Service Restored

March 29, 2008

4:05 pm

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.

Filed under: News, Operations — Brent Viljoen @ 4:05 pm

Problems creating new sites

7:35 am

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.

Filed under: News, Operations — lisa @ 7:35 am

Service disruption within the Site Builder

March 2, 2008

6:22 pm

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 inĀ  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.

Filed under: Operations, Service — lisa @ 6:22 pm

Amazon Web Services Restored

February 16, 2008

3:24 am

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.

Filed under: Operations — Brent Viljoen @ 3:24 am

Amazon Web Services Outage

February 15, 2008

4:07 pm

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.

Filed under: Operations — Brent Viljoen @ 4:07 pm

Auto Save Temporarily Disabled

February 11, 2008

12:30 pm

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.

Filed under: Operations — Brent Viljoen @ 12:30 pm

Deciding Office Server Names

June 19, 2007

11:27 am

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

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 :)

Filed under: Operations — peter @ 11:27 am