If you're seeing this, then you are looking at the new server! It will take 24h for the DNS changes to propagate to these new servers, then the old server infrastructure will be shut down and securely wiped.

My apologies for the ten minutes of downtime earlier today - it turns out that the documentation for making a ZEO based Plone site read-only is severely out of date, so I have submitted updated docs to the Plone FAQ.

Enjoy the considerably faster new server cluster - it's about 200% as fast for cold page loads, 600% faster for warm page loads (see page load times archive here) and can handle several dozen times more maximum simultaneous users! We would also like to announce that due to reliability problems we have disabled the Los Angeles cluster which will shortly be decommissioned - all global traffic now goes to Amsterdam. In case you are wondering about the effects on ned Productions Ltd hosted websites:

The first graph shows the current and former european latency profiles whereas the second graph shows the former geo-targeted profile (note that the two graphs can't be directly compared as their test locations and times are very different, however the blue line is for the same top quality London Docklands based server in both despite the up to 100ms difference ). As you can see, the new Amsterdam cluster isn't as well connected outside Europe as it could be with its 50-100ms extra latency, but sometime in early 2011 we hope to open a data content caching node in Phoenix, Arizona for much improved global data read latency.

This is just a note to let visitors and customers know that the primary ned Productions Limited servers are being migrated tomorrow (1st July) onto much more powerful hardware with considerably improved international network connectivity. Read access ought to be entirely unaffected so there will be no site downtime at all, however write access will be completely disabled across all ned Productions Limited hosted websites for much of tomorrow until the migration is completed.

We hope that this does not inconvenience you too much. Remember to run portal_migration and portal_quickinstaller upgrades on July 2nd or thereafter!

We would like to announce that the upgrade of Plone to v3.3.4 will occur between tomorrow (Friday 19th Feb) and the end of this weekend (Sun 21st Feb). After this upgrade, for each of your websites you will need to do the following:

1. Enter portal_migration in your ZMI and upgrade.
2. Enter portal_quickinstaller in your ZMI and reinstall any products which have been upgraded. We strongly recommend that you do one at a time if you get any errors by trying to do all at once.
3. For each product upgraded, reenter its settings in Site Setup. For example TinyMCE will return to default settings.

During the upgrade your website will still be present, but any attempts to login may return a 502 Service Unavailable error. In the highly unlikely situation that your site dies after the upgrade, please contact us.

Details behind the upgrade:

We have been waiting for v2.0.5 of the varnish web cache to be released before we performed the upgrade of our Plone installation to v3.3.4. This is because that release of varnish finally adds support for the HTTP If-None-Match header which is used by web browsers on Plone sites to tell the web server which version of a web page they already have a copy of by sending its last known ETag. Unfortunately, varnish used to always bypass its cache when it saw such a header which effectively meant that all visitors to any ned Productions Ltd. website who had been here before bypassed the cache (not that this caused much load nor delay, as Zope simply returned a 304 Not Modified).

What that meant in practice was that if we took down Plone for any reason, every visitor who had been before instantly got a 502 Service Unavailable error. Other than stripping If-None-Match support and therefore greatly increasing page load times while visitors navigated our sites, there wasn't much we could do.

With this new support however, we can now take down Plone for up to 24h and varnish will continue to serve out its cached content and so long as the cache has a copy of the page, no one should notice a thing. Obviously enough because logged in users always bypass the cache they will not be able to log in at all during the upgrade. Right now the cache is being populated, so we should be ready to start work tomorrow.

Obviously enough this new feature considerably improves load scalability and load times of changed pages on all ned Productions Ltd. websites. Whereas before Zope always had to be asked to verify an ETag and if it didn't match then Zope  had to deliver a copy of the page, now varnish understands ETags and will handle everything. This should reduce page load times for updated pages by a few hundred milliseconds.

Other new features resulting from this upgrade are mostly bug fixes. Firefox users will see a very substantial improvement in page load times as a bug invoking Java with every page has been fixed. There has been a very rare XSS vulnerability fixed in Zope (not an issue in Plone), and there have been many more bug fixes to TinyMCE and a few other components.

We finally got around to implementing the geo-directing part of the ned Productions Ltd web services platform, so finally all our hosted websites are now being served to their closest geographical server. This has very substantially improved page load times and browsing speeds for our customers:

Our server locations are as follows:

View Larger Map

We have also added a new product: you can now have your own sites be geo-directed for a low low price of just €12/year!

We strongly believe in being transparent about how we implement our products and services so you can see for yourself their quality - or indeed, how to implement them yourselves if you so chose. We have hence opened a new Wiki section which contains detailed implementation notes as a public service.