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GC server down - should be expect more?


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As I write this, the GC server is down. Now while I appreciate that planned outages are essential for maintenance, and server crashes just can't be helped, wouldn't it be prudent to at least give us an idea of when we can expect it to be back online? At the moment all we get is a 'Server down at the moment' message and a picture of a sick looking signal. I'm sure a few of you will read this and feel that I'm just having a moan, but GC isn't just someone's hobby. It is a service that many of us pay for and that gathers funds through advertising revenue. Should we expect more?

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Sorry folks but I'm guessing that this is not a planned down time [which is usually scheduled for periods of low server usage]. As it's around 06:30 Sunday Morning at Groundspeak's office, this will mean that someone will have been dragged out of bed to try and get it fixed.

 

Please be patient they have not done it on purpose. The site has been extremly stable compared to earlier periods [when down periods were a regular feature of the site], and a reminder that the advertising revenue and PM fee's goes not only to the running of the site but to the future development of the site. Which as Jeremy has indicated is involving specialist outside contractors, who have to be paid for their services.

 

as for

 

wouldn't it be prudent to at least give us an idea of when we can expect it to be back online?

 

As this appears to be a unplanned downtime, giving any sort of time line will be the last thing on anyone at Groundspeaks minds, who will solely be concentrating on resolving the issues which have brought the site down. Plus from previous experience even if they did and were unable to get the site back up with in that period, this would generate even more vocal comments off people who believed that the time was set in stone.

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Please be patient they have not done it on purpose. The site has been extremly stable compared to earlier periods [when down periods were a regular feature of the site], and a reminder that the advertising revenue and PM fee's goes not only to the running of the site but to the future development of the site. Which as Jeremy has indicated is involving specialist outside contractors, who have to be paid for their services.

 

I agree, the site has vastly improved in speed and at least from my personal experieces has had a very good uptime over the last few months. Due to the nature of geocaching, it's understandable that some members will become quite frustrated with downtime though expecially if they wanted to use the site before going out for the day.

 

It might be nice for GC.com admin to tell us what actually caused the outage though, just so we know :ph34r:

 

Just my 2p :laughing:

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Normally there's at least a posting on the forum to give us an idea: but today there's nothing, even though I pointed the problem out 2.5 hours ago.

 

Yep, at 3:47am Seattle time on a Sunday morning, the hamsters were having a well-earned nap. :ph34r:

 

I was out caching at the time using the WAP site. I looked up a cache and got "this is a Premium Member Only cache, you'll need to log in" (it wasn't a PMOC). When I tried to log in, I got "SQL server does not exist". I suspect the back-end database server had locked up for some trivial reason like the transaction log segment getting full...

 

I'm sure a few of you will read this and feel that I'm just having a moan, but GC isn't just someone's hobby. It is a service that many of us pay for and that gathers funds through advertising revenue. Should we expect more?

 

Well, if it's down, Groundspeak aren't generating any advertising revenue, so they would seem to have an incentive to get it back working again. As for paying for it, well, as a Premium Member, you don't really pay for uptime; you pay for more features when the site is up, which I estimate it is around 99% of the time (which is to say, I don't think there are more than 86 hours of downtime per year).

 

As an exercise, try giving a computer services company like Hewlett-Packard or Fujitsu or SCC or LogicaCMG a call, and ask them how much they charge to guarantee better than 99% uptime for a year on a 24/7 web site.

Edited by sTeamTraen
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We did not get the series of 6 caches we had planned to do today :anicute: Ok we should have updated the Tom and Palm last night :laughing: but by the time the website came back up today we would not have had enough light to complete what we wanted to do. :ph34r:

 

There would be friggan hell on if the US forums were down at 12 lunch time on a Sunday :ph34r::ph34r:

 

M :P

But you did get to, er, do a 5/5 cache instead. :P:anicute::D

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There would be friggan hell on if the US forums were down at 12 lunch time on a Sunday :ph34r::laughing:

 

All in all I think it's been worse in the past. More than just a 5 hour outage for one day in....how long has it been?

 

We're just now heading into ice storm season. Power outages, phone outages, Satellite TV outages, DSL outages. All of which I pay closer to $300 a year. $1700+ for some of it. Gas and electric separate.

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As has been said, it's been much worse.

 

Become a premium member, get regular PQ's , save them and you'll always be only a couple of days out of date. :grin:

 

Yup! This is exaclty what we do. We have a daily PQ for our 500 closest. This would keep us going for quite a while if need be. :lol:

Edited by Delta68
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