wyDay blog

The past 24 hours have been pretty eventful. We've undergone 2 pretty nasty DDoS attacks (and another half-hearted DDoS attack) on our servers. And as a result we had about 2 hours of downtime.

And for this I'm truly sorry.

The good news is we're back up and running now. If you're having trouble accessing your LimeLM accounts (or even just accessing wyDay.com in general) then make sure you do the following:

1. Make sure your network is not caching old DNS entries. Our IP addresses have been swapped out and we're now behind CloudFlare. If you try to access wyday.com using an old IP address nothing will happen.

2. Make sure you're not hard-coding IP addresses to a whitelist. Never do this. Always use the DNS servers. Our IP addresses have changed in the past, they'll change again in the future. I guarantee it.

Quick FAQ for people who don't know what a DDoS is

A DDoS is an acronym for "distributed denial of service". Or, in plain English, it means someone with a grudge wanted to throw a whole bunch of traffic at our servers so that no one else could access our servers.

A DDoS is not a hack. No data was accessed; our servers remain secure.

The long and short of it is that DDoS attacks are a blunt, ultimately harmless, weapon used by small-minded people.

What we've done

The 2 big things we've done is:

1. Swap out our old IP addresses.

2. Put our servers behind CloudFlare.

This means that the brunt of future attacks will be handled by CloudFlare. Meaning more uptime for us (and less angry customers calling you).

What's coming

In addition to everything we've done to successfully stop this DDoS attack, we're also going to further improve our backend so that there is never any 1 "point of failure". Before these latest attacks there was 1 "point-of-failure" in that all traffic was being routed through a single IP address.

So, even though we have several servers spread across the United States doing the hard work of processing activations, verified trials, API requests, and everything else that LimeLM does, all traffic had a common "entry point" in our systems. This was a mistake and didn't account for the cynical nature of the Internet.

In the coming weeks we're going to add several new entry-points world-wide so that if a subsequent DDoS attack effects us at all it will last minutes rather than an hour (because all we'll have to do is "flip a switch" and legitimate traffic will be routed through new entry points, while the attacked entry-point will be shutdown).

What else is coming

TurboActivate and TurboFloat 4.0 are almost out. We're just finishing 2 last-minute bug fixes, and then going through one last round of testing. These are significant releases that we're very proud of. I'll post a long detailed blog post when they're released.

The announcement blog post will also talk about the infrastructure improvements we've already done.

- Wyatt O'Day
Founder & CEO of wyDay

This is a short, but long overdue, update to tell you we've extensively tested all of our products with the current pre-release build of Windows 10 (10240), and everything is working perfectly. So if you're using the latest version of TurboActivate and TurboFloat (get the latest versions on your API page), and the latest version of wyBuild, then you'll be able to continue to use the best licensing and updaters with all currently supported versions of Windows.

(And of course, with TurboActivate and TurboFloat, you'll be able to continue to use the best licensing on Mac OS X, Linux, and soon Android in addition to the Windows support).

We'll of course test everything with the final Windows 10 once it comes out.

We keep an up-to-date list of compatibility and requirements on their own pages:

• See the latest wyBuild compatibility / requirements.
• Also, see the latest TurboActivate requirements and TurboFloat requirements.

Big changes coming

This past week we did major work and expansion to our server infrastructure to support the big features that are coming to LimeLM in the very near future.

The only changes that you will see currently (as of me writing this) is a healthy speed-up for all requests (managing licenses in LimeLM, online activations, deactivations, web API requests, etc.). But visible — and very cool! — features are coming soon.

So, stay tuned for big updates to LimeLM, TurboActivate, TurboFloat, and wyBuild that will be rolling out over next 3 months.

I'm excited! I can't wait to show off our hard work to our growing, loyal, customer base.

We've been hearing a lot about licensing companies shutting down lately. The most recent one to leave the scene is Sharify. Apparently Sharify is shutting down at the end of March 2013.

And because of this we've had an influx of "licensing refugees" — customers leaving old and defunct licensing products for LimeLM. To make this transition easier we've done 2 things:

1. We're providing a discount for all customers that switch to LimeLM.

2. We've made importing your old data very easy.

The discount: Basic plan for Solo Price

For customers that switch over to LimeLM anytime between now until the end of July 2013 you'll get the Basic plan for the Solo plan price ($11/month). This special price lasts for as long as you stay on the Basic plan. We hope your business grows so you can outgrow the Basic plan and move up — mutual self-interest :).

Whether you're switching from Sharify or one of the many other old, defunct, or poorly designed competitors taking advantage of this discount is easy. Here's how you take advantage of the discount:

1. Sign up for LimeLM

2. The shoot us an email (or give us a call) with something that we can use to verify you were a user of one of our competitors (any competitor — still standing, soon to shut-down, or long defunct).

After you take those 2 steps, we'll manually apply the discount to your account.

The quick sales pitch: why LimeLM?

So why should you choose LimeLM? Well, we have a whole article about it: What is hardware-locked licensing and why choose LimeLM?. But here's a brief rundown of our benefits:

• LimeLM and TurboActivate (the part you include with your app) work on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Solaris and Android support will be added soon as per customer demand.

• You can integrate TurboActivate into your app no matter what programming language you use. Right now we have example integrations for all major programming languages (C, C++, C#, VB.NET, VBA, Adobe AIR, Java, Delphi, etc., etc., etc.). We add more example integrations based on customer demand.

• We make things dead simple for you to create and manage your licenses.

• We've made things even easier when your customers activate your app. You can even use our pre-built TurboActivate wizard to make online activation (or even offline activation) absolutely painless.

• You can automate absolutely everything so you never have to log into LimeLM if you don't want to. We have an extensive web API so you can integrate into your existing back-office processes.

• We have customers ranging in size from small one-man companies to Fortune 500 companies. In other words, large and small companies alike put their trust in us.

• We've been profitable since our first year in business and we've been growing steadily. This means we're not going anywhere.

On top of all that, if you're still not sure whether you want to use LimeLM then you still have a couple of options. We have a free plan that you can play around with. Or you can contact us and we'll walk through any questions or concerns you have.

Migrating from your old licensing

Switching to LimeLM is fairly easy, and you can make it seamless for your customers. Read the "How to switch your licensing to LimeLM and TurboActivate" article for the best practices.

Also, if you have old license meta-data you want to import into LimeLM then simply click the "Import product keys" link in your LimeLM dashboard:

The import wizard requires data to be in CSV format. To get the data out of Sharify, for example, just click the "Sales as CSV" link in your Sharify dashboard:

Have questions or need help?

If you have questions or need help you can contact us by email, forum, or phone. We'll be glad to help.

Sign up for LimeLM right now. You'll be glad you did.