Dear customers,
This is a very good and healthy discussion.
Again, we do understand the frustration due to the lost development time, uncertainty, etc. We could have communicated better and faster, we take responsibility for that. Please again accept our deep apologies.
At the same time it was really heartwarming to read some posts, especially from tioloco, which summed it all.
Yes, it's a first such incident in our many-many years being in business, and we're making sure it will never happen again. So we hope that addresses the concern about the reliability of our product.
Yes, we tried to understand the situation and best ways to fix it, so we didn't want to communicate to our users before we figured out what's going on and what kind of fix we can provide and timeline for the fix. And we provided it fairly fast.
Also we assure you that we value our user community very much, so we hope that pretty much everybody will stay with us and will continue using our product which we think helps you guys in your development.
Nusphere Customer Care Team

To make it clear -- what you purchased is Personal license. Almost the only difference is that it comes with no technical support.
In other words you saved your money not paying to support.
With PRO that comes with support, our support response time is usually 1 day. Sometimes less, sometimes slightly more -- depends on holidays and other factors.
With Personal, support is free not to reply at all.

Think about this fact -- it's one time issue of this scale we faced in 14 years.
I hope stability is still quite high. I'm not saying the situation is acceptable or okay. No, it's not. But we did our best to mitigate it ASAP.
Of course we learnt this lesson well and took necessary precautions to stop the problem escalation. That's was the very first step we took. That's why only relatively small percentage of customers was affected.
Regarding risk -- tioloco is absolutely correct. I have to add we all are using Windows, MacOSX and other proprietary or opensource applications. They can fail all of sudden. We all are using proprietary hardware -- it's risky because hardware can fail too. How frequently? About once in 3 years we can get a bricked HDD. We all are using internet provided by our ISP that fails time after time. I don't remember a year that ISP would not interrupt even for a hour. Perhaps their total will be more that 8h in 14years. Ok. I'm turning back to v17 development. Some of you would love to test our php-7 compatible debugger. In my personal opinion php7 is a very very big step. Forward or not -- only time will show

Hi dmitri,

Thanks for the response. First off, I want to say I'm not complaining, and I'm not looking for anything other than understanding. You have built a very useful application.

From my standpoint, I've only been a customer for 60(?) days, so one issue of this scale in the first sixty days felt like a big deal. 14 years, wow! I didn't know.

My workaround was quick and easy once I understood the problem, I just went back to my old editor. But it took me a long time to realize the problem was not on my end. I actually got my first clue on twitter from another customer. (https://twitter.com/design_sheep/status/672008431205789696).

I've worked as an independent (sole proprietor) web developer since 2006. I never had a day long application failure, hardware I usually fixed in a few hours. My worst case was the recurring outages at Hostgator (Provo UT), so they have been replaced with a service with much more redundancy.

I did not realize PHP Ed phoned the mothership everytime I reboot and start the app. I assumed once my license had been verified, it would not need to re-verify the license again until I upgrade.