Due to a series of events explained below, we were forced to suddenly move our live server to another hosting facility. If things had gone as expected, the transition would have been flawless with no site downtime. Everything is back to normal now and we will not be experiencing any more unexpected downtime.

Here's what actually happened:
1. On December 30, 2010, the company that's hosting our server said they would be shutting down their data center in Los Angeles an moving everything to Dallas. We didn't want our server moved to Dallas, because our server guru lives in LA.

2. We weighed our options and decided to purchase an additional server and host it at a new facility. We could transfer everything to the new server and have it running while we took our existing one down, then move the existing server to the new facility.

3. We purchased our new server and set up a contract with the new hosting company. Then, on January 9th, 2011, our existing host decided to route all network traffic through its Dallas datacenter. This caused several hours of outage for the site. The issues were resolved and we continued to wait for our new server to arrive.

4. Our new server finally arrived on January 15, 2011 and we made an appointment to install the new server at the new hosting facility for today, January 21, 2011.

5. At around 9:30am PST, our existing host had a major network malfunction, causing the site to go down. We weighed our options and decided we've had enough and if the outage continued, we would take our live server and move it today as well. That's what happened so we moved the server.

Where we stand now:
We are currently up and running at the new hosting facility on our main server. Over the next few days we will be getting the additional server installed in conjunction with it, to provide an even faster experience for the site.

The downtime is over and all the headaches are done. We're in a much more solid facility now and happy to be rid of the old hosting company.

Again, I'm truly sorry for the issues and any problems it may have caused.

Brandon O'Brien
CEO and Founder
ClearCheckbook.com

I was just sent an email from about.com telling us we could have our users nominate ClearCheckbook for the 2011 About.com Reader's Choice Awards in the Personal Finance category.

You can visit the following link and nominate ClearCheckbook for "Best Online Personal Finance Software" and "Best Mobile Personal Finance Software":
http://financialsoft.about.com/library/bl-readers-choice-awards-2011.htm

Voting takes place through February 11th, 2011. There are no prizes or awards, simply bragging rights. It would be great to see how we stack up against the competition though.

The article is a little outdated (as it's about 2.5 years old), but you can read About.com's writeup on ClearCheckbook here:
http://financialsoft.about.com/od/onlinesoftware/p/ClearCheckbook.htm.

I wanted to let everyone know we are aware of the recent service interruptions. This has been due to our server host messing with their internal network routing.

Due to these as well as other issues with our host, we will be moving our server to another hosting facility and purchasing another server to reduce any other downtime and improve redundancy.

Unfortunately our new hardware hasn't arrived yet and we can't move the existing server without the new one unless we took the site offline, which is obviously not ideal.

We will keep you posted when we know more about moving our server and the new hardware, but I wanted to let you know we are working on this to ensure it doesn't happen again.

-Brandon

ClearCheckbook has had a great 2010 and we look forward to making 2011 even better. In 2010 alone, we had more new signups than the previous 3 years combined, closing the year with around 147,000 users.

In 2010 we also released mobile apps for WebOS, Android and iPhone. These mobile apps have brought in over 45,000 new users alone. We know there are some feature requests and updates needed for the mobile apps and we will be addressing these in 2011.

What does 2011 hold in store for ClearCheckbook.com? We're currently working on a complete overhaul and refresh to the site. We've been working on it for about a month and will continue putting more time and effort into it as we progress. This new refresh is taking many of the suggestions we've received over the last year into account while building the next version. Aside from new features and tweaks to the way current features work, we're re-coding the site from the ground up to help make future growth easier.

The new site will visually look pretty similar and behave about the same as the current version, but everything will be quicker and much more intuitive. We know you've become adjusted to the way the current site works, so we are striving to keep things as similar as possible in the next version.

Along with a refresh of the website, we're also working to release updated versions of all mobile apps in conjunction with the launch of the new site. This is a huge undertaking but we know it will pay off by making things even smoother between the website and mobile apps.

While I'm not going to start tossing out any kind of deadlines for the next version of the site yet, I just want to reassure you that ClearCheckbook is going strong and we're going to continue to be an industry player and make money management even easier.

We haven't been as active in the Support Forums because we've been focusing most of our resources on the development of the new site, but if you have any questions that go unanswered there, please don't hesitate to send us an email by clicking on the Contact Us link at the bottom right side of the page. We always answer any email that requires a response.

Thank you for a great 2010 and we look forward to making 2011 and the upcoming years even more exciting.

Brandon O'Brien
Founder of ClearCheckbook.com

We're working on updating the Budgets tool to allow for transfers and deposits to be included as options. We would like to get some real user feedback about these and to ensure they're working properly before we release it to everyone.

If you're interested in testing this out, please use the Contact US form at the bottom right side of the page and let us know.

Thanks!