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.

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.

More details about what’s included on each plan are always available on our plans page.

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!