The Pause That Refreshes

Hi all,

After a crazy last 7 months which saw us move hundreds of sites behind the scenes to our new Phoenix facility, while simultaneously growing faster than ever (thank you!), we’ve fallen behind on some important projects. Plus, we’ve worked so many late hours, ‘Walkers’ have been telling us how terrible we look.

The Pause That Refreshes…

To that end, we’re mostly closing the front door to new clients until July 1st to allow us to catch up on projects & recharge our batteries. Keeping you & your sites happy is our highest priority, above even growing the company.

This pause won’t change anything for existing clients. We’ll still happily add whatever sites you need, and provide the same (hopefully) fantastic service you deserve. (The same applies to our web developer friends.)

For folk not yet hosting with us, if you have an existing site, and can hold off for a couple of months that would be wonderful. As we do all the work to migrate your site from your old host to us, they’re terribly time intensive, so pausing them is the easiest way to free up time. If you’re starting a brand new site, ping us through our contact page.

What we’ll be up to…

Here’s a partial list of the projects we’ll be working on:

• Upgrading the TS web & mail server to SSD – 75% complete
  This will speed up our own sites, and make email syncing much faster – especially for webmail.
• Roll out PHP 7.1 as an option – not yet started
  PHP 7.1 is about 7% faster than PHP 7.0. This will reduce the time it takes for our servers to do the work to build your pages. (That’s one piece of many that affect page load times.)
• Improve our CDN – not yet started
  For our busiest sites, and those with heavy traffic in Europe, we’ll be rolling out a CDN server in Paris. And behind the scenes, we have some improvements planned to eliminate some quirks common to CDNs.
• Implement a CPU pool for super-viral posts – 25% complete
  The goal is to make it so we can quickly bring in extra servers to help share the workload when a post goes so viral that it overwhelms the site’s normal server.
• “Cold Spare” server – longer term project, but worthy of putting here
  This is a spare powered-off (“cold”) server that is cloned from the ‘real’ server to allow recovery more quickly than restoring from backups. (It’s effectively a third type of backup.)
• Plus a whole lot of other behind the scenes improvements to make it easier to identify and block bozos, manage your sites, and keep things chugging along happily.

Remember, check our live status page if something ever seems wrong – bookmark it. It’s where we’ll post our hot takes about incidents and issues we see (not just ours), and items not worthy of a post.

We are hiring a junior to mid-range IT position. If you know a sharp, smart, geek with about 2-3 years of Linux experience, who is reliable, friendly, and (somewhat) patient, we’d love to talk with them. Preference is for someone in the Phoenix metro area, but remote is okay too.

Thanks so much for hosting with us!

-TS