If this happens to you, we imagine that you might feel something like this:

We’re introducing a new “We’ll Pay the Ransom” promotion, wherein we will pay Network Solutions the $34.99 necessary to register the domain name for you. Or, if you’ve already paid it, we’ll credit your account $34.99. Either way, just sign up to transfer the domain name to us and a year of our Web hosting.

Or, if you just want to transfer the domain name but not sign up for Web hosting, then you can sign up to transfer the domain name to us and we’ll put it on our watch list. We’ll register the domain on your behalf when Network Solutions releases it, then transfer it over to us.

We have full details available on this page.

• A flexible search feature that lets you search through subjects, senders, and more.
• The ability to optionally view “unsafe” images in HTML messages.
• Preferences that permanently remember things such as your time zone and date format.
• An easier-to-use address book.
• Optional threaded message display.
• Message filters (sorting incoming mail into certain folders) and highlighting.
• Automatic conversion of many foreign-language character sets to UTF-8 display, making it easier to read messages written in other languages.
• And much more…

If you’re already a Webmail user, you’ll see the new pages the next time you login. If you haven’t tried Webmail before, this page explains how to get started.

By the way, we’ll be keeping our old Webmail system around for a couple of weeks at this special address, just in case anyone experiences any problems and needs to temporarily “downgrade”. If you have any trouble with the new system, do let us know right away so we can address it before the old pages are permanently removed.

We’d also like to thank the more-than-200 people who helped us test the new system over the last few weeks. The new system is better because of your efforts.

The upgrade will take place between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time (the times will be slightly different for each server). We’ll be making a full backup of all databases on each server before the upgrade, and as a result, customers should expect MySQL to be unavailable for about 15 minutes during this period. In addition, large databases may be slow for several minutes after the upgrade, because MySQL automatically converts databases to the new version format the first time they are accessed, which can be time consuming.

If your site doesn’t use MySQL databases, it won’t be affected at all. If it does, you almost certainly won’t see any effects other than the 15 minute outage. That said, we do recommend checking your scripts for MySQL 5 compatibility.

MySQL 5 has been available for over a year and is now the standard, recommended version, according to the company that makes MySQL. Any modern script that uses databases should work properly with MySQL 5, but we should mention that we’ve heard reports of MySQL 5 database incompatibilities with a very small number of older scripts. That’s why you may want to check with the authors of any scripts on your site to verify that they are compatible with MySQL 5, as we’ve previously suggested.

If you’re a technically advanced customer and you want to know exactly what changes need to be considered for this upgrade, the MySQL 4.1 to 5.0 upgrade page has plenty of gory details. Where possible, we’ve taken care of the obvious things (for example, we’ve already converted any ISAM tables to MyISAM), but there’s a long list of rarer, subtler issues that are impossible for us to check without examining each SQL query that a script makes.

Although we don’t expect any problems, we will have senior technicians (who have extensive MySQL experience) on duty Sunday August 5 to help customers with any problems. In the very worst case of a customer using a script that simply will not work with MySQL 5, we are keeping a separate MySQL 4.1 server available that we can temporarily use for that customer’s databases to for up to 30 days, giving such customers a chance to resolve the issue.

By the way, we now also provide a way for your scripts to “know” if any MySQL maintenance is in progress, which gives you a way to make sure that your script displays a graceful error message. See “How can I tell when MySQL maintenance is happening?” for details.

We apologize for any inconvenience this upgrade causes. We tend to be very conservative about major upgrades, and we don’t undertake them lightly, but this one is definitely necessary.

The Web hosting plans have had their bandwidth increased as follows:

• Silver plan: increased from 100GB to 250GB per month
• Gold plan: increased from 200GB to 500GB per month
• Platinum plan: increased from 500GB to 1TB per month

This change is effective immediately (in fact, it’ll be applied retroactively to the start of June).

Our pricing remains the same. We’re glad to be able to help you grow your sites without extra fees!

Although we already have a mailing list for Important Announcements, we try to keep traffic there to a minimum. But there are lots of other things happening that we’d sometimes like to share — everything from minor software updates on our servers to useful tips from our support staff.

One of the most useful features is RSS feeds. RSS feeds let you use a feed reader to “subscribe” to all the posts on the blog, or just to particular categories. For example, if you want to see the key things we think every well-informed customer might want to know, you could subscribe to the “Blog Highlights” feed. Or, if you want to know about every last technical change we make to our server platform, the “Tech Corner” feed is for you!

By the way, we should mention that we’ll probably be making lots of changes to the blog as it evolves. We may even change the names of some of the categories, which would cause your RSS feed to stop working. If that happens, you can simply visit the blog again and re-subscribe to the new feed name.

We hope this blog is useful, and we welcome comments and feedback.