System update in progress

Smartmessages will be having several short outages over the next few hours while we are deploying some major changes. More news later.

Intermittent outage

Our ISP, Mythic Beasts, experienced a major router failure, followed by routing instability, on the evening of Friday October 13th, continuing until early afternoon on Saturday 14th. This has now been resolved. This affected connectivity intermittently to and from Smartmessages servers, but the servers themselves were unaffected. We apologise for the inconvenience, but this was outside our control.

Short outage

Due to an unexpected hardware issue, the Smartmessages service will be down for around half an hour this evening at approx 21:30 UK time.

Update: It started a little later and took a little longer than expected, but all work has been completed successfully and everything is back online.

Smartmessages performance boost

Today we're happy to announce a big performance boost to smartmessages.net. We've migrated our whole platform to PHP 7, so you'll see a huge boost in page load speeds (which were pretty good to start with!) and email send rates.

We've also improved our TLS configuration (still an A+ rating on SSL Labs!) with the addition of ChaCha20/Poly1305 cipher suites, which give massively improved performance on low-power devices such as phones.

We hope you like it!

Database update

Yesterday we ran into some database issues that resulted in the system being very slow. We had partly commissioned a new database server, so rather than fixing the problem on the old server, we worked around it by completing the configuration of the new server and deploying it into production.
This accomplished what we hoped - a massive performance improvement across the board.

We apologies for the slow performance yesterday, but hope you enjoy the enormous speed boost you've got today!

Achievement unlocked: HTTP/2 deployed!

We're happy to announce that we've completed deployment of HTTP/2 support across all our services. In addition to our previous support for SSL everywhere and IPv6, we now complete the set with HTTP/2. Expect a fair performance boost on all web page interactions, especially on mobiles.

If you're running a very old browser, you won't see any difference - but there's never been a better time to upgrade!

Big technical update

We've just rolled out a pretty hefty technical upgrade to our back-end systems.

• Switched our web servers from apache to nginx (faster)
• Updated from PHP 5.4 to 5.6 (faster, better)
• Enabled IPv6 (faster, better on modern networks)
• Updated to SPDY 3.1 (faster)
• Enabled the HSTS header (safer) - we now get an A+ on SSLLabs tests.

You should find things work exactly as before, just faster and more securely!

The HSTS header means that we now always serve everything over SSL encryption, including mailshot web versions and images. If you are hosting your own mailshot images on an insecure site, this may mean that recipients viewing a web version are either not shown images or see a security warning about insecure content from your site. To fix this, either upgrade your site to use SSL (we can help with that), or move your image hosting onto our servers.