ZippyKid

Database connection errors on May 16th 2012 – Explanation

Vid Luther — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:42:26 +0000

Around 10:00AM PST, we started noticing a connectivity problem from our web servers to our database servers. We started investigating the issue, and got on the phone with Rackspace, to get a better idea of what was going on. After about an hour of being on the phone with them, we figured out the issue... Read more »

How to update your WordPress site automatically using Github and DeployHQ

Vid Luther — Sun, 06 May 2012 16:31:26 +0000

One of the things we’ve been working on over the past few months, is something called continuous deployment. Where, changes made locally on our computer, automatically get pushed to our servers for our viewers to see. What I’m going to describe below, is possible with any plan we have. We believe in eating our own... Read more »

Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) results

Vid Luther — Thu, 03 May 2012 16:14:41 +0000

Last week we sent out a survey to our customers, asking them if they would recommend us to other people. We got an astonishing amount of feedback on that. Apart from people taking the survey, I got a lot of emails back to me personally with details about what we’re doing right and wrong. In... Read more »

Explanation of recent outages over the past week for around 400 customers.

Vid Luther — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:23:55 +0000

For the past week, around 400 customers have been affected by outages, or degraded service on one of our clusters. This cluster is under what’s known as a Slowloris attack, where good connections are being mixed up with bad connections. It’s a slower form of a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. Symptoms of this... Read more »

What’s MyZippyKid all about?

Vid Luther — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:33:33 +0000

We’ve been getting a lot of requests from people who are eager to get into the beta for MyZippyKid. Since it’s beta, we’re still tweaking a lot of things, and entrance is currently limited to those who we’ve worked with in the past. Mainly, because they were the ones who helped drive the feature set,... Read more »

Announcing MyZippyKid – The best way to host and manage your WordPress sites.

Vid Luther — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 16:39:00 +0000

Almost one year ago today, I signed the first ever term sheet in my life. Basically, I took money from investors, in return for equity in an idea I had, which seemed to have some legs, and the investors believed I was crazy, yet capable enough of making it grow. Thank you Gabriel Weinberg ,... Read more »

Managed WordPress Hosting Support – What you should expect from us and any other good WordPress host.

Vid Luther — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 20:48:46 +0000

This post explains some of the support options and level of support you can get from us here at ZippyKid. Whether you’re hosting a high traffic WordPress site, or a low traffic, but high value (City government) site, you need a way to figure out where the bottlenecks in your code are. We can help... Read more »

Worst Week Ever – Growing pains at ZippyKid

Vid Luther — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:50:02 +0000

I’m sorry for the worst week ever, in the history of ZippyKid, and it’s happy customers. We’ve been having slow downs and downtime across the board. We’ve isolated the problem down to a strained and maxed out Firewall, which is operating at 80% CPU capacity, and near full limits of it’s bandwidth capability. We’re working very closely... Read more »

Custom error messages for Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers

Vid Luther — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:38:50 +0000

If you use Rackspace Cloud Load balancers like we do, sometimes seeing the “Service Unavailable” message is annoying, and somewhat ambiguous to the visitor. In November Rackspace allowed you to upload your own error pages via the API, we’ve started implementing it for some of our Enterprise clients. It’s a relatively simple process, once you... Read more »

ZippyKid 2012 – Changes coming to ZippyKid

Vid Luther — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:12:39 +0000

In April of 2011, I decided to make ZippyKid a full time job and focus all my efforts into growing the company, my goal was to make a new kind of hosting company, that focused on WordPress and small businesses. I wanted to make the best WordPress hosting company, not just another company that manages... Read more »