We want to do everything for you to trust DotNest for running your valuable websites: this is why we very much care about minimizing outages. DotNest opened about a month ago: in this month the uptime ratio of DotNest tenants was more than 99,99%! (As measured by Uptime Robot.) Actually it was a bit even more than 99,99%: we had only one outage on the 27th of March that lasted less than 5 minutes! To be honest there was another issue that affected all the tenants but technically doesn't count as downtime: on the third day after launch we had some configuration issues that caused CSS not to be loaded for tenants for about 20 minutes. We learned from this and applied fail-safes so it never happens again. How do we manage to get 99,99% uptime? We don't operate with planned downtimes. When we built up our deployment story we started with the ideal case of not having any downtime when updating DotNest or doing some maintenance work. This doesn't mean that something can't go very wrong to cause some outage but if that happens that is an exception: we plan for no-downtime maintenance. We have a roll-back strategy in case something unexpected happens: if that incriminated thing hits the fan we can still get away with a very short outage by hitting the "roll everything back" button. Only errors in Azure can cause downtime: at the moment if we have some downtime it is caused by Azure failing. As you may know, DotNest runs on Microsoft's excellent cloud platform, Azure. Azure is very reliable, but still, there can be slight downtimes. When this happens what we can do is limited, since our core infrastructure is impacted. Actually that one outage was also caused by an Azure service failing in the background. While we can do nothing about Azure service outages we actively work on improving DotNest to be more tolerant to failures in its server backend. Is 99,99%+ good enough for you? Then jump on the DotNest train! If not, then be assured that we'll get better :-).

Update time! In this round we fixed some bugs that arose recently, among others one with Media Theme deployment that caused the deployment hook not to work correctly in all circumstances. Also we made some changes to the subsystem that is responsible for running maintenances tasks. This means that we can now make upgrades more safely, keeping your sites up-to-date all the time without you even noticing.

We deployed some little fixes (and you probably didn't even notice the deployment; what is a good thing, since we strive to make such updates totally seamless). Most important from them is that we fixed how the SMTP settings are populated. That means that if you want to send e-mails from your tenant (like from a contact form or to get notifications about new comments to your blog), it will work now. Now if you wonder: "I wanted to try this a day ago and it didn't work, interesting that you fixed it now." - yes, you! We made it because we noticed you had trouble :-).

Today we reached the point where we fixed every bug that came up during the few first days of DotNest. This doesn't mean it's perfect but currently we don't know about any important errors at least. Here are the two main issues we fixed: Issues when Jobs Queue when using together with Media Theme Deployment Redirects now work correctly when you're using custom domains. (Because you can point your domain to your DotNest site completely free!) There were some other, smaller fixes too. By the way, did you notice how fast the sites running on DotNest are?

Only a few days after announcing DotNest (see the recording about it), we've released the first set of updates ('cause that's how we roll on Saturday evenings). Let's see what changed! MediaTheme deployment works (again, but you didn't see that before). SSL for tenants works on port 8443, work is still in progress to make it work on port 443. You can suspend your tenants if you want to disable them temporarily and then you can re-awaken them. It is also possible to delete a tenant - be aware that this action is immediate and irreversible. A little technical detail (may be interesting for the fellow devs): Orchard.Azure is upgraded to the latest 1.x source, which gives us much more flexibility regarding the configuration of DotNest. More importantly, the storage (Media and Indexing) performs faster and more efficiently with this upgrade. Happy Orchardin'! - The guys @ Lombiq

We'd like to bring SaaS to the Orchard community. Kind of like Wordpress.com does for Wordpress. DotNest wants to be neat and useful. This is just the beginning, so please forgive our mistakes. - The guys @ Lombiq