21Classes now fully SSL/TLS-encrypted
When browsing our service at 21classes.com, you'll now always get redirected to our SSL/TLS-encrypted pages at http://www.21classes.com. Although you could choose to use SSL before, it's simply not been the default setting. However, we decided to make 21Classes even more secure, and always use https instead of http.
You don't need to do anything, you can keep your previous bookmarks - we're simply redirecting you to the corresponding https page.
Although this is currently available only on www.21classes.com, we'll be extending this to all our 21Classes accounts (e.g. myschool.21classes.com etc) within the next few days.
Better performance with new hardware
Good news for all of you: we finished the migration to our new servers. Both 21Publish and 21Classes are now running on faster and better servers, so the performance should be better when accessing your BlogPortals. They're now powered by Intel Core2Duo processors and have 4 gigs of ram each.
Availability is now more than 99% with less than 1 second response time per request. And we're working on performance-tuning longer-taking pages as well, to become one of the fastest blog services on the net.
Network hickups
This morning we had some routing problems to our datacenter, so some users might have had problems reaching us between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. EDT.
Seems like the backup routes were not all configured correctly... by now everything should be back to normal.
Sorry if you were affected by this outage, though this is something we couldn't prevent on our side.
Downtime of our 21Classes System
Some trouble at our datacenter
In case you were trying to access our systems last night around midnight (eastern time), you probably did receive an error message about a proxy error or an unreachable host. That's because our hoster did suddenly have problems with their uninterruptible power supplies at some of their racks, requiring them to power off some machines and repair the problem. While this lasted around 2 hours, it took our automated recovery processes another 2 hours to get all systems back up and running again.
We apologize for this inconvenience, though we hope with the new UPS at our datacenter there won't be such issues anymore.