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Karelia is switching web hosts

This week would have been a great week for Karelia in getting new Mac users aware of Sandvox — an interview with Dan was featured on this week's Macworld Podcast.  But Murphy of "Murphy's Law" decided to visit the company that Karelia has been using for web hosting services, and because of that, our website and web-based services were out of commission for three separate occasions this last week.

From time to time, a website is bound to have some "down" time.  But the amount of time a website is down should be measured in minutes or at worst hours per year, not *days*.  And that's just what happened to us.  We had very slow response time from from their technical support in resolving the issues.

Having our own website down is certainly an inconvenience for us; we clearly lost some potential Sandvox users because a cryptic message appeared in place of our site for half of this last week.  But what's especially frustrating for us, and for many Sandvox users, is the outage of our "services" domain which handles certain special tasks and provides content for many Sandvox-built websites, including contact-form processing, page view counters, Amazon.com wish lists, and RSS feed relays.

To those Sandvox users and visitors to Sandvox-built websites who noticed problems accessing these components of your website, we apologize humbly and pledge to find a new web host that provides us (and indirectly, these other websites) a higher availability — and a faster response time to dealing with the occasional problems that Mr. Murphy brings from time to time.

Sandvox is One Year Old

birthday candle

One year ago today, we released the first version of Sandvox.  That means that Sandvox is a year old!  Just a toddler by human standards, but in internet years, like dog years, Sandvox is an active kid, already at version 1.2 and, in a few weeks, version 1.2.1.  My how you've grown!

Back in our secret labs, we're already starting to work on some new features and updates for the next major version.  We have learned a lot about what our users want, and so we are re-building a few components of Sandvox "from the ground up."

Thanks very much to our vibrant community of Sandvox users who have made this a happy birthday indeed!