Next Monday on April 8th Shivtr will be moving to the Linode cloud hosting platform.

Why are we moving?

Shivtr currently runs primarily on dedicated hardware, which has the drawback of being difficult to scale. Our traffic varies quite a bit and can spike with popular new game and expansion releases.

To better address this we want to be on a more easily scalable solution, and after researching several options we liked Linode's flexible server plans and customer service the best. Linode allows us to spread out the services we use to their own linodes (virtual machines) and scale them as needed for extra performance.

What will you need to do?

If your site uses a Shivtr subdomain, such as *.shivtr.com or *.wowhordes.com, you won't need to do anything. Once the move is complete your site will simply be running on our new servers at Linode!

However, if your site uses a custom domain name, you will need to update its IP address to point to our new server. When we begin the transfer, the old server will display a maintenance message, with a note showing our new ip address and help on how to update your domain name.

If you have any questions on this feel free to ask below, or email us at support@shivtr.com

Happy gaming! =)

It's time for cake and candles, today marks Shivtr's twelfth birthday!

Shivtr started out as a home for our WoW guild more than a decade ago, and has grown into one of the most popular guild hosting services used by millions of gamers worldwide! We love our amazing customers, and hope we can continue providing a great home for your guilds in 2019 and beyond!

Thanks again to everyone who helps support and promote Shivtr, you guys are awesome! =)

Update: Our server move is complete! Everything looks great on our new hardware, with all bugs squashed and our average response time holding at a blazingly fast 40ms =)

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

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We have been notified by our hosting provider (SoftLayer) that the pod our servers are located on needs upgrades, and we are being required to move our servers.

We have been working on this for the past few weeks to ensure a smooth transition and plan to initiate the move on Friday July 6th. Due to the size of Shivtr's database, we expect the transfer to take about 8 hours to complete.

If your site uses a Shivtr subdomain, such as *.shivtr.com or *.wowhordes.com, you won't need to do anything. Once the move is complete your site will simply be running on our new, shiny hardware!

However, if your site uses a custom domain name, you will need to update its IP address to point to our new server. When we begin the transfer, the old server will display a maintenance message, with a note showing our new ip address and help on how to update your domain name.

If you have any questions on this feel free to ask below, or email us at support@shivtr.com

Hope you are having a great summer of gaming! =)

Today we have a rather big update from the backend to announce, as Shivtr has moved entirely to https and now uses SSL throughout our service =)

SSL For Shivtr Subdomains
If you use an official Shivtr subdomain for your site, such as *.shivtr.com or *.wowhordes.com, your site is now served over https by default, and will show the green secure lock in browsers =)

SSL For Custom Domains
If you use your own custom domain name for your site and are on the Epic or higher plan, you can now request an SSL cert for your domain name, and we can apply it for you. A note that you can do this has been added in our features page.

SSL Lock has a warning?
Though your site now should show the green lock, you may encounter an issue where the lock is grey or has a warning with it, saying not all content is served over https.

If you run into this, it is likely due to you including images on your site that are not served over https (for example by linking to an external image in a forum post or news entry). Updating these paths to be served over https will resolve this.

The easiest way to fix this is to use Google Chrome and right click on your page and go to Inspect, then go to the Security tab, you should see it mention Mixed Content. Then reload the page with this open, and it will show you the exact images you need to update.

Domain Names may no longer have "." in them
To support https with our subdomains, you may no longer use a "." in your domain name. The reason for this is because our SSL certs are for *.domain.com, such as *.shivtr.red or *.tyriaguilds.com. If your guild domain was "my.epic.guild.shivtr.com", this would not match the certificate and throw an invalid certificate error in the browser. An easy fix would be to update this example to my-epic-guild.shivtr.com

Bugfixes

• Bank members who are inactive/deleted will no longer show in the Members tab of the Bank.
• WoW Profiles have been fixed to work with updated stats
• Several CSS fixes have been made to the Glare/Scrime themes.
• The image gallery got a fix to its storage calculations to ensure they are correct

That's all for this update. Happy Gaming =)

Put on your ugly Christmas sweater and get into the holiday spirit, as its time once again for our Annual "Wish List" Contest! =)

Wish List Contest
Share the game you wish for most this holiday season and post it in the comments below, and we'll enter you into a draw where the winner get their game!

Contest Rules

• You must own an active site with us prior to today (Dec 7th)
• You must specify which system you want the game for (PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC, Mac, etc)
• The game you wish for must cost less than $100 USD to purchase
• The game needs to be available for purchase on Amazon

This contest will run until noon EST on Monday December 18th, so be sure to participate before then! We end the contest on the 18th so we have some time to send the game out and hopefully have it arrive by the 25th =)

Update: Our Wish List contest has once more come to an end. Congrats to superzpurez, who gets "Zelda: Breath of the Wild" for the Nintendo Switch =)

Happy Holidays from Shivtr!