This is not interesting at all unless you’re interested in how building a service like VaultPress happens behind the scenes. There are basically two sides to the team, one working on the core technology that stores eleven copies of every one of your files, scans your plugins and themes for security issues, and makes sure our mirror of your site is up-to-the-second. The other side tries to make the reams of data we gather usable, intuitive, beautiful, and tries to let people who don’t know about VaultPress yet that we exist. This post is about that last part.
Billing and Naughty Plugins
We’re having a problem with our credit card processor that is throwing back errors for about half of the people who’ve tried to sign up. The fix on their side could take a week or more so we’re going to try a workaround on our side and email everyone who was denied VaultPress bliss.
One side-effect of running a system which mirrors every single database write, option update, and more is that we notice pretty quickly when something is inefficient. Already, even with just the few testers we have, we’ve been coming across a number of plugins that are updating options on every single page load. Some people have been running these for years in the background silently slowing their sites down and causing undue load on their server, and doubly so with VaultPress running getting every update to that option.
We’ve already pushed hot-fixes through the VaultPress kernel to several of the blogs affected to fix their issue but more importantly we’ve gotten in touch with the plugin authors to notify them of the problem and offer suggestions or code to fix it! Once the plugin is fixed the entire WordPress community is going to benefit, not just VaultPress users, and their sites will run that much faster. Win, win, win.
VaultPress Vignettes
vi·gnette /vɪnˈyɛt/ noun, verb.
Any small, pleasing picture or view; a small, graceful literary sketch.
It’s been awesome this week to see and hear from everyone who’s excited about the VaultPress beta. We’re working behind the scenes to welcome as many of you into the beta as we can, as quickly as we can. For now, we’re sending out 30 golden tickets a day and we’re moving people who blog about VaultPress or tweet about #vaultpress to the front of the queue.
Here’s a set of vignettes of things we noticed and loved this week. Can’t wait to have you join us on VaultPress! 🙂
http://twitter.com/micah/status/17182068559
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International Orders
As some folks may have noticed our order form did not play nicely if you tried to put in an address outside of the United States. We’ve whipped it into shape and now you should be able to place orders from all sorts of crazy places like Canada. (Where I am right now, in fact.)
The golden tickets pick back up tomorrow, maybe it’ll be your lucky day?
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First Golden Tickets
Over the weekend we started to trickle out the first Golden Ticket invites to VaultPress. This means that if you’re on the list you now have a semi-random chance of being one of the first people who can sleep more soundly at night because of VaultPress.
The real-time nature, security aspects, and robustness of VaultPress means that it has lots of moving bits, so we’re controlling the growth of the service through the invite system. We’ve started out by sending out 30 invites a day and will gradually grow that over the next few months.
Early customers are getting a lifetime discount applied to their subscription, and then the prices will go up to their premium level when we open the doors up more.
If you’d like to move ahead in the line, write a blog post about why you want to use VaultPress and link it here, or tweet why you need your site protected by VaultPress and use the hash tag #vaultpress.
See you soon. 🙂
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