myVersionControl Hardware Upgrade

myVersionControl servers are in the process of being upgraded. As part of the upgrade we have installed reverse proxy servers to handle myVersionControl functions. These will allow us to do maintenance/improve redundancy in the future. As a result of this myVersionControl has new DNS addresses which may take a few hours to propagate around the world.

We apologise if some users experience an interruption in service during DNS propagation. We believe that these changes were essential to the continued expansion and robustness of myVersionControl.

We hope you enjoy the speed increase!

myVersionControl Support Team

myVersionControl Downtime

On Monday 26th August myVersionControl experienced two extended outages. This was caused by a cascade failure at the datacenter cluster that we use. This effectively took most of myVersionControl systems offline. This is the first major outage we have experienced from this datacentre in the whole 6 years we have been in operations.

Downtime was recorded at:
13:47:04 until 16:04:43 (BST, 137 minutes)
18:39:04 until 21:29:00 (BST, 170 minutes)

Like thousands of other businesses, we have been very disappointed with the way that this was handled by the datacenter. The good news is that if this had happened, even one month later we could have continued operations. This is because our infrastructure upgrade means we will now span multiple independent datacentres therefore a single outage would not be enough to take us completely offline.

In this occasion we fully accept that our communications could have been better and we are drawing up new procedures for situations like this one where our customers will be far better informed. We are also going to extend and enhance our status page so that it reflects the health of each of the components that make up myVersionControl.  We would like to apologise to all our customers that were affected by this outage and reassure you that we are doing all that is necessary to ensure the service can deal better with exceptional circumstances like this in the future.
Many thanks,

The myVersionControl Team

Basecamp integration available

The myVersionControl developers are working extremely hard on implementing a number of major infrastructure changes which we will talk about over the next few weeks. This is taking all our efforts at the moment and we should be releasing these upgrades mid to late July.

Basecamp Integration
It is good to do some less technically demanding development at times though(!) which is why we have also begun a development effort to increase myVersionControl integration. The first to be released is the excellent Project management software 'Basecamp'. Integrating your repository with Basecamp is very simple and can be done from your control panel with only a few clicks.

If you would like to add Basecamp to your myVersionControl account you will find the option in the 'Resources' part of your control panel. The option is available to both free and paying customers. If you use some third party software and wish us to integrate with it then please register your suggestion at our ideas page.

Version 2.3.1 Released

1st April, in some parts of the world this is "April Fools Day" so perhaps not the best day for a release but nonetheless it is the day we chose!!

I should explain how we work our deployments, for the most part we work in a relatively agile manner where new features are released as soon as they are tested. We use our milestones to break our enhancements into sensible related fragments. So most of what is under the release heading today has already been deployed into the live environment.

Version 2.3.1 contains a number of enhancements and fixes but the most important ones include:

• Realtime backups - If you have a paid account you can rest assured that each and every one of your commits are sent from our European datacentre to a server 3904 miles away in Pennsylvania, USA. You do not need to do anything to activate this, we are working our way through all our customers and will have completed this in around 1 week.

• Deployments, we are still beta testing deployments but if you are an Enterprise user you can expect it to be added to your control panel shortly and then rolled out to other paid users shortly after.

• We have doubled our server count to separate out core functions, you should see an improvement in response times and overall speed.

• You can now create a custom address for your downloadable invoices.

• The restriction on project name has been removed. After deleting a project you can now reuse that name.

Milestone 2.3.2 is due in only one month. That includes a number of behind the scenes e.g. an overhaul of the billing platform. However there should be time to add some new functionality and aesthetic improvements!

myVersionControl 2011 - big, BIG, BIIG changes ahead!

Throughout 2010 we were entrusted with ever larger amounts of customer's data, we retained our excellent >99% uptime, we fixed and squashed bugs and our servers were loved, we receive only 3 or 4 support requests per week.

This has left us with plenty of time to innovate and plan for 2011. We now have a new management structure, new staff and an office thirst to be the best! There is so much planned for 2011 that a blog article is likely to be too short (and I don't want to give the competitors too many good ideas!) but I will do my best to do it justice. Incidentally, we are intending on having frequent blog updates now to keep you informed of progress so that you know when your 'must have' feature is likely to be added (add them here).

First up - we have a new management structure. myVersionControl is now run by "VersionControl Solutions", the same staff and the same owners but a far more sensible name. Any credit card statements will be changing to this new name in the next month or two. We may need you to input your credit card numbers again as we are changing merchant account providers at the same time from Barclaycard to HSBC but we will let you know about this nearer the time.

Our staff numbers have now risen to six and this has meant that we can instigate our ambitious development plan conceived over the last 12 months and now on an accelerated program.

We are pursuing grant funding of > 100,000 GBP to employ yet more new developers taking us up to eight and paving the way to completing some new and exciting research and development initiatives that we have underway in our labs at the moment (sneak previews will be in future blogs so come back often!).

Our first milestone is due on the 1st April and will contain alot of goodies like deployments and realtime backups.

More about this and the other developments in future posts! For now, I am back to the labs to crack the whip and make sure we hit our deadlines!!


Martin,
Managing Director
p.s. The reason for the rabbit? 2011 is the chinese year of the rabbit!!