What Happened?

After what seems like a marathon, we have finally reopened the site for you. The question your all going to be wondering is what happened, so I’ll tell you.

John and myself went to Leeds for Thinkvisibility conference at the Weekend. We set off back home in the car when I fire up ECU on my phone thinking of looking at some support tickets which had come in over the weekend, when… Oh no the site was down. Not only that, but the fail safe we thought we have scripted in place, failed too, so units were not being shown. This was at around 1230, and 5 hours from Plymouth.

I’m not sure you can imagine the horror I was feeling, nor the despair at not being able to do anything about it.

Some of you might remember the last time I went to Leeds for Thinkvisibility, 1 & 1 our hosts went down. I am beginning to think there’s a jinx, however i digress.

It appears, that our lovely hosts managed to clog up our server with logs which should have been stopped and removed ages ago, this meant that the hard drive filled up, and the database was not able to write any more to it. Of course this pulled down our entire site, blog n all, and your units couldn’t show, as each call is written to the database.

Our master coder managed to clear this and get your units working before I arrived home. We then set about restoring the front end, unfortunately we hit a few snags, and this meant further outages at around midnight on Sunday night for about an hour and half, and again Monday morning around 0720 this time for 10 minutes. The rest of the time your units have been showing and clicks tracking as they should, however the site was down and we needed to get things up and running for you.

What we did:

Some of you know we have been heading towards moving servers anyway, and after discussions with some of our top members, we decided to bite the bullet and whilst the front end was suspended, go ahead and move to new server. This we have been working on solidly for the past couple of days.

It was a case of shifting the vast amount of data across, checking and double checking it’s integrity and structure. We have had to rewrite the import scripts to be compatible with new platform, and then today piece by piece switch everything over, testing and checking everything, with one or two snags thrown in to keep us on our toes.

I am happy to say that it’s all there now and it’s back live. We have ironed out the issue with the fail safe, this should now work save for a major catastrophe.

You should see a speed improvement when you log in (as long as everyone doesn’t do it at the same time), and this will improve further as we continue to develop and fine tune over the coming weeks. Units will continue to load as close to immediately as we can make them.

Whilst we were preparing for the move to the new server, we had suspended product imports, which could mean that some of you will now have to update your units with new products, as new ranges have been added and some products out of stock. The data we have in our new system is bang up to date and back on the daily updating cycle.

We are truly sorry that your units didn’t show on Sunday, I’d like to thank you for all your kind words of support as we battled to restore ECU for you. It has reinforced why we do it!

The Future:

As mentioned, we are going to be spending the next week or so working to streamline our system more, to optimise it for you. We are seeking the help of experts to help us improve this further. Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks of being a small company, is knowledge, and one thing we have learned is where we are lacking.

Once we’re happy with this, we will be moving onto develop a system to include voucher codes in your units, this is something a lot of members have been asking for. When we are ready, I will be seeking views on this so we can make it useful for you.

Another area we want to develop is our reporting. It’s pretty naff. Again as we get to this we’ll ask for your thoughts.

There are a few other little developments which we have on our request list which we’ll be adding as we go along.

Any problems?

We will be monitoring things over the next couple of hours, but if you notice anything, please let us know – you can post here, a support ticket, or catch us on Facebook.

Thanks for your patience and support.

Jason and John