Import Domains page cleanup
Let’s start a week with a new release. A few minutes ago we deployed an update to a few internal features and some improvements to the RoboDomain interface.
The most noticeable changes are in the Import Domains page that now looks more polished and user-friendly.
But wait, today is just Monday. The week has just began, and I’m quite sure we can expect more updates to be released very soon.
Stay tuned!
Server migration completed
The server migration has been successfully completed. RoboDomain is now running on the new infrastructure and, hopefully, you can now enjoy a faster navigation experience.
As usual, let us know if something doesn’t work as expected.
New server migration
We’re very happy with how RoboDomain is going so far, our user base is growing day after day. This is a very exiting news and the time has arrived to move our main server to a new infrastructure.
Our old server is running on Ubuntu 8.04 and this release no longer offers the same number of features and packages as the most up-to-date versions. The result is that we need to upgrade to the latest LTS release if we want to continue to take advantage of several technologies such as Memcached, Redis, Ruby 1.9.2 and other more recent softwares.
Photo by Dominik Deobald
Whois definitions updated
We just pushed an update to the WHOIS infrastructure for several top level domains. The following new extensions are now fully supported, which means RoboDomain is now able to automatically detect and update creation and expiration dates.
.ci.at.cx.bo.ca.ck.cl.cm.cz
To update an existing domain, press the “syncronize domain dates” button in the domain overview page.
We are constantly adding new definitions. If you find yourself missing the support for a specific TLD, let us know and we’ll do our best to increase its priority in our task list.
What’s your name?
We recently released our new support system which, as you might have seen, is tightly integrated with our main application so that you don’t need a separate account to use it.
Unfortunately, RoboDomain didn’t let you provide an alternative name for your account and all the support users were displayed with the login name… until today!
Now you can provide some additional profile details in your RoboDomain account page, including your real name. Your support account will be updates as soon as you login again into the support site.
We are planning to integrate some of this information into the main application as well. So, what are you waiting for? Enter the account page and complete your profile.
The new support system
We’ve been listening to you, our users, since day one. We setup an UserVoice feedback forum the same day we released the first private EAP release and, since then, we received tons of feedback.
We strongly believe that you guys have been a fundamental part of RoboDomain development so far and we couldn’t imagine RoboDomain without your feedback.
In the last months RoboDomain user base has increased and we’re arrived at one point where listening to our users is just half of the story. We also need to help them providing support whenever required and a comprehensive documentation to help you getting the most out of the application.
So, today we’re launching support.robodomain.com, powered by Tender, the amazing Entp’s application.
New site and public beta
It’s with a ton of excitement and a bit of healthy nervousness that we’re announcing the launch of the new RoboDomain website.
This is a really important step for us, a milestone we’ve been working very hard for the last two months. It’s not a secret that we probably underestimate the task, since we originally planned to complete the entire activity in less than a month.
Unfortunately, quality requires time. It took many steps and several weeks before even starting writing the first line of code.
It’s with a mixed emotion we say goodbye to the old homepage that served as placeholder for over than 10 months.
We think that the new website better communicates the benefits of using RoboDomain to keep track of your domains.
We also wanted to keep you informed about RoboDomain features. Sometimes, playing with a brand new account doesn’t really give you the idea of what RoboDomain is able to do. This is for example the case of the RoboDomain Transaction feature, one of the most powerful but yet underestimated features.
And if you are looking for more details to understand RoboDomain, we created a really nice page to explain how RoboDomain works.
Public Beta
As of today we’re also reaching an other important milestone: the first Public Beta release.
In practice, this fancy name is a way to indicate that you no longer need an invitation to join RoboDomain. Simply go to the sign up page and create your account.
Best of all, you can use RoboDomain for free during the beta period. After the beta period is over and the first version is released, we will send an email notification and you’ll be able to upgrade to one of the available paid plans or downgrade to the always-free limited edition.
What’s next?
You might be surprised to know that even if we’ve been very busy working on the new site, we also had the time to work on some exciting improvements for the site, the blog and the product.
More news coming in the next days.
In the meantime, you can discuss the changes or suggest new features in our support forums.
Deploy August 19, 2010 - Bundler Edition
Been a while since we updated this blog. We’re very busy working on the new RoboDomain website and a branch new feature, but we continue to push small updates to the site as well.
Today we deployed a small architectural change, upgrading our codebase from Bundler 0.9 to the latest Bundler 1.0 release. We experienced a small downtime, less than 3 minutes, caused by the need to reinstall all the RoboDomain dependencies for the new release.
I personally want to take the time to thank Carl Lerche, José Valim, Yehuda Katz, and all Bundler contributors for their efforts and hard work.
Keep track of your new .CO domains
In about two hours from now, .CO Internet S.A.S. is going to open the registration of the .CO top-level domain. Starting from today, individuals, businesses and organizations are able to register a .CO domain name through one of the accredited registrars.
.CO domain name was officially announced in February and, since then, this extension has attracted lot of interest, mainly for its similarity with the international .COM top-level domain. Many well-known companies are using the .CO domain to expand their product or services. For instance, Twitter.com already acquired the T.CO domain name which will probably became its official URL shortener.
Here at RoboDomain we want to join the party and today we’re announcing the full support for .CO domains. You can now keep track of as many .CO domains as you want and RoboDomain will automatically fetch all the domain details for you, including the purchase and expiration dates as you would expect.
About today outage
We’re currently in the middle of a very long downtime. So far, the server has been unavailable for 930 minutes, which is an unbelievable amount of time, I know. Let me explain what happened.
RoboDomain is currently a free service, but we’re trying to do our best to be as reliable as possible. Unfortunately, this time we failed.
Yesterday we received an email from VPS.net, the current RoboDomain server provider, telling us they were going to move our VPS to a new location, sometime in the next 11 days. In order to prevent unexpected downtime — they said — they also strongly encouraged all VPS owner to start the migration their own. Quoting from their email:
Each move should take a matter of minutes (but you could be queued waiting to do the move), and will require no configuration changes on your end at all.
Unfortunately, this didn’t happen to be true for RoboDomain VPS. The VPS was shut down at 8.30 pm CET and, is still offline. Apparently, the server has been migrated but we can’t access it via SSH and the web console is returning a weird boot error.
