Safe.mn offline for 8 hours - UPDATE

Unfortunately, our new hosting provider has suspended our server. We are looking for a new home. We may also have lost the URLs created in the last 4 hours.

UPDATE

We've found a new home for safe.mn, the downtime was less than 8 hours.

Information on the last outage

You may have noticed that safe.mn (not go2.gs, clic.gs, cliks.fr or 888.hn) expired recently, and was not functioning for a couple of days. This was not an error from our side. Here are all the details.

We registered the main domain safe.mn in 2009. There were very few registrars for .MN at that time, and even fewer affordable registrars in the US. We settled for Planet Online.

All went fine until 2012. In 2012, we had troubles to renew the domain. We paid Planet Online, but they did not renew the domain. It took many phone calls over a couple of weeks to get the problem resolved on their side. Of course, we wanted to switch provider. But transferring out the domain did not work (and other parts of their panels were broken as well). Then, we wanted to renew the domains for 10 years. Unfortunately, only 1-year renewal were authorized. Finally, we set up a long TTL (1 week) on the DNS records in anticipation of new issues. It look like it did not help in the end.

In March 2013, we paid for the renewal 2 months before the expiration date. Again, the payment was successful, but the renewal was not done. We sent many e-mails and phone calls, but no reply. Finally, we learned that planet Online was out of business.

We still had 2 to 3 weeks to figure out what to do. Most of the TLDs managed by Planet Online were transferred to Namesbeyond ... except .MN! We contacted nic.mn and other registrars, none of them could help. Finally, we were pointed out to the right people at the right registrar. It took another few days to prove that we were the legitimate owner of safe.mn, and for the registrar to check that Planet Online was indeed unreachable.

Finally, 4-5 days after the domain expired, and redirected to a different page, safe.mn as renewed and transferred to a new registrar. We are still in the process of verifying whether we should stay with the current registrar, or go to a new one. We'd like to register the domain for 10 years.

Sorry for the 4 to 5 days of interrupted service. Be assured that safe.mn is still alive, we want to keep it around forever.

Move to a new server (SUCCESSFUL)

We're moving safe.mn (along with go2.gs, clic2.gs and cliks.fr and 888.hn) to a new, more powerful,  server.

The move will start on Tuesday 08/14/2012 at 8pm PST and will finish the same day at 10pm PST. The API will be shutdown during the move, so new short URLs can be created during the 2-hour move (UPDATE: it lasted 22 minutes only).

The short URLs will still redirect users throughout the move. We will loose a bout a day of statistics about traffic.

We will update this post when the move starts, and when it is done.


Updates:

8pm PST 08/14/2012:

• migration started
• No new short URL can be created

8:18pm PST:

• database migrated to new server
• DNS switched to new server
• Old IP redirects to new safe.mn server

8:22pm PST:

• new short URLs can be created
• migration is complete (much shorter than scheduled)

8:30pm PST

• all tests are successful
• the migration is officially finished

Vesion 26: mobile

We've released a beta version of the website for mobiles. This is still experimental. Mobile users represent about 10% of our user base.

Version 25: QR codes

We've added QR codes to all links shortened with safe.mn, clic.gs, clicks.fr and 888.hn. You'll see them on information pages (http://safe.mn/1/i), warning pages (http://safe.mn/3) or by adding /q to a short link (http://safe.mn/100/q).

The QR codes are also available through the API.

Finally, we made it easy to add QR code to any page automatically.

Discussion: affiliate links to cover our costs

I am very happy that safe.mn is getting more and more popular by the day. We recently switched to a more powerful dedicated server to ensure better reliability, and better speed. We also increased the number of tests we do on each short link to protect users better. Finally, we purchase additional storage for better backup.

We are currently looking at adding commercial tools for even better security. We would also like to add a second server in a different location for full redundancy.

Of course, all of this has the cost. We are looking at different ways to cover our expenses. One way we're trying is Google Adsense. But the revenues are low, and unpredictable.

We would like to try a different way to pay for the hosting services: affiliate links. The idea is to modify some links, like Amazon URLs, to include our affiliate ID. The links would still redirect to the same page, but we would get a percentage of the sales done by users. But we would not modify existing affiliate links: if you shorten an Amazon affiliate link, we would not modify it.

Would it be acceptable to you and your users? We'd like to open the discussion before we take any action. Please leave comments on this post.

Version 24 - Alternate domains clic.gs & go2.gs

You can now use 4 domains for your secured short links: safe.mn, cliks.fr, clic.gs and go2.gs. You can switch between the domains at any time: http://safe.mn/1 and http://clic.gs/1 point to the same final link.

Choose an alternate domain

We have also improved our statistics. You can see a map of the visitors by country.

Visualize where visitors come from

We improved our French translation as well.