape Town, South Africa was recently spun out from the incuBeta group as a separate stand-alone company that will focus on delivering a world class web based software platform for web publishing, focusing specifically on Widgets and Mashups. Synthasite looks and feels like desktop software, but remains firmly rooted in the browser with no reliance on client side technology.

Synthasite CEO, Vinny Lingham (Founder of a leading Search Engine Marketing company, incuBeta), said the following: “Synthasite’s Alpha [Tech Preview] release today was a milestone in the company’s aim to become the standard for web publishing. We’re releasing it at this early stage in order to allow the community to assist in the direction that we will take Synthasite and we are very excited about the potential for this space, especially with the rapid rise of Mashups and Widgets.”

“Synthasite ushers in a new era for web publishing; where people construct using existing building blocks, rather than build everything from scratch, and publish collaboratively from any machine rather than being stuck on a single PC or OS. We’re very excited about rapidly releasing many of the features on our extensive roadmap. We’re opening the Synthasite framework to the developer community so that they can build their own components and templates, and we will also be enabling source code level editing - although this will only be available in the Beta released, scheduled for Q4.”

Synthasite is also being tested on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, which in theory allows it to be infinitely scalable, although accounts will initially be limited.

Synthasite is currently being seed funded by Lingham Capital, incuBeta and Miombo Capital, all South African based investment firms.