OpenX Blog

Today we announced a version of our ad server that is hosted. What this means is that a publisher will have the option to use Openads without downloading and installing on their own web server. This will be useful for small publishers, who do not have the time, money, or expertise to use the downloaded version. Equally, large publishers may prefer a hosted version of Openads if they do not want to configure a server cluster that will handle large amounts of traffic.

Obviously this is a gigantic effort - there are more websites using Openads than all other ad servers combined. If even a small percentage of our community chooses a hosted version rather than a downloaded version, we will be serving billions of ads per day. The planning involved with this has been in the works for months.

What does this mean for publishers?

• Choice. Publishers will now be able to choose between a downloaded and hosted version of our ad server. Openads will continue to provide a download version of our ad server.
• Open. Openads will continue to be open source, licensed under the GPL.
• Free. Both the downloaded and hosted version of Openads will be FREE.

We are starting to roll out our hosted product at the end of January. During the first couple of months, the service will be in private beta, and we will be opening the beta to more and more publishers throughout 2008. If you would like to sign up for the private beta process, please sign up here.

Please realise that it will take some time for us to roll out the beta across our entire community. I encourage you to continue to download and install Openads - we will keep you up to date and invite you to join in with beta testing as soon as we are able.

I cannot emphasise enough how much I appreciate our team’s effort in preparing for a hosted version. I also thank everyone in the Openads community for using Openads, and for continuing to give us feedback so we can make our products better.

Thanks,
Scott

–
Related articles:
Openads announces $15.5M funding and a free hosted ad server

We’re pleased to announce the Openads 2.3.38 beta release. This release includes some important bug fixes missing from the 2.3.37 beta release.

This version contains the following updates:

• Fixed upgrade of 2.0 flash banners with converted hard-coded links.
• Fixed 2.0/2.1.29 upgrade paths to correctly set the “Booked” impression value.
• Resolved an issue preventing the application from working after an upgrade from 2.1.29

For full details on the new version, please see the Openads 2.3.38 beta release notes.

Thank you to all of you for your continued feedback. Please continue to report back your experiences in the forum.

Download the new version now »