Website Support Blog

Update on Scammers

Back in February, we alerted our customers about phone calls from potential scammers posing as WebsiteDynamics employees. The response we received was fantastic and we got a ton of information that helped us investigate these calls further.

We've seen a definite decrease in the reports of these calls, but we want to remind our customers to continue to be aware of companies calling about your website. While they may not claim to be from WebsiteDynamics anymore, these companies are still trying to sell website optimization or SEO services that are often expensive and ineffective.

Calls from WebsiteDynamics will always come from a 604 area code, and we will never call to sell you website upgrades or SEO services.

If you have any questions about a call you've received, simply submit a support request via the link in the upper right of your website builder.

Email Login Issues Resolved

UPDATE 10:55AM PST: Our email provider has deployed additional capacity and monitoring shows that the intermittent login failures have now cleared. You should now be able to log in as normal.

This morning between approximately 8:30AM PST and 10:55AM PST, our email provider experienced intermittent issues with logging in. This affected sending and receiving email via POP, IMAP and webmail.

More details can be found on our email provider's status page, where you can view the status of Email Cluster B: http://www.opensrsstatus.com/

We will post updates via this system notice as we have more information. Thank you for your patience!

Email Sending and Receiving Delays Resolved

Sending and receiving emails may be sluggish as our email provider, Tucows/OpenSRS is experiencing some technical difficulties. They are posting updates here: http://www.opensrsstatus.com/service/email-service/email-cluster-b/. We received notice at 1:18 pm Pacific Standard Time.

Update at 1:37 pm Pacific Standard Time:  Tucows/OpenSRS states that no email is lost, there are still however delays for some inbound email.

Update at 2:23 pm Pacific Standard Time:  Tucow/OpenSRS reports that emails are all flowing normally now.

New Feature: Catalog Filters

Many of you have built massive, successful online stores with hundreds of products that your customers love. Some of you sell a small number of highly specialized products, or products with lots of different variations. Whatever you sell, we've got a great new feature that will help your customers find the products they're looking for: Catalog Filters!

Catalog Filters allow you to create categories and individual tags for your products, allowing your customers to filter your products to find just what they're looking for. They can also filter by price, and sort products by name or price.

For more details, check out our how-to guide.

6 New Enhanced Templates

Since the release of our new Enhanced Template System a few weeks ago, we've been hard at work cooking up even more great Enhanced templates to add to our library. We've added six new left-navigation templates for your website building pleasure! Here's a few examples:

For more information about the Enhanced Template System, check out our how-to guide.

DDoS Attack On Our Websites Causing Intermittent Service

Our website has been targeted with a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack which means that someone is flooding our site with so much traffic that the servers are having difficulty showing some of our customer sites. Our technicians are doing their best to try and curtail these attacks as much as possible or at least have them affect as few customers as possible.

There have been a few attacks now. Most being fairly short like 5 to 10 minutes. The first occurred Sunday.

Just to give you some background on how a DDoS attack occurs, typically someone will send traffic in huge amounts all of a sudden with the goal to take a particular website down. Sometimes, the attacks will be one-time and in other cases, they may attack several times. Note that with each attack, technicians are able to better narrow their focus on what to do to block or minimize the attack drastically. At that point, it's common for the attacks to stop.

Please be assured that your website content is in no way affected. However, if you are saving work, it's highly recommended that you copy all the work before hitting the "Save" button just in case an attack occurs just as you are trying to save. To highlight all info in a text box, press CTRL-A and then press CTRL-C to copy.

Update 4:17pm PST: Our technicians have isolated the issue and we have taken steps to prevent the attack from reoccurring. Things appear stable, but we are monitoring the situation closely. Thank you for your patience!

New Enhanced HTML5 Templates

We're very excited to introduce our new Enhanced Template System, featuring a collection of brand new templates that we think you will love.

The Enhanced Template System provides new modern-look templates built completely in HTML5. They're simpler to manage than our standard templates, and are integrated with PicMonkey for creating header images and modifying graphical website elements right in your browser.

For advanced users, the Enhanced templates allow direct modification of the template's CSS, giving you tremendous flexibility to create a site that looks exactly how you want.

We've released a small selection of Enhanced templates, and there are lots more coming very soon! Navigate to Edit Site > Design > Choose a Template and have a look for yourself! For more detailed instructions, check out our how-to guide.

Billing Phone Support Back to Normal

Our billing phone line is back up like normal. Apologies for the temporary issues.

Billing Phone Support Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Our technicians have been working on a problem with our billing phone line. We apologize for the inconvience. Please submit tickets via our online support ticketing system for the time being until our phones are operating like normal. To do this, click on "SUPPORT" -> "Submit a Support Request" -> "Submit a New Request." Thank-you.

Email Problem Update

At around 8:50 am PDT, our email provider Tucows/OpenSRS experienced some technical issues that caused email to be intermittent. They have cleared up the problems, but customers may find that their email is delayed as Tucows delivers all the emails in their queue. They have stated that no email was lost.

The status of our email provider is posted at opensrsstatus.com and then scroll down to "Email Cluster B."

Some customers have questioned the quality of our email provider's service as there have been a few problems the past several months. We had spoken to Tucows some time ago asking the same thing. We learned that they were planning a major upgrade to their hardware to clear up all the problems that had been occurring. This major upgrade was completed and since then, things have calmed down considerably.

We just wanted to make clear that our customers' happiness is important to us. Email issues are not something we take lightly (our own in office emails are on the same system as our customers too) and we have looked into alternatives to find that overall Tucows is a better provider than most competitors. This doesn't mean that we won't still consider alternatives, but as of now, Tucows appears to still be the best option.