As the service has continued to grow in North America we've continued to invest in new infrastructure to serve those users. Adding new servers to a region doesn't just enable more customers and increased performance, it also provides redundancy against server failures and network malfunctions.

For our new LETO node we've chosen a new datacenter in the United States and we're running this node from what is now the most powerful server in our cluster utilising AMD's EPYC 2 Rome architecture. Previously we've placed one other node in the US and two in Canada run by two different companies, this LETO node is now using a third company.

It's important to diversify infrastructure like we are doing, utilising not just different datacenters but placing them in different regions and having them run by different companies as it's possible for a singular entity to have unexpected downtime. It was only a few months ago that the biggest host in Europe had a total infrastructure failure lasting an entire hour, something we were insulated from due to our use of many different datacenter partners.

As we mentioned above Leto is now the most powerful node in our cluster. In node terms it's the equivalent of two previous North American nodes put together and we intend to make this our new baseline of performance when we upgrade our previous servers or add new ones.

We're still planning a future expansion into Asia with 3 server nodes but due to the chip shortage and the resultant high server prices we've as yet been unable to execute on that. We continue to look for good options though and will take this step when the time is right.

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend.

Today we've made a change to our v1 API (which we sunset and have not supported since March 2020) that essentially replaces it with a translator for our current v2 API. This means for the users who are still making requests to our v1 API you will now actually be making requests to our v2 API and having the result altered to use our v1 format.

This does have a performance penalty of a few milliseconds which is why we've waited to do this now when 99.9% of all our API requests are already made natively to our v2 API. Until now we've maintained the v1 API in a minimal fashion, it was functional but lacked many of our new features and even some of our newer data wasn't available.

With this change the handful of paid customers and a few hundred free customers who have been using the v1 API for years can still do so and it reduces our technical debt in that we no longer need to update the v1 API if we make database scheme changes for instance.

If you're still using the v1 API we would highly recommend you update your implementation to target our v2 API as not only will it be slightly faster in answering your queries but you gain access to a lot more data and features such as safe connection types, Custom Rules and our CORS feature.

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

Today we've refreshed the website with a renewed user interface. This new design brings what we call our glass theme found on our homepage to all the pages of our site for both our slate and snow themes.

Alongside giving our pages a more modern appearance it serves to bring design harmony and consistency. We've loved the topological map design featured on our homepage and we're very happy to now have that available on all our pages.

With this change we've also worked on site design from a functionality standpoint. We've taken extra time to tweak the way our content is displayed across the entire site for smaller screened devices.

Prior to today up-to 25% of your screen may be wasted on empty margins if you were using a phone, tablet or other small display. Now the content can use up-to 98% of your display with only the very smallest of margins making our pages more usable on smaller displays.

Thanks for reading and we hope you love the new design as much as we do.

Today we've enhanced the custom rules feature found within the customer dashboard to support two new conditions and to display the last modified time on your rules thus helping you to keep track of why a rule was made.

The new last modified time looks like the screenshot above, we were able to fit in the modified time without altering the height of the rules which is important when you have many and need to scroll through them quickly.

When saved or toggled whether individually or when using the global controls the last modified time will update on the page in real-time.

In addition to this we've added two new condition types which are Greater than or equal to and Lesser than or equal to. Both of these conditions join our previous Greater Than and Lesser Than conditions but allow slightly expanded functionality so you can use one condition to cover two scenarios and without needing to test how our interpretation of Greater or Lesser is implemented.

We've also made some efficiency changes to how custom rules are applied within our API resulting in lower response times to your queries especially when you use many conditions that compare numbers in your rules.

Support for these new conditions have been applied to all v2 API versions starting from June 2020 all the way to the current August 2021 dated version so you can use the new condition types immediately and without changing your selected API version.

Thanks for reading and we hope everyone is having a great week!

For as long as there has been data to keep there has been data kept for far longer than necessary. This is no less true than when it comes to technology companies. In-fact today tech companies hold so much information about people they may know you better than you know yourself.

And while we're not a large tech company holding lots of private information we do hold some information generated by our customers. Things like your usage of our service and where you're deploying it, the email address you signed up with and some limited payment information if you purchased a subscription.

These are things that we only really need while you actually use our service which is why we recently introduced a self-deletion feature which enables you to both close your account and erase all the associated data we held about you.

Today we're taking this a step further by automatically removing unused accounts. After 30 days from the creation of your account if you've not used it at all (meaning you never logged into the dashboard or made a single query to the API using your API Key) we will schedule your account for deletion and notify you via email.

When scheduled you'll have 15 days to cancel it but these deletions noted above are for completely unused accounts so there shouldn't be much need to reverse the scheduled deletion as you can still signup again when you do need the service.

In addition to this we will be removing inactive accounts after 1 year from their last moment of activity. So if you've logged into the dashboard or made a single API request even once we consider that activity which would push back any scheduled deletion by a year. Similarly to the unused account deletions when scheduled you'll be notified via email and have 15 days to cancel the deletion.

We're making these changes because we think user privacy and the control of your data has been headed in the wrong direction across the tech industry and we want to do our part to nudge the line in the right direction. It's your data and you should always be in control of it and we should turn back time and make it as if you've never used our service when it's clear you haven't needed it in a while.

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

With the release of iOS 15 by Apple a new feature has been enabled for paid subscribers of their iCloud storage product called iCloud Private Relay and it's essentially a VPN service for the Safari browser on iOS 15 and macOS Monterey.

We've been monitoring the service throughout the beta of iOS 15 and we've determined that Apple is using three content delivery networks as partners for this feature which we've been able to detect without issue. Today we've enabled this detection on our API which means by default users of iCloud Private Relay will now be detected as VPN's when visiting your sites and services.

We know that since this is baked into iOS 15 and macOS Monterey it may become a popular service amongst your users and so you may not want to block users from accessing your sites and services when they use iCloud Private Relay.

Due to this we've added a new custom rule to the dashboards rule library (Big Business -> Allow iCloud Private Relay) which when enabled will allow these users to bypass being detected as VPN's while keeping other VPN services blocked. We will say that since iCloud Private Relay is a paid service and most Apple users do not pay for iCloud you may not deem it necessary to whitelist the service but we've made the rule available to you just in case.

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

Today we're introducing a new feature to the customer dashboard which enables you to close your account and erase all the held information we have surrounding your usage of our service.

The reason we've done this is we strongly believe your data belongs to you and just because you've provided us access to some of it doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to revoke that access on your terms.

For many years now you've been able to make a request to our support team to have your account erased but we felt closing an account at a service should always be as easy as it is to open an account and that includes the removal of all your data.

So within the Dashboard you'll now see a new button in the top right corner of the settings tab as shown above which when pressed will begin the process of closing your account and erasing your data.

From the moment you click that button you'll have 30 minutes to either export your data if you haven't already done so or to cancel the scheduled closure as shown in the screenshot below.

To be clear this is a full deletion that actually erases your data held on our servers and not just an account disablement. This means you can signup again using the same email address as you used previously because we will have no knowledge of it in our system once the deletion occurs.

It is our hope that we're exceeding the standard set in our industry for not just data portability but account control and data ownership, we truly believe in providing a great frictionless service that doesn't just meet the letter of laws and regulations but the spirit of them too.

We hope everyone is having a great week and thank you for reading!

Today we've added a new button to the Custom Rules interface so that you can download your rules to your local computer on a rule-by-rule basis. This makes it easier to backup and share individual rules as opposed to downloading your entire set of rules which has been the only export method available up to now.

Above we've included an image of the new control buttons you'll see on each of your rules with the highlighted portion being the new rule specific export button.

We've also altered how importing works, prior to today importing would replace any rules already held within your account with the new imported rules. We've now changed this so any imported rules (whether it's a single rule or many rules) will be added to the bottom of your rule list. This change will not just enable easier backup and deployment of specific rules across multiple accounts but will also make the sharing of rules between customers and our support staff easier as well.

In addition to these changes we've also made some improvements to our dark mode and added some rules to the rule library based on common scenarios we've been asked by customers to assist them in creating. We're now up to 45 rules in the library and if you have an idea or need some assistance in making a rule please don't hesitate to contact us.

Thanks for reading and we hope you're all having a great week.

Today between 1:30 AM and 1:45 AM GMT we suffered degraded performance resulting in many requests to the API going unanswered. This was due to a large DDoS attack against our infrastructure which caused all of our servers to intermittently fault. The traffic we received was the same as 6 hours worth of queries but sent over just a few minutes.

Our Anti-DDoS CDN (Content Delivery Network) was able to mitigate the attack starting around 12 minutes into the attack and by the 15th minute normal service was fully restored while the attack was ongoing for another 15 minutes until 2:00 AM GMT or so.

We apologise for any disruption caused by the attack, we usually have our Anti-DDoS detection at our provider set to be quite conservative due to our users often coming under large scale attacks themselves that could trigger our protection if they were to make a large number of queries to us in a short time span. This is why it took a few minutes before the protection activated and restored our service availability to normal.

Next week we'll be going through the activation parameters of our DDoS mitigation and see if we can tune it further for more immediate activation when an attack begins without triggering under normal circumstances.

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful weekend.

Today we're pleased to announce the introduction of an often requested feature, dark mode. For a long time now we've been wanting to deliver dark mode and we've even converted several pages to a dark appearance in the past to see how that would look and ultimately we decided to move forward with a full commitment to this feature.

We first thought about doing it after the popular PVB plugin for WordPress which integrates our API gained support for dark mode. But as our site is very complicated we knew it would take a lot of time and effort to do it correctly. The most difficult part was of course the customer dashboard which code wise is a behemoth of complexity with many unique user interface elements that required special consideration.

And of course we didn't want to just make some of the site dark, it had to be a full transformation and that meant going through some frankly ancient code and bringing it up to par. Even screenshots within our api documentation pages and the preview images on our homepage needed to be remade in both light and dark versions and then automatically change when the user switches between themes.

Choosing the right colour palette for every page was also difficult and we'll continue to tweak things as we did with our default light theme so any colours that look a little off will likely be corrected in time as we go through our normal iterative design process.

We know some of you have been using browser plugins to darkify websites like our own which didn't offer a native dark mode, we welcome you to disable those and check out what we've been able to do with a tailored approach. Hopefully it won't disappoint the dark mode enthusiasts among you.

So that's todays update, to activate dark mode simply click the little two-toned circle button found in the top right of all pages. And if you are already using the dark mode available within your operating system then our site will detect and use dark mode by default unless you override it by using the provided button.

Thanks for reading and we hope everyone is having a wonderful week.