We've changed the focus of Branchable, away from being a for-profit corporation. Branchable's parent company, Braawi Ltd will be closed down. Branchable will continue as a service run by Joey Hess and Lars Wirzenius.
This change will be reflected in the bills we send our users going forward. Users who have set up recurring PayPal payments to Braawi will need to stop them.
message from Joey
The above is the essence of the change, but I wanted to say something
personal as well.
When Lars and I started working on Branchable two years ago, our goal was not to get rich quick. We hoped to provide ourselves with a small income that would supplement our other work and add some flexability to our lives, and we wanted to build a service for people who valued freedom from proprietary lock-in, while wanting something easy to use. I think we've succeeded well at the latter goal; as to the former, we've only made enough money to pay for operating expenses, but not for our time.
And to me, that's ok. I'd rather build something that is done right than make money. And I'm proud that there's a very easy hosting service for Ikiwiki available now, in Branchable.
So I plan to contine operating Branchable, and hope that the users keep paying its operating expenses. And if our current slow growth in new users continues, then who knows, it may still put some food on my table. Until and unless that happens, Branchable isn't a business venture for me, it's a labor of love.
message from Lars
I originally started Braawi as a backup service company, and then did several years of consulting through it. However, I'm now working in a normal job, and it takes a bit of time and money to keep the company alive, so that's why it's shutting down.
I love Branchable. It is wonderful to have a sensible hosting service for my own web/wiki/blog sites, and I enjoy being able to help others host their stuff the same way. I plan to help Joey keep Branchable alive for a long, long time to come.
Today I've installed a new version of ikiwiki, which uses a faster markdown engine called "discount". It's been benchmarked to be up to 40 times faster than the old engine, so enjoy the speed boost! --Joey
On Saturday, 26 November, at 12 pm EST (17:00 GMT), Branchable will be transitioned to new hosting. During this time we expect sites to remain accessible, but in a read-only mode. We expect the move to take less than an hour, and will post updates on identi.ca and twitter.
The move involves an IP address change. Some sites hosted here that have their own domain names hardcode our current IP address. We will contact the owners of such sites to help them move to the new IP address after the transition. To keep such sites from breaking, our old IP address will continue to work too, for the next month.
Update: The move is complete.
Our new IP address is: 66.228.46.55
Our new IPv6 address is: 2600:3c03::f03c:91ff:fedf:c0e5
Update: The old IP address was decommissioned on January 5th 2012.
Users of Blogger had a scare on Thursday and Friday when their last post or two seemed to go missing. We feel for users who pour their heart into a site, and how they must feel when that happens.
While the Blogger posts were later restored, this made us wonder: Could users of Branchable experience the same uncertainty about data they have entrusted to us?
Well, the two of us behind Branchable bring our own perspectives to keeping your data safe. Actually, we both care so much about backups that each of us felt we had to set up our own backup strategy for Branchable, even though that was redundant work for us. In total we keep at least six copies of all data.
So, we have pretty good backups (we think!), but then so does Blogger (we hope!) The key difference is that we are very interested in making sure you have a copy of all your data, no matter what happens to Branchable. That's why we built Branchable on git, and provide the entire content, including all of its history, of your site as an easy git checkout.
To make that even easier and more automated, today we've added a way to make Branchable push changes from your site out to other git repositories. So every change can be automatically pushed to Github, Gitorious, your own personal server, and as many other places as you can think of.
To turn this on for your site, see setting up git pushes from Branchable.
Remember: Many copies keep bits safe!
Today we enabled IPv6 for all sites hosted at Branchable.
We decided to take this step three months before World IPv6 Day, because we saw no reason to delay -- our IPv6 connectivity is solid; and we delight in bringing world-changing technology to our customers ahead of time.
While IPv6 is enabled by default, we do make it easy for you to opt out
of using it on your site. Just go to the Control Panel,
click on the Setup button for your site, and check the box to disable IPv6.
Also, of course, if you are using your own domain name, you can choose to point it at only our IPv4 address and not get IPv6.
We will be keeping a close eye on the results of enabling IPv6 this week and going forward, and if it does cause problems we may turn it off. We welcome your feedback about this.
On this Valentine's day, let's talk about commitment. 
Today we've updated our pricing for Branchable. Commit to a year's service, and we'll provide it at half of the normal price. That means you can host two sites at Branchable for an entire year, for just $59.99.
To sign up for a year's hosting at this new rate, just visit your Control Panel.
Yesterday evening (December 14, UTC time) Branchable was offline for a couple of hours. This was due to a Denial of Service (DoS) attack on the ISP where Branchable is hosted. The server stayed up, but the ISPs network access was flaky until they got things under control.
To provide an out-of-band way to inform customers of any further such events, we have created identi.ca account for Branchable, and also on Twitter.
To be informed of future issues, please subscribe to one of them, either via your identi.ca or Twitter account, or via the corresponding RSS feed.
Branchable blogs were vulnerable to a cross-site-scripting issue involving comment posting. The underlaying security hole in Ikiwiki is CVE-2010-1673.
This hole has now been fixed on all Branchable sites, and as far as we know, was never exploited in the wild. --Joey
Now your sites hosted at Branchable can be translated into multiple languages. The translations are stored using standard PO files, which makes it easy for translators to use their normal tools to update them.
This is thanks to Ikiwiki's excellent po plugin written by intrigeri. We've fixed it to be configurable via your site's Setup page, and tweaked Branchable so it will Just Work. Getting this kind of advanced stuff working can take some tweaking; Branchable takes care of that kind of thing for you.
Make a translated site today!
--Joey
Branchable is built entirely using Free Software, by two guys who are also involved in many Free Software projects. Naturally, we're super excited to be able to use Branchable to host wikis and blogs for our own projects. We're especially pleased that it uses version control, and that branches of sites can be easily created by anyone. These things are a perfect fit with Free Software, and are the reason why Branchable's wiki engine Ikiwiki is already used by many Free Software projects such as DragonFly BSD, Monotone, and GNU Hurd.
So, while Branchable is in beta, we're letting Free Software projects sign up with a special, free hosting plan. Once we get out of beta, we'll continue to provide free hosting to projects that signed up in time. So now would be a good time to sign up!
howto
The procedure to get a free site hosted by Branchable for your Free Software project is pretty simple:
- Get an OpenId that will only be used for this Free Software project. (Don't use your personal OpenID. This is important.)
- Sign up using that OpenId, and the "Basic" price plan. Since the first month is free, you have a few weeks to build your site and see if Branchable will work for your Free Software project.
- Email admin@branchable.com with "free software" in the subject, and a link to your site(s). We will check them, and convert the project's OpenId to a free account.
faq
Q: How many sites can be hosted for a given Free Software project?
A: For now, we're limiting it to 2, but we may raise that.
Q: How much disk space/bandwidth can we use?
A: We don't enforce hard resource limits, but please keep disk usage to
a reasonable amount, and don't plan to use this to serve up disk images!
Q: Branchable is just a startup. What if it fails?
A: You can back up your entire site at any time using git clone.
And move it, if needed, to any other system with ikiwiki.
(That's what the Franklin Street Statement
is all about.)
Or, if you'd like to help us not fail, please consider also paying
Branchable to host your blog or personal website.