I can't count how many times we've put together a site and at some point the signup feature had some kind of problem. Out of curiousity, what was the specific bug if you don't mind me asking?

Definitely.

Lesson learned from countless similar issues: sign-ups and credit card forms break in weird and wonderful ways.

Always test both right after a big deployment.

"Always test both right after a big deployment."

Words to live by. I've changed to a staging server so I can test everything on a "live" server before pushing it to production.

As I mentioned before, I'm glad I wrote it just to hear that frustrating mistakes like this aren't altogether uncommon!

It was the mailer that was sending out confirmations to users who signed up with email address. It failed silently on the dev machine - and I didn't notice because I wasn't expecting an email - while on the server it rightfully failed and stopped everything.

I'm very comforted to hear that such experience isn't limited to me. Thanks for that!

Hey sgrove - thanks for the update.

I'm only one of the 600, but I'm definitely keeping an eye on ChuWe. 'Ask HN' posts are great (as you realised, and acknowledged) so a website full of small biz questions is very exciting.

Looking forward to the hard launch ... and your thoughts on that as well!

For those of you who don't know, Jacob's a business coach out of Australia who's been wonderful in helping out individual questions on the site.

Exactly the kind of expert we were hoping to attract to help entrepreneurs on the site!

This is a little off topic, but I want to re-iterate an age old plea: Please link to your product/service from your blog page!

I missed the original soft-launch, but happened across this article. I had to type in the top level domain to see what the service was about. If the blog had a header explaining what the service was and providing a link to the home page it would make things so much easier.

Sounds fair enough. I've emailed garry at posterous to see if there's anything we can do about that.