We finally have a release date for MIVA Merchant 5: May 2, 2005. If you never looked at Miva before, this is a good time to start.

• Advanced catalog, customer, and order management systems.
• No limits on the amount of store data.
• Complete store design control with new Store Morph Technology™.
• Integrated credit card processing and shipping calculation.
• An expansive list of add-on modules and services.
• Automatic updates… and more.

Pricing information is not quite finalized. I am not permitted to pre-sell licenses. MIVA Merchant 4.xx cost $995 for a license. The Gryphyn Media Miva Package included a year of hosting with 100 megs of storage and 2 gig of bandwidth with a FREE Miva Merchant license for $200/year (plus one-time $40 set-up fee). I expect the Miva5 package to be similar.

Drop me a line via the helpdesk if you want more details.

How exciting is that? I am provisioning a server for Zope hosting… that means Plone. Let the CMS fun begin! I am testing with one client… we hope to be ready for more by June. If you have a burning need for details, open a helpdesk ticket.

Octopus crashed under the load. We suspended the high-use account and rebooted to bring it back up. We will be clearing the queue and things should come back up normally in just a few minutes.

Update: We actually found three email-related problems on the server. A user with webmail files so large they choked the server every time they were accessed, an un-batched email list with 3000 addresses, and a use being emailed by so many spammers that the bounces were slowing the mail server. We have addressed each of these issues now, and Octopus is looking good again.

We have been having email trouble on the Octopus server for the past few days. Connecting to POP mail and webmail has been intermittantly difficult. This affects people using nameservers ns3/ns4.gryphynmedia.com.

We have found the problem. One of the accounts on the server is getting spurts of high volume of email, which is overtaxing the mail queue and slowing Exim to a crawl. We are moving the account to a higher-volume server as quickly as we can, which will resolve the problem permanently. We appreciate your patience. If you have a site that becomes very successful, we will also help you to scale up.