Monday, January 26 2009
By Joe on Monday, January 26 2009, 15:52 - Moonfruit in the news
Yes I know that's too many acronyms, but hey, sometimes it happens. Being regular moonfruitlougers, it's probably nothing you don't know, but thought it might still be worth a read. Here you go;
We were also selected as website of the day by these guys!
http://m.pocket-lint.co.uk/news/news.phtml/20671/21695/design-build-host-great-websites.phtml
Thursday, January 15 2009
By Walt on Thursday, January 15 2009, 17:21 - SiteMaker features
Another year, another Rambo movie (yawn), another Pixar movie - Wall-E (nice), and another Batman movie (yeah!!!). So what else is 'same, same but different', as they say in Thailand, this year? A year on and it was time to revisit our favourite taxi company - Joe's West London Taxis - and see how it was doing in the Search Engine rankings.
Thursday, January 1 2009
By Walt on Thursday, January 1 2009, 00:15 - General chat
Wow, what a year it's been. When we sat down and looked back at what he had done this year we were quite surprised. So we thought we'd give you a summary of all the changes and improvements we made to SiteMaker during 2008, as we'd even forgotten about a few of them ourselves!
Here they are in the order they arrived. My haven't we been busy...
Tuesday, December 16 2008
By Joe on Tuesday, December 16 2008, 15:40 - Release notes
So this is Christmas (laaa, laaa, laaa, laaa), and what have we learned (laaa, laaa, laaa, laaa), another year older (laaa, laaa, laaa, laaa), etc. In fact speaking of another year older, as 2009 approaches we'll be entering our 10th year of moonfruiting, so not bad going for the old website builder.
Anyway, you don't want to hear about that, you're interested in Santa's Goodie bag, or should I say Google bag...
Friday, November 28 2008
By Joe on Friday, November 28 2008, 16:53 - General chat
Who'd have thought it but we're rapidly approaching 2,000,000 websites built using SiteMaker. We are of course very proud of this achievement and it goes to show how many people have been touched by Moonfruit SiteMaker and how many customers have been able to create a website beyond their expectations using our award winning website builder. But enough about us, this is about you. You're the ones building the sites, so we wanted to give something back, like a Xmas bonus...
Wednesday, November 26 2008
By Walt on Wednesday, November 26 2008, 19:27 - Technical info
So you're now the proud owner of a domain name or you've been one for while and you want to set up your email so that you can access it on line.
It's all pretty easy with webmail, you just have to remember to use your mailbox name and not an alias to log in. There are a few other rules but we'll cover those below. So if you need some help, have a problem to solve or you're just curious please read on...
By Walt on Wednesday, November 26 2008, 10:40 - Service status
What Happened
Yesterday we suffered two incidents, one starting at 12:52 GMT lasting for 13 minutes resulting in very slow response times and another one starting at 15:32 GMT lasting for 1hr 40 minutes, which included some periods of full loss of service.
Service was restored to normal at 17:12 GMT and all sites were up and running with normal response times.
Tuesday, November 18 2008
By Joe on Tuesday, November 18 2008, 17:10 - Moonfruit history
There's been lots of talk of impending global doom and recession following the financial crisis in the developed world, but what does it all mean for you? I think as consumers we're starting to 'feel' the impact a bit more with sales decline, job losses etc., starting to affect more people. In the UK the Federation of Small Businesses has suggested we "use the internet to increase sales during the downturn", which we're seeing in our results as more and more people are buying sites with Moonfruit to start trading online.
Tuesday, November 11 2008
By Joe on Tuesday, November 11 2008, 13:03 - General chat
More and more people are making a living out of Moonfruit as professional web designers. Once people discover how easy it is to do, they realise that they can do it, not just for themselves, but for others also. And they can make money ;-). So we thought we'd give you a bit more information on what life is like as a Moonfruit Reseller.
Alistair at SDDesigns joined Moonfruit in June 2006 and has been designing sites ever since with clients in the UK, US and Portugal. He was kind enough to answer a few questions for us...
Thursday, November 6 2008
By Walt on Thursday, November 6 2008, 18:05 - Technical info
So you've bought a domain name through Moonfruit, or maybe you've transferred your domain in to us. You want to know how to set it up with Outlook? Or perhaps Mac Mail or even Thunderbird. Any email client (application) that supports POP3 or IMAP (and SMTP) will permit you to set up an account to send and receive emails.
It's fairly straightforward (although using Webmail is even easier) but there are a couple of things you have to watch for. You may find you can't send emails (although receiving is OK) or you find you're sending emails OK but you just don't see them turning up in your Inbox. So, if you need some help, have a problem to solve or you're just curious please read on...
Saturday, November 1 2008
By Joe on Saturday, November 1 2008, 16:44 - Moonfruit history
It's been over 2 years since we moved into our new office, which we're already growing out of, but we thought it might be nice to share a little more about the Moonfruit team and what we get up to day to day.
Friday, October 31 2008
By Walt on Friday, October 31 2008, 18:35 - Service status
At 16:42 on the 29th October we were alerted to the fact our main file server appeared to be offline. This meant that customers' uploaded files were unavailable. Once it was confirmed that the file server was not accessible, we immediately instigated our recovery plan and brought the standby file server online. We then attached the network storage to it, thus restoring access to customer uploaded files. Services were brought back up by 17:32.
On further investigation, we noticed that the server detected that it had entered an inconsistent state and as a result, halted itself as a safety measure. This an extremely rare occurrence and is the first time we have encountered this behaviour since SiteMaker began. However, this is the reason we have redundant hardware enabling us to quickly fail over to our standby system and recover services rapidly.
As a precaution, we have updated the operating systems of the file servers and, although we have no reason to suspect any damage, we are running a full diagnostics on the hardware.
By Walt on Friday, October 31 2008, 18:18 - Service status
We host our servers at a secure data centre managed by Telstra, a reputable colocation provider. As part of their colocation service, they provide dual uninterrupted power supplies. Each server on site thus has two independent power feeds to ensure that in the event of either power supply failing, the servers will continue running without interruption.
At 19:10 (18:10 GMT) on 23rd October, Telstra engineers started planned maintenance work on one of their UPS (uninterruptable power supplies). During this work, the servers were to be moved temporarily onto mains power. This should have happened transparently but the additional load on the mains tripped a circuit breaker. At approximately 19:47 (18:47 GMT) the breaker was reset and power was restored; the servers were then brought back online one by one. The servers have been subsequently restored to redundant UPS and will continue to be fully protected in the future.
A full report on the outage and the remedial actions from Telstra is attached below.
In the hours that followed the file server noticed certain problems with the filesystems. As each problem was detected, to ensure data integrity, the affected file system was remounted in 'read-only' mode. This ultimately resulted in 50% of the file systems going into a read-only state, meaning for half of our sites file uploads and other 'write' activities (such as form submissions) failed. This could not be rectified until the following morning.
In order to do a thorough filesystem consistency check, each affected filesystem needed to be taken offline. We therefore took each individual affected filesystem offline one-at-a-time to perform these checks in order to cause minimum disruption. This meant that affected customers may have experienced 'Internal Server Errors' for a 20 minute period while their file system was checked.
We have taken multiple measures to ensure that our services remain available in the event of power failures. The failure of Telstra to guarantee a permanent supply was an unforeseen and extraordinary event. Again, we apologise for any inconvenience you may have experienced.
Wednesday, October 29 2008
By Walt on Wednesday, October 29 2008, 17:17 - Service status
Service Outage: 29th October 16:42 GMT
We have had a very unexpected failure with the Disc Array. We are currently trying to bring up the Standby system to restore services to all customers.
You will be notified immediately of any changes to this condition and the expected ETA when we have one.
We appreciate this is not great timing after our last outage but this is completely unrelated and is being working on by our own technical team who are doing everything in their power to bring up the standby service as quickly as possible.
Thanks
================
UPDATE: 17:37 GMT
All services have been restored to normal operation. We will obviously investigate the cause of the incident and once we have this and get an explanation from our Data Centre over the cause of last weeks downtime we will inform all customers. We will also notify you of steps to avoid these situations occurring again.
If you encounter any difficulties with viewing your site we recommend clearing your cache (temporary Internet files) and reloading your browser. This will fix problems with pages loading and file uploads.
Thanks again for your patience.
Thursday, October 23 2008
By Joe on Thursday, October 23 2008, 21:43 - Service status
Service Outage: 19:10 - 21:30 BST
A power failure at our data centre resulted in a complete loss of service at 19.10. This caused all of our servers to shut down unexpectedly and then restart. We then had to run full diagnostic checks to make sure they were running correctly before bringing the service back online at 21.30 BST.
The service has now been fully restored, with no loss of data or other negative side effects. Latency may be a little bit higher than normal over the next few hours while caching is restored on the live system.
We apologies for this unexpected outage, and will be following up with our network provider to discover the cause, and why secondly power supplies were not called into use.
Thank you for your patience during this outage.
==============
UDPATE: 10:12 BST (GMT +1)
Because the power failure caused our machines to shut down unexpectedly, our disk array which contains uploaded files restarted in 'read only' mode as a precaution. This means we have to run full disk integrity checks before we can go back to 'write' mode. Only 50% of sites have been affected by this, and we will repair them 10% at a time.
In any event, all content on these disks is backed up both on and off site, so in event of any errors in the disk, we can fully restore the files.
We will let you know when this is complete.
==============
UDPATE: 14:00 BST (GMT +1)
The service is now fully restored.
This means that all websites should now:
Now that the service has been fully restored we will begin our investigation into the causes of the outage and how we can ensure that this is not repeated. We will ensure that you are kept informed of our findings as well as the solutions.
If you are still encountering problems related to this outage (see above) you may wish to:
Thanks again for your patience, understanding and support with this issue. It is very much appreciated.
==============
Monday, October 20 2008
By Joe on Monday, October 20 2008, 17:22 - Release notes
We are very pleased to announce that we have released the changes required that now allow you to transfer your .co.uk domain names to moonfruit! Once your domain is transferred to us, you will benefit from the free email (5 mailboxes and infinite aliases) that other domain customers get. So what are you waiting for?!
Tuesday, October 14 2008
By Walt on Tuesday, October 14 2008, 16:37 - Service status
Our domain name partner will be running a major maintenance operation on the Mail platform. This operation will lead to greater stability of the service in the event of an excessive load.
The service will be unavailable during the maintenance period, which will be on Wednesday (October 15th, 2008) between 8:00 PM BST (19:00 GMT) and 1:00 AM BST (23:59 GMT). Incoming mails will be received but you will not be able to access them before we have completed the maintenance work. POP, IMAP, Webmail will all be unavailable.
Monday, October 13 2008
By Walt on Monday, October 13 2008, 16:51 - Release notes
What's this? Another release? Well not quite, it's an update to our previous release and a small one at that. Although it does include a nice feature for domains and a bug fix.
The key feature of this release is the addition of the preferred site address. This means that if you have one or more domain names, you can select one of these as your main address and whenever anyone types in one of the other domain names then they will redirect automatically to your preferred address. This is a very powerful feature for those wishing to make the most of marketing their site and using one particular address. You can do this by logging in, going to Admin > Site Address and then selecting your preferred address from the drop down. Once you close the panel, your site will refresh and you will have to log in again, which you will only need to do once.
What we have also released is a fix to the Video-no-audio bug. So for those of you who had videos on your site and needed to refresh the page to hear the audio, this is now fixed. If you have multiple videos on the same page you may hear a short burst of sound which is another bug we are looking at but we felt that ensuring your videos played audio was more important.
And coming soon: Google Maps widget. A simple widget to start with that will allow you to set a location, zoom level and permit toggling of basic features. We are aiming to get this out next release along with a number of other features. So we will keep you posted.
Tuesday, October 7 2008
By Josh on Tuesday, October 7 2008, 16:04 - Service status
A number of database changes need to be run to enable new features in SiteMaker. Unfortunately this means a service outage for no more than 15 minutes on Thursday morning, 9 October 2008 10:30 BST (GMT+1).
During this time, visitors to SiteMaker sites will be presented with a holding page informing them that the site should be back soon.
We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.
Regards,
Hiren Joshi
Systems Manager
Update:
This has now been rescheduled to 13/10/08 15:00 BST (GMT +1), we thank you for your understanding.
Monday, September 15 2008
By Joe on Monday, September 15 2008, 15:01 - Release notes
After a long wet summer, we've finally got some news to cheer you up. It's release time again! We've streamlined a few widgets, added social network bookmarking, and we're setting the stage for releases later in the year. You can also now transfer your domain names over to Moonfruit and use our website builder if you're with another provider. So have a look through the notes below and let us know what you think. Enjoy!
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