Here's a quick summary of what has been going on at Wikidot recently.

Bitcoin promotion extended indefinitely

On Nov, 29 we launched a week-long Black Friday promotion. This time it was different. For the very first time you could purchase account upgrades with Bitcoin and we would give a 50% discount to those paying with Bitcoin. Optimistically speaking, we have learned there definitely is a huge potential in Bitcoin payments, but it still needs to be unleashed.

However, we have decided to keep the promo on-going and offer 15% discount for all upgrades paid with Bitcoin.

Infrastructure changes

From time to time we are plagued with internal issues. Servers being overloaded, sometimes dying, traffic spikes causing enormous stress on our machines, DDoS attacks etc. Over the years we have learned how to cope with such issues and internal problems very rarely affect the Wikidot as a service. Yes, there is a lot of redundancy in our setup, several metrics and alarms constantly monitor health of servers and there are mechanisms that can failover to a hot stand-by servers in case any of critical ones fail.

However recently some database and web worker issues affected the stability of Wikidot. We had to take radical steps and literally re-created large parts of our infrastructure. Wikidot is now being hosted in an isolated Virtual Private Cloud within Amazon Web Services. This gives us better connectivity between our 30 servers and improves manageability. As before, servers are spread over multiple availability zones, so in case any zone goes down (which sometimes happen), Wikidot should continue its operation (or at least make the recovery much faster).

We did the transition last Friday. There are still a couple of issues we keep working on, but the overall stability of infrastructure seems fine.

New ad formats for pro sites

Premium site owners can now paste Yandex and Google Adsense asynchronous code snippets within the ad management section of Site Manager.

Layouts improvements

Although Layouts are far from mainstream yet, we can see dozens of Bootstrap-based wikis under construction, which is great. We are working on several improvements and new components, to be announced soon!