We’re back up and have a very full and exciting release for you: Blogging, domain registration and shopping cart widgets!  Check out the details below:

1.) Blogging

The new blogging feature allows you to post online journal entries, text, images and share it with the world within minutes.

Features include:

• Instantly create a blog post that is dated, categorized, includes tags and author details
• Blog manager to search and access all your posts within a few simple clicks
• RSS syndication
• Commenting
• Create multiple blogs under one site

To add a blog to your existing site, simply click on the “New Page” button. To create a new blog, click on “Create a New Site”.

2.) Domain Registration

Buy an available domain (www.yourdomain.com) with a few simple clicks!  Take the hassle out of configuring your new domain by buying it through us.

You’ll see this option when you first publish your new site.  If your site’s already been published, you can use this feature by unpublishing your site first and then republishing.

3.) Shopping cart widgets

We’ve integrated with PayPal and now you can:

• Sell anything on your website and securely collect payments from your visitors via PayPal
• Accept credit card and bank account donations from a button on your website

To add any of our new Paypal widgets, click on “Online Store” in the content sidebar in the site builder on the right hand side of your screen.

Try these features out and tell us what you think!

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.

Service has now been restored to the hosting environment and all published sites should now respond as usual.

An unusual combination of events caused a temporary networking hiccup to become a bigger problem that affected our hosting environment.  We’ve identified a way to avoid this type of failure in future, and will be implementing it shortly.

We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your support as we work to improve our service.

We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. Users may get an error when trying to access published sites. We are investigating the problem and hope to have the service restored as quickly as possible.

We apologize for this service interruption and will post updates here as soon as the problem is resolved.

At around 21h00 PST on Wednesday night 30 July, our Site Builder
service became unavailable to users. This was due to a hard disk
failure on a critical server. There was a backup drive waiting to take
over, but for a reason still unknown to us, it did not happen. The
Site Builder (the service you log in to in order to create, edit and
publish sites) was down for about two hours while we diagnosed the
problem and switched over to our failover systems. The published sites
were never unavailable so there was no disruption for the users of
your sites.

Hardware failure is something we know will happen from time to time,
no matter how many preventative measures are put in place. So as
engineers we plan and rehearse for it so that we are able to respond
with least disruption to our user base. In this instance the longest
part of the downtime was spent making sure we knew exactly what had
gone wrong so that we could make the correct decisions for recovery
without compromising the integrity of any data.

I want to extend an apology to all users who were unable to log in
during this time. During such incidents you are foremost in our minds
while we work to bring everything online again.

SynthaSite is uncompromising in our commitment to optimal availability
and reliability of the platforms that run both the Site Builder and
the sites you host with us. We have asked the data centre where the
server is hosted to investigate the reason for it not automatically
failing over to another drive, and will take steps to prevent this
from happening in the future.

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!

SynthaSite is upgrading a server component on Friday (20 June 2008) morning and need to take the SynthaSite Site Builder offline between 1am and 2am PST.  During this time, you will not be able to log in and make changes or updates to your sites.  Your published sites will be unaffected.

We have completed the scheduled maintenance and the SynthaSite services are back in working order. It took a little longer that initially anticipated - thank you for your patience.

As promised there was no downtime on the published (hosted) sites.

We are aware of a known issue which occurred as a result of the changes we made - image editing from within the Site Builder will currently not work. This is being worked on and we will let you know when it is resolved.

We’re beefing up our servers on Thursday (12 June 2008) morning and need to take SynthaSite offline between 1am and 4am PST as part of this upgrade.  During this time, you will not be able to make changes or updates to your sites.  But don’t worry, visitors to your published sites will not have any interruption and will still be able to see all the great stuff you’ve been publishing.

Thanks for your patience as we scale SynthaSite to meet the needs or our ever growing user community!

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.