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We are open to new members again. The deadline to get your application in to us for this round is February 23rd (one month from today). After starting your application you can save and come back to it as many times as you want so please take your time and give good complete answers to all the questions we ask (there are a lot).

After the deadline we will take a few weeks to review the applications and decide who to accept as new members. Before you get started it is a good idea to review posts to this blog in the Prospective Member Advice category.

We are open to new member requests until May 20. Before you apply please take time to browse the Prospective member advice section of this blog.

Since our service is free people rarely let us know when they stop using (or never end up using) their accounts. To clear out the unused accounts we occasionally perform an audit of user accounts. Last night we began reviewing all user accounts. If sites were found to not be in use they were deactivated. Similarly if sites were found to be in violation of our rules they were deactivated. Our review will continue for the next couple days. If your site becomes unavailable in the next couple days it is likely because we misidentified it as out of use. Please contact us immediately so that we can reactivate your account.

When we finish our review all remaining accounts may be contacted and asked to email us to confirm they are using their account. Please make sure your email address on record with us is up to date by logging in to the member area and navigating to the community section where you will find options to view and edit your contact details.

Its the last time this year to request membership at AmbitiousLemon.

Prospective members have between now and 10 Dec to submit requests. This last closure was longer than usual so we are expecting a larger than usual number of requests. Be sure to make them good! The large number of expected requests might also mean it could take us longer than the usual 2-3 weeks after 10 Dec to send out our responses, please be patient with us.

Please review the blog posts made in the “Prospective Member Advice” to make sure your request is the best possible.

We are gearing up for some big improvements around AmbitiousLemon, but it is going to require all hands on deck. We are an all volunteer team. That means that big improvements, like those we have planned, require the community to come together to make things happen.

We are looking for a group of volunteers to work on various parts of a larger project. The completed project will allow us to more easily expand the number of web technologies (particularly web frameworks) we support. The work will also involve the creation of a new control panel for our members (we currently use webmin/virtualmin). One of our senior volunteers will be organizing the effort.

The larger project involves a large set of different skills. We don’t expect each person to have all of these skills, just a useful subset and the willingness and time to help. If you have some of the skills listed below and have some time to donate towards making the AmbitiousLemon Community better please contact us.

Skills Needed:

• *nix Administration
• Interface Design Experience
• Virtualization Experience
• PHP Development
• Experience with a couple popular frameworks (e.g. Django, RoR, Pylons, TurboGears, Catalyst)
• Python (bonus points)

Please use the contact/support button on the top of the page to send us a message, or send email to jbanks@ambitiouslemon.com.

We have reopened for new hosting requests. Requests submitted between now and the close of the request window on 25 July should expect a final decision approximately around 9 August.

For the best success please review the posts made to the Prospective Member Advice section on this blog.

At this time, we have completed our reinstall and have resolved all known issues with the server.

If your site is still experiencing issues that started on last Saturday, please contact us so that we can investigate the issue.

The major portions of our reinstall have been completed and we are working on some lingering issues now. If you are having an issue with your website that was not happening before yesterday please contact us so we can address it.

EDIT: Issues with the member site have been fixed.

On Sunday, May 30th Saturday, June 12th we will be taking AmbitiousLemon down for six to eight hours to reinstall the operating system. The server will go down at about 11:00 AM Pacific time and will stay down until we have full functionality restored. We have full backups of data stored on the server, so while data loss is a possibility it is very unlikely.

We have been working on resolving our intermittent downtime issues and have decided that our attempts to band-aid the issue have not been successful. For this reason, we are going to install a fresh build of Linux. In addition, we have seen some attempts to break into AmbitiousLemon. Rebuilding the server from the ground up allows us to add additional layers of security to ensure that future attempts have less chance of success.

Update:
One of our admins is has had a family emergency and will not be available on Sunday, May 30th. Accordingly, we are rescheduling our downtime to ensure the reinstall goes as smoothly as possible.

Update #2:
The downtime is being delayed again. We are delaying to ensure that we are in the best position possible to reinstall with minimal downtime and to ensure that the experience is as seamless as possible for our users.

We were down for about eight hours today. The downtime occurred while we were upgrading system software trying to address the downtime and related issues from the past week. This was caused when a system component got upgraded before a planned kernel upgrade was completed. Unfortunately, this left the system in a state where we needed to be on-site to work on it.

After getting to the unit, we were able to diagnose and fix the issue, and while doing so completed some additional upgrades to the machine.

We are continuing to investigate the cause of our downtime; the server has not been performing as it should and we are investigating how to best and most effectively fix it.