February 17, 2015

Introducing Pressable Community Lounge

Part of the process of finding ways to improve upon our services over the course of the last few weeks was to find out ways that we can address customer concerns. Over the last couple of weeks we received a large amount of feedback regarding the optimization of our communication channels. We were being told by our customers that they wanted easier, more efficient, and more effective lines of communication during outages, service interruptions, or maintenances.

Pressable Community Lounge

The first big step in opening up new and improved lines of communications is the introduction of the Pressable Community Lounge.

Toward the tail end of a major outage we experienced, not long ago, we opened up a chat channel where customers could join and find information, in real time, about the work being performed to get sites back up and running. As it turns out, it was very helpful in getting information out to customers in a way they could get quick answers to questions being asked frequently.

hipchat_pressable_lounge

A screenshot of the Pressable Lounge chat available at http://chat.pressable.com.

We’ve decided to bring back the community lounge to see if it can have the same effect for general customer inquiries and for it to act as a means of getting frequently asked customer questions answered quickly.

You can find information about how to join the Pressable Community Lounge and a set of Guidelines at the linked below:

We hope to see you in the community lounge and are looking forwarding to making improvements to this new initiative in the coming year.

 

January 28, 2015

Root Cause Analysis of Outage for Week of January 19, 2015

The following is a root cause analysis and postmortem for the outage experienced during the week of January 19th, 2015 at Pressable. Root Cause Analysis. What caused this outage? Ultimately, the reason for this outage was a well crafted attack on our systems.  The attack was a variant of the “slowloris” attack discovered in 2009.  The attack went undetected for so long due to the method in which it was executed. After discovering this variant of the attack, we have

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January 12, 2015

We’re Sorry for the Downtime.

Beginning on January 9, 2015 Pressable experienced the worst outage in the history of the company. Below is an email from Vid Luther (Founder and CEO) sent to all customers impacted by the issue. On behalf of the entire team at Pressable, I would like to say we’re sorry. We’re sorry about the outages you have experienced recently, including the longest ever outage in company history, this weekend. I’m also sorry for not responding  to some of your phone calls

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January 8, 2015

Using WP-CLI for Spam Comment and Revision Management

Advanced WP-CLI Commands In a previous article we covered some of the basics of managing a WordPress site using WP-CLI. Today we’re jumping in with a couple of advanced wp-cli commands that can really help when working with large sites that are overrun with spam and post revisions. Spam comments and post revisions are two things that can easily bloat your WordPress database. They cause maintenance problems as database sizes have grown unnecessarily large, performance issues as data access is slowed down and

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December 23, 2014

DNS Management: Record Types and When To Use Them

This article is part three in a series dedicated to the DNS Management; DNS Record Types Explained. It is recommended that you read the first two entries in this series, “Registrars and Nameservers,” and “Zones, Record Types, and Record Composition” before continuing with this article. In this part, we will discuss a few of the more commonly used record types and when you might use them. A Records A Records are the most basic type of DNS record and are used to point a domain

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