The problem is with Dreamhost’s Web Panel, the service that customers use to administer their web hosting packages. It turns out that certain parts of this panel can’t cope with the idea of you accessing it from multiple tabs or windows at the same time. If you try opening the web hosting settings for more than one domain in different tabs, only the last one you opened will actually work as you expect. Yep, they are remembering, server side, which domain you are editing the settings for.

This wouldn’t normally be the end of the world. I could accept it if there was some error message or it just failed to save the settings for one of the domains it wasn’t expecting. Sadly the panel is not that clever. Instead, no matter which domain’s settings you try to save it always overwrites the domain that was last opened. The panel does subsequently tell you the real domain that it saved the settings for (with a nice green tick to emphasise that everything is fine!) if you are careful enough to read the full message but of course by then the domain’s old settings are gone.

I discovered this when trying to make a change to one of my domains blew away the settings for my secure server, including the ssl keys. Thankfully they were recovered but this sort of thing really shouldn’t happen at all. It seems pretty absurd to me that a modern web application can exist that doesn’t seem to take tabs into account at all.

It’s a shame really because for the most part Dreamhost are the best webhosts I’ve ever used and their panel is very easy to use. Dreamhost’s support team have told me that this is a limitation of the web panel and it should only be used in one window, though there don’t seem to be any warnings about this anywhere. I hate to make sweeping statements like “Surely it would be easy to…” because it bugs me whenever anyone says the same about Firefox, but happily overwriting your settings (and calling it a success) seems like something that should be avoided at all costs.

Imagine my horror today then when someone else emails me to notify my that the registration for oxymoronical.com had expired the day before. Freeparking hadn’t so much as whispered on the subject and would you look at that, I now have to pay a late registration fee.

To say I feel let down is an understatement. Not only have they over the years failed to even update their website beyond its only-just-working state but now they seem to be actively trying to rip people off. It’s a shame but I guess it is the push I need to move all my registrations to Dreamhost who have been nothing short of excellent when it comes to my hosting. Sadly of course I still have to renew the domain first, then wait 60 days before I can move it.

I particularly like how their support form has “I was not informed of an imminent renewal” as one of the options to choose from. Clearly this comes up quite a lot for them.

Of course it wouldn’t be right for me to push this out without first making my own extensions comply with the new requirements. So today I am rolling out updates to all of them, mostly just changing the update url to an SSL one, though a couple of the extensions (Nightly Tester Tools and /Find Bar/) have some additional updates.

Using SSL really will be the easiest way of hosting secure updates for your extensions and I urge you to use it. Assuming you have a sensible hosting package, adding SSL is really not as expensive as many expect. Godaddy offer SSL certificates for $18 per year (minimum of 2 years) and if you are like me and hosting open source extensions then you can get the first year for free (though that seems to take a few weeks longer than if you pay). It’s also pretty simple to set up assuming you have a decent webhost, Dreamhost just has one form to fill in.

It turns out that the hardest part of getting SSL was fixing the bugs in my CMS since it’s current version had never been used in an SSL environment before