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For the past week we have been reading and discussing all of the hosting requests submitted in the past application window. Out of roughly 50 requests submitted, we are more closely reading and discussing 22 requests. If you haven’t heard from us yet it is because we are still discussing your request. I hope to send out final decisions some time next week.

A common question that comes up when reviewing requests by students is “Why isn’t their school providing hosting?” Some of you do a good job in your application explaining how you looked into hosting at your school and found it wasn’t offered or was limited in some fundamental way that would prevent you from using it for the website you have in mind. But many requests do not address the issue at all.

Middle and High schools may offer hosting either at the individual school level or at the district level. Ask around to see if students at your school can get hosting – most schools would require you to make a special request.

Universities probably have a number of ways to procure hosting. Hosting services by the University IT system may exist, but you may also find hosting at the college, department, or program level. Often the Computer Science department can provide hosting even if you aren’t a student in that department. Even if your school doesn’t have a formal system for providing hosting services you will likely be able to find someone who can hook you up with an account; especially if your website idea will provide a service for students. Doing this may even lead to the University helping to publicize your website, provide you with course credits, or even fund your project.

If you are a student you really need to demonstrate to us that you have looked into what hosting services your school provides and have a good reason for not using it. We often reject requests because we do not think we are the right host for them; demonstrate to us that you have researched your options and have decided our service makes the most sense for your project.

As the years have passed it has become more common for individual AmbitiousLemon members to use more than what we consider their fair share of server resources (namely bandwidth and storage space). Each time we have identified a problem and contacted the member in question, the member has quickly dealt with the problem and apologized.

Despite the respectful nature of these interactions we have noticed a disturbing pattern. All of the sites that have caused excessive bandwidth or storage space usage have been created in-addition-to or as a replacement-of the site we had approved when the member was first granted AmbitiousLemon membership. None of these sites would have made it past our formal approval process. Often the site that was added was created for a friend of the AmbitiousLemon member rather than for the member him/herself; completely bypassing our careful review process for new members.

We’ve decided that this is unacceptable. While AmbitiousLemon members have always enjoyed the ability to add additional domains on their own as of today we are changing member privileges to block this ability. Our formal policy is that we allow an unlimited number of domains for each member, but each member must receive permission to add a new site or replace their existing site with something fundamentally different.

Furthermore while members have never been allowed to share their accounts, we are now adding language to our rules page to make this policy plain and obvious to our members. If you have a friend who needs an account, they will have to formally request their own account.

Please review our rules page to make note of these changes.

We are now accepting applications for new members. Applications are due by November 24th, at which time we will close to review the pool of applicants. You can expect a decision on your request by December 14th.

You may wish to review previous posts to this blog concerning tips on your application.

We have been experiencing frequent intermittent downtime throughout the last 10 hours totaling about 2 hours in accumulated downtime.

We are still looking into the cause, but suspect it is related to the undiagnosed downtime from a couple weeks ago.

We are upgrading the kernel on AmbitiousLemon tonight, so there may be momentary downtime as the server reboots.

Postgresql has been upgraded to 8.1. As part of the upgrade process all databases had to be exported and imported. If you see any issues with your Postgresql database, please contact us.

This upgrade was required to allow psycopg2 to work correctly with Django.

Should any issues arise, please contact us.

Last night we experienced about an hour of downtime and this morning we were down for about an hour and a half. The server required a reboot each time in order to come back online, but we are still investigating the root causes of these crashes.

I’ll post again when the issue is resolved.

Lately I have been getting a few dozen of these emails every day to this effect. The volume is high enough that I can’t respond to everyone so hopefully those of you who are interested will have subscribed to the rss feed, email list, or twitter feed.

We will be reopening in a couple weeks time.

The reason we have been closed so long is that we have been having trouble juggling the many frameworks we support. While adding Pylons support a few weeks ago we managed to break our Django install. Getting Django up and running again took quite a bit more time and effort (and the help of some of our Django users) than we had expected. Django has been working again for a few weeks, but Pylons is not installed anymore. We plan to take another swing at Pylons – perhaps before we reopen, but likely not.

I want to give things a bit more time to settle, to make sure we are running smoothly again, but should the server not implode or start only serving webpages about duck hats then we should reopen in a few weeks.

We expect 1-2 minutes of downtime at approximately 8pm PST tonight.

In our welcome email to new users we ask that users change their password. As one might expect, new users often respond saying “Ok, how do we do that?” Since the control panel software sort of hides the change password function this is a good question. So here is a quick step by step guide.

1. Browse to the AmbitiousLemon Members’ Page
2. Click the Control Panel Icon.
3. Log in to your control panel by entering your username and password.
4. Click the Virtualmin Virtual Servers Icon.
5. Click on the name of your virtual server from the list*.
6. Click on the Configurable settings text.
7. Click the radio button next to “Administrator Password” to “set to..”
8. Type your desired password into the password field next to the “set to..” radio button.
9. Click the “Save Virtual Server” button.

*Note this is also the same page of settings where most of your control panel functions reside. From here you can change your domain name, delete your server, add new email users, add databases, and much more.