Website Support Blog

Five Hour Shut Down for Maintenance - March 28, 2020

UPDATE:  This has been cancelled due to COVID-19.

Due to electrical maintenance at our network provider's data center, we have been informed that all of their networking infrastructure will be powered down on Saturday, March 28th, 2020. For our customers, this means from 4:00 pm to 9:00 pm Pacific Standard Time, your website and email will be offline. Additionally, our company's website, email and billing phone line will also be closed during that time.

We apologize in advance for this inconvenience and we will work with our network provider to bring everything back online as quick as possible.

Thank You.

HTTPS Project Completed

We have now completed getting SSL certificates for all our paying customers. For any of your customers visiting your website, they will see the https:// in front of your web address. If you have a custom domain like mybusiness.com, your address will show as https://www.mybusiness.com. If you do not have a custom domain, your address will show as https://www.mybusiness.webhost.com.

If you have secure pages showing a warning (e.g. a "!" or "i" in a circle) in your browser even though the web address begins with https://, this means that you have mixed content on that page. Mixed content means that you are sourcing an image, video or part of a code (perhaps one you copied elsewhere for a special effect) that is not served through an https connection. We did run all pages through a mixed content page fixer to replace any sources that had an equivalent secure version of the same content available. In cases where no equivalent was found, the mixed content was left alone. If you are having difficulty fixing a page with mixed content, please contact Support with the webpage address.

We thank everyone for their patience.

 

HTTPS Support Is Coming!

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. It is a way to secure communications over the internet via encryption. HTTPS is widely used for many purposes across the internet, including securing sensitive email and payment processing. We already include HTTPS encryption on several critical parts of our website builder platform - the checkout phase of your shopping cart, for example - but we are undergoing a large project to incorporate HTTPS encryption across all pages of your website.

Why are we implementing HTTPS?

There has been an increase in HTTPS usage over the last few years; in 2018, overall HTTPS traffic on the internet surpassed HTTP traffic. Beginning this year, some web browsers have begun displaying warnings when visiting a site that is not encrypted via HTTPS, which may concern visitors. In the interest of protecting the communications of our customers and offering a secure guarantee to your visitors, no matter what web browser they are using, we are undergoing the process of implementing HTTPS across the board.

How will my site be affected? What do I need to do?

Most websites will not be affected when we release this update; they will continue to function as they always have, except that all traffic to your site will be automatically redirected to a secure HTTPS connection. The only potential problem will be with integration of 3rd-party services that do not support HTTPS. We expect this to be rare, and we will be personally testing large numbers of websites to ensure that these problems are dealt with. Our support team will contact you if we discover any potential problems with your website.

What is the timeline?

Our development and systems team are already hard at work on this project. While we do not have a definitive timeline to provide at this phase, we are working as quickly as we can to roll this feature out to all users. As this is a large, complex project involving thousands of websites, we ask for your patience and understanding. 

I have questions about HTTPS integration.

Please contact our support team via the Support link in the upper right of the website builder. If you are concerned about the functionality of a 3rd-party service or code used on your website, our support team is happy to help.

 

Billing Issues on March 4th

For any customers who received an email that their subscription renewal declined on March 4th, please note that there was a technical issue that day related to our credit card processor. Our automated billing system will try to bill your credit card again by Wednesday. There is a 2 week leeway period after your fee is due that will prevent your website from closing. If you have any questions, feel free to contact the support team.

System Maintenance on December 15th

We’ll be performing system maintenance this Friday, December 15th, 2017 at 11:30pm, Pacific Daylight Time. It will take approximately 4 hours during which all websites and email will be unavailable Following the scheduled maintenance, everything will be accessible once again.

UPDATE: Image Loading and Slowness Issues Fixed

UPDATE: The problem has been fixed and websites are back to normal. Thank you for your patience while this was being resolved.

The issues were a result of a power outage at our Internet Service Provider's location. When that occurred, websites were inaccessible for a time. After the power came back on, a few of our services experienced some difficulties. Those services are now working correctly and everything is back to normal.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

PREVIOUS POST: Our technical team is currently looking into an image uploading issue that also affects captchas. Captchas are the images of text that appear at the bottom of forms where a visitor to your website has to type in the text to prove they're a human and not a spam software program. We are also looking into some slowness issues on the website that seem to be affecting some customers.

We apologize for any inconvenience this is causing.

Image Loading and Slowness Issues

Our technical team is currently looking into an image loading issue that affects both adding new images and captchas. Captchas are the images of text that appear at the bottom of forms where a visitor to your website has to type in the text to prove they're a human and not a spam software program. We are also looking into some slowness issues on the website that seem to be affecting some customers.

We apologize for any inconvenience this is causing.

Improvement: Product Option Dropdowns

We have made a change to the Product Options Dropdown section of the catalog pages. You can now make the product option dropdown selections mandatory and your clients will need to select an option before they are able to add the product to the cart.

Some of our users had asked that we make the drop downs mandatory as the clients would forget to click on the drop down and it would default to the first option in the list. You can now choose to make the selection mandatory and it will not allow the product to be added to the cart without a selection being made:

When your customers are checking out on the website, they will now see a little indicator that the selection is mandatory next to the Option Name, and if you do not select the required option, a message will appear letting them know that they must “provide all required fields before adding this item to the cart”.

If you already have products created with options and you’d like to make them mandatory, simply go and edit your product and click on the box underneath the option you want to make required.

As always, our support team is available to assist with any questions you might have - just click the Support link in the upper right of the website builder. 

Issue Resolved: Power Down, Websites Offline

UPDATE 2:36PM PST: Our website setup is up and running and there are no problems on our end. However, our Internet Service Provider has indicated that they are still dealing with some issues and it is possible there may be outages later on. Our tech team is in contact with them and we will keep all our customers updated here should anything come up.

UPDATE 2:16PM PST: Power has been restored and our servers are back online. We are monitoring to ensure there are no further problems. We thank you for your patience and apologize sincerely for the downtime.  

UPDATE 11:38AM PST: The power for our Internet Service Provider has gone down and they have informed us that their back up generator has also failed. As a result, all their customers including us do not have their websites online. We will keep you posted of any updates.

As our phone lines run through the Internet via VOIP, our phone lines are unfortunately also offline.

In the meantime, our technicians are on site ready for when power is returned to get our websites up again as soon as possible.

 

Updates: Express Checkout, Shipping, Calendar

We've implemented a few small fixes and updates today, including a few small changes to our new features that were released recently. 

• The new shipping notification feature now allows you to enter a custom message when sending the shipping email to your customer. If you send a tracking number, it will automatically be appended to the order notes so you can retrieve it later. 
• The Express Checkout feature now has support for a 'guest mode' that allows users to complete a purchase without creating an account. 
• New event icons have been added to the Calendar page type. 

As always, our support team is available to assist with any questions you might have - just click the Support link in the upper right of the website builder.