We’ve seen a huge amount of offers for tomorrow on all kind of stuff: shoes, electronics, travel offers or even insurance special “Black Friday” offers. As if you’re waiting Black Friday to come and sign-up for an insurance

We’re thrilled to experience our first Black Friday from the other side of the counter. So we tweaked a bit our crazy formula and made the super simple pricing even simpler, saving you a solid $100 every month for lifetime:

- $99/month with 500,000 page views included
- extra page views keep the usual $10 / 100,000 page views / month.
- waived optimization fee

This is an offer that is available only during 2012′s Black Friday – November 23rd. So go ahead and convince us that Black Friday is the mother of all special offers because you won’t see this offer below our costs anytime soon.

Good luck and … Welcome to PressLabs!

Crunching log data is a tedious and resource intensive task. We’ve implemented and made available for you a slim, fast and accessible on all devices version of PHP logging. On top of our logging architecture we have integrated the Papertrail API which proved an outstanding way to integrate in our Hydrogen hosting infrastructure. It allows developers and site owners to get more insight into their site code, debug if the case, but also check how the site behaves, in realtime.

The logging feature is integrated in the Hydrogen dashboard, and is accessible via desktop, but also from a mobile device. We hope you’ll agree with us when we say that this feature is priceless, for example when tinkering with the theme code or with a plugin directly on the live site. Well, speaking of tinkering, consider using the error_log() PHP function to print messages or variables values you need to debug in this log, instead printing in the content of the HTML output.

Let’s say for example you want to debug your custom WP_query and would like to dump its content without affecting the public pages on your production site. You can add this line and watch the logs in the Hydrogen dashboard:

<?php error_log(serialize($wp_query)); ?>

Now a few technical details. Logging level is set to display errors and warnings and the logging viewport displays the last 100 log entries, but it loads them as you scroll. Still, it is not bloating or blocking your browser, by dynamically adjusting the buffer of entries. We give access to the last 7 days of backlogs.

One of the key features of our Hydrogen WordPress hosting service is the separation between the frontend / www of your site hosted with us and the backend / WordPress dashboard. This enables you to avoid many possible downtimes due to syntax errors, bad plugins or the wrong theme. Therefore if anything goes wrong on the WP dashboard area (wp-admin), the public site is showing the latest cached version of the site.

We are happy to announce today an update to our service that speeds up the entire dashboard area and thus makes it more responsive to every click and action you perform. We have tested extensively the keepalive feature introduced in nginx version 1.1.4 and now are making use of it. In other words the servers running the wp-admin area are in permanent connection with the frontend servers that are running the public site. So every action you perform on the WordPress dashboard is sent faster to your browser (editing/publishing posts or pages, various settings you modify or even the load of the wp-admin home page).

Simply put, your WordPress dashboard is around 100ms more responsive than it used to be until now. That is a response time improvement of about 15% throughout our customer base and we consider that having a faster WordPress dashboard is a win for everybody.

HTTP response time

source: pingdom.com

We are happy and proud to announce our managed WordPress hosting service which we named Hydrogen. We have built it to be simple to use and extremely efficient for growing sites running WordPress. It is the result of three years of challenging hard work with real and demanding publishers. We believe that we grew together nicely and learned responsibility since day one. It’s definitely thrilling to see successful spikes as large as 5 million page views for a single website in 24 hours. Not to mention huge traffic figures in counters and many log lines with “200 OK” flooding the screen.

Surviving spikes was our first challenge back in the autumn of 2009 when digg.com used to shake and crash sites. The next challenges came lightning fast one after the other – sustaining massive traffic levels, coping with poor code, migrating rushing early adopters who had their sites hacked, working round the clock to provide support and in the same time putting all the experience gathered in a meaningful service.

I’d say the biggest challenge by far was to develop our service in production conditions, where real customers put their trust in us and therefore the room for errors was close to none. Nevertheless, we want to thank our early adopters for this but also for spreading the good word about PressLabs. We hope to have raised at your expectations level and we promise to keep Hydrogen at the highest possible level of performance while you focus on what’s important for you.