Since yesterday we’ve returned to an open signup system, where any user can sign-up immediately. We had to temporarily place limits on new user signups while we experienced very high demand, but we’ve added additional resources that should keep us going strong for a while.
We’ve also completely emptied the invitation queue — if you haven’t received an invitation by email (we had about 3% email failure rate: bouncing, etc), you should be able to sign up for an account immediately.
Thanks again for your patience while we grow, and for your feedback. We’re aware of a couple bugs, and have some great features planned for release this next week.
On a sidenote, I’ll be in New York at BizDev2 today, and TechCrunch 8 on Thursday — drop me a note if you’re attending.
After being covered recently on TechCrunch and other blogs, we received much more traffic than we expected to deal with this week. Luckily, we were prepared, and our cluster is braving the storm. We’ve overnighted a new dual-core server and some extra RAM, which we’ll be able to throw in on Monday. With the new server, we’ll empty the waiting list within a day and return to open signups.
In the meantime, we’ll continue sending out invitations — if you don’t have one and are reading this, send us an email and we’ll get you one right away.
I woke up this morning to an email by Sid congratulating me on being TechCrunch’d. I was honestly quite surprised that I hadn’t received any notifications that our site went down, and our cluster seemed to be handling things admirably — in part, this was due to the fact that we limited user signups to 1,000, so we didn’t have too many concurrent users.
It’s a great feeling, but we still have a ways to go. We’re very excited about what we’ll be able to accomplish in the next couple months — we’re listening to your feedback, and many of our changes are directly related to feedback we received from our users.
We know many of you have been trying to sign up, and have been placed in the queue. As of this post, we have a little bit over 2,000 users in our queue. We’re adding an extra server to our cluster very soon, and we’ll be sending out invitations every 4 hours in batches of 200 before then. Depending on our server load, we might move a bit faster.
Please bear with us while we grow. These limitations are temporary and are in place to make sure that every registered user can actually use our site, and that we don’t go down.
Here’s a tip: We know it can be frustrating to sign-up only to be told that your information has been added to a waiting list, but if you contact us, we should be able to work things out.
Last, we had several sites that covered us early on — these include Rev2 (Post 1, Post 2), Go2Web2 Blog (Post 1), Jinfoo (Post 1, Post 2, Tutorial) and Wappblog (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Thanks guys.
Along with a couple bug fixes, we’ve made some fundamental changes to the way Weebly works. First, with some advice from Paul Graham (of YCombinator), we’ve done away with our invitation system. Second, we’ve revamped our home page to present a more detailed look into what Weebly is and what it can do for you. Third, we’ve removed the “Weebly Network” header bar.
- Open invitation system. The purpose of our invitation system was to limit the size of our user base to something within our resources — or at least until we can throw another server into our cluster. Instead of requiring that users have an invitation to sign up, we’re letting any user sign up until we reach a preset limit. Users with invitations will always be able to sign up, regardless of our limit. If we hit the limit, users without invitations will be placed on the “invitation list”, as before, until we can accommodate the extra users.
- Revamped home page. We’ve revamped our home page and added a feature list, an introduction video following a user creating a site from start to finish, and a “Discover Weebly” section with screenshots detailing various aspects of the interface. Dan created the video — let us know what you think of it, and the other changes we made to our site.
- Site Header Bar. We received a lot of feedback about the header on published pages — for the most part, users didn’t like it, so we took it off. We designed it to be attractive, but agree with you that it’s a bit invasive. We’ll eventually want to integrate some additional features using some type of bar, and we’ll be sure to get your feedback before we implement that. To remove the bar from your published pages, log-in to Weebly and re-export your site.
We appreciate the feedback we’ve received in the past two weeks, and it has been very helpful. As always, let us know what you think of the site, and if you have any comments or suggestions.
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