Categories
General Technical

Downtime since June 17th

Hi everyone,

this is a blog post I wished I never had to write, but here we are again: the server’s down. It’s frustrating for everyone involved, and we’re doing our best to bring it back online, but it seems that it’s going to take a while.

I want to apologize on my own behalf as well as on the behalf of the whole staff team about our poor communication during this downtime. We realize that many of you would like to hear an official word about what’s going on when the site’s down and we were unable to provide that to you in a timely manner, which is not acceptable. Rest assured, we will definitely aim to improve the communication between the staff and the users once the site’s back up again.

What can I say? We believe in our mission and we have no intention of “closing down the shop”, despite what other sources may claim. But it doesn’t change the fact that we don’t have people 24/7 to work on this issue. Downtime is always a critical thing, but this seems to be something only a few select people from the tech team are able to fix. We want to bring the site back up as soon as possible without losing anyone’s important data. Needless to say that it’s not the fastest possible process in the world.

The techs are busy working on our new, more stable server, which will be located in the United States of America. This will replace the Polish server as our main webserver and bring the much-needed stability. This server was planned to be our backup and was close to being ready to be deployed for production when these new issues occurred, we are now changing that plan.

I want you to know that we haven’t given up — and we have no plans to do that!

Jack Phoenix
Head of the Customer Support Team

UPDATE 1: To clarify a few points. This is NOT a repeat of last time. Last time the server itself crashed and needed to be restored from a backup, and said backup was corrupted. This time there was no need of a backup to be restored, and as such there shouldn’t be any data loss, although we cannot confirm this for sure. The main issue here is not recovering databases, but rather moving everything to the new server, which should prove to be much more reliable than our old one. While we’re working on moving everything over, I’ve managed to set up a hack to make MySQL behave properly and actually display the wikis, albeit in read-only mode. Please note that since this is a hack, you might see the same “unable to connect to socket” error as before — this is temporary and if you reload the page in around a minute you should see it. –Skizzerz

By Jack Phoenix

I'm the head of ShoutWiki's Customer Support Team.

151 replies on “Downtime since June 17th”

I feel completely left in the dark. Can we have an update?

@Phinbart

We’d be back online and editing last week, the server migration is the reason editing is locked. So I would not call this a ”major crash” or anything. (I’m not saying you did)

WTF!? It’s been 12 workdays now and the best we have is read-only access. If this is the quality of service we can expect from you, then I’m glad I just moved a very tiny personal wiki here, instead of the main wiki. Wikia may be an evil corporate overlord, but at least they are reliable and solve their technical issues on a timely manner.

Moving on to search for another wiki provider…

@Scarbrow, are you an expert? Do you know how long it takes to move 100s of wikis to a new server? Give them a chance. If it gets to a month, then look into leaving.

Just try and be patient guys. We stuck by ShoutWiki when we went through much worse a couple of months ago.

@Scarbrow, Our techs are working as fast as they can to fix the issues and move us to the new servers. Please remember that our techs are all volunteers who donate both their expertise and free time to our project. So the number of “work days” doesn’t really mean much in our case.

@MyDreamName, I am checking with the techs daily to see if there’s any news. When there is no news, there is nothing to report other then saying that there is no news. Whenever our techs have a free moment, they are working to bring us back to full service. Whenever they have an update, I post it here and on our facebook page.

@Jedimca0

Thanks for the update. Really, I’m not upset as I know how much work the migration process must be, but it would be very much appreciated if we were to get an update every few days or so, even if its just to report that there isn’t any news since the last update.

You guys are doing a good job, but people having their wikis here *expect* shoutwiki to be a professional hosting company, not a site run by amateurs on their spare time. Maybe because this fact hasn’t been noticed on a relevant place of the ShoutWiki main page. I suggest ShoutWiki staff to clearly notice that so people coming here for a reliable wiki hosting service don’t get surprises on events like that.

@Ciencia Al Poder: thank you for your comments. I value them, and so do the other staffers.

Your point is a good one, but I can’t totally agree with you. We’re trying to be not just good, but the best — of course this isn’t possible if third parties keep letting us down. We’ve paid them, so we expect them to do their job and not to mess up our data; your data.

While I’m sure that everyone — users and staff alike — would love the idea of multiple ShoutWiki datacenters around the globe with techs maintaining them 24/7, that just isn’t possible yet. For the time being, we unfortunately have to rely on third parties and trust them instead of doing everything ourselves. Even the Wikimedia Foundation has to pay third parties, if not for hosting, then for other things, such as the Internet connection, the actual, physical servers and so on.

I remember paintwiki disappearing. I am not saying shoutwiki is like this at all, but if they do decided to fold up shop anti wikia alliance members, a back up of the site is found on awa.wikkii.com

As said before, ShoutWiki has no intention to “disappear”. The move to our new server was not a planned one, it was decided to move because the Polish server is far from stable and we want to give you all the stability that you deserve. I understand your frustration, and the techs are working on getting us back to editing, but there are only so many hours in a day and there are only so many things our techs can do in the little free time that they have.

Had we planned this move, we would have made sure that our techs had a week, or more, to fully dedicate to this process. But unfortunately the recent failures of the data center have forced us to implement this move at a time where our techs are not available all day. There is currently a lot of fixing and planning going on behind the scenes and the work is progressing. But this will, unfortunately, take its time.

You guys just take your time. Don’t rush. I’m not moving no matter how long it takes.

@Jedimca0

Will the Polish server now act as the backup server if something malfunctioned in the American one?

At this time we do not yet know what the fate of the Polish sever will be, our priority is getting us back to editing. There have been discussions about what to do with that server, but no final decision has been made.

Hockey:

June 20th, 2011 at 6:29 am

Again, is it too much to ask wanting to know why the site’s been down? You have until July 1, or I am gone.

June 25th, 2011 at 10:18 am

You have until July 6 to get everything back up and working, or I’m gone.

July 9th, 2011 at 5:56 pm

You guys just take your time. Don’t rush. I’m not moving no matter how long it takes.

@Anno

I said they had until the first, but changed it to the sixth after the blog post. ”everything up and running” meant getting the wikis back up, which they did by the 26th…

@Jedimca0
The fact that the techs are volunteers was certainly not advertised. I didn’t find that when I first evaluated Shoutwiki, and I searched long and and hard, reading all I found about you.

@Ciencia Al Poder
Exacly my point. When Shoutwiki was advertised as an alternative to Wikia (especially by members of the AWA) I expected something better. Maybe with some small problems, since it was a new company. But certainly not this.

@Jack Phoenix, Jedimca0
Unfortunately for you, the level of service a user expects is set by your competitors. People (me included) are accustomed to Wikipedia’s or Wikia’s reliability, that is, short or very short downtimes. While new users, and specially enthusiasts, may be willing to forgive and stick with you, this sets a very bad record indeed.

Shoutwiki is right now set at “amateur” level for me. An amateur wiki hosting service, currently *down*. It will take quite a while for it to grow into “professional”, if it ever does, and by the look of it, I’m very worried it will never be. Sorry for the harsh words, but almost a month of downtime? (and yes, read-only counts as downtime for me, it’s wikis we’re talking about). Most real-world businesses would be declared dead by now.

With all this said, I certainly wish you a quick recover. I will lose some interesting writings and midly important writings of me if you don’t. Don’t fail us. Please?

Wikia may be more reliable as in server wise but the staff are horrible, the skin is horrible and the new editors they’ve released are horrible. I would much rather have an unstable host over that.

That being said, we all know how bad it is that this is happening. Sure, the techs weren’t advertised as volunteers but many websites run off volunteers. Not many websites actually employ staff.

Another month of downtime is very bad, we know. Hopefully, once the transfer is complete, this should not happen again and if it does, it won’t be as severe.

(I am not staff but this is news I have gotten direct from staff and I’m sure they’ll say the same).

@Hockeyben

As I saw on IRC, it seems they prepare to transfer to the new server, but wait for official confirm as Jedimca0 is waiting news from techs.

@Facy5 : Salut Facy, ce qui s’est passé, c’est que les responsables du serveur polonais ont voulu changer l’adressage IP de ShoutWiki provoquant un nouveau blackout et tout ça sans prévenir l’équipe SW. Par conséquent, le staff a décidé de passer tout SW sur un serveur situé aux US qui devait normalement servir de serveur de secours, mais qui devient le serveur principal. Bien entendu il fallait vérifier que toutes les données n’était pas corrompues (tout va bien de ce côté-là) et maintenant, il doivent se préparer à commencer le transfert, ceci expliquant la perte de com avec le wiki. Ceci est pour l’instant officieux, Jedimca0 attend des nouvelles confirmées avant de publier cela officiellement.

It seems the Polish datacenter was nice enough to update and then restart the server while we were in the process of transferring files to the new server. The file transfer has now resumed and we are on our way to our new, better and more stable, home once again. I hope to have an update soon, verifying that all files were successfully transfered.

I have over 100 pages and pictures to upload, when can we edit again? A move should not take long time.

Were talking about more than 750 wikis here. It may be longer than we think. And the techs have to check if everything is Okay.

Moving 750 wikis is a lot of work, yes. But this is also not just any move, a lot of fixing (issues caused by the Polish datacenter) had and has to take place. And like I said before, had we planned the move, we would have made sure our techs had plenty of time to get it all done. Right now we are unfortunately forced to work around certain other schedules.

We are not waiting with this move because the Polish datacenter we trusted has experienced two “incidents” recently and they have yet to sufficiently explain to us what exactly happened.
And that is something we cannot and will not accept from them. We want to offer you a stable ShoutWiki, which is why we decided to move right away. I know it is all taking longer then we would like it to take, but the techs are working as fast as they can.

Although it’s sad to see the site down for so long, I’m very glad ShoutWiki takes the issue seriously and works to make sure their fixes aren’t just half-assed patches. Despite these issues, I’m still very glad I made the move to ShoutWiki, and look forward to continue using the service.

It’s irritating that this caused ShoutWiki’s downtime – but I am soon to move some wikis to ShoutWiki. I find this wiki farm a great one, and actually, unlike Wikia, provides a service that provides their customers with the best possible experience, while Wikia provides their customers with one skin which reduces reading and editing space for room for more advertisements just for the pleading for money. I hope this issue will be solved ASAP.

”I hope to have an update soon, verifying that all files were successfully transfered.”

One week later. Nothing. Come on!

Patience is the word here. (Would you rather wait for a stable ShoutWiki that would never have any future problems, or get a ShoutWiki RIGHT NOW that would have future problems?)

Leave a Reply to Hockeyben Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

cbd gummies viagra precio apple cider vinegar gummies costco male enhancement pills for 70 year old man gummies for ed treatment vibez cbd gummies reviews viagro male enhancement pills spectrum cbd gummies for penis enlargement what are cbd gummies 300mg good for shark tank ed cbd gummies best male load enhancement pills 2024 can you get high off cbd gummies do male enhancement pills increase penis size joy organics cbd gummies regen cbd gummies for growth 750 mg cbd gummies review shark gummies target just cbd gummies reviews kushly cbd gummies optimal rock male enhancement pills reviews on power cbd gummies you wanna buy penis enlargement pills max male enhancement pills effects of gummies retro vigor male enhancement pills shark tank cbd gummies for sex boner bears male enhancement gummies love bears gummies do penis enlarge pills work live hard gold edition male enhancement pills quick flow male enhancement pills review poseidon male enhancement pills ingredients do cbd gummies help with penis enlargement

super cbd gummies for hair loss braggs apple cider vinegar gummies silver sword male enhancement pills cbdmd tropical cbd gummies male enhancement xl pills ebay choice cbd gummies price male enhancing pills rite aid are cbd gummies safe iron man ultra 1 male enhancement pills strongmen male enhancement pills reviews spectrum cbd gummies for ed treatment vigorade male enhancement cbd gummies male enhancement pills that work fast gas station mood gummies cbd male enhancement pills reviews amazon cbd gummy for sleep male enhancement pills drug stores cleveland ohio best broad spectrum cbd gummies for pain uno cbd gummies reviews male enhancement pills for lasting longer best and effective penis enlarger pills top 3 male enhancement pills 2024 el toro male enhancement cbd gummies naturally huge male enhancement pills reviews granite male enhancement pill alpha strike male enhancement pills strongest male enhancement pills good morning male enhancer pill male enhancement pills for sex best male enhancement over the counter pills

essence cbd gummies farmers garden cbd gummies review green roads sweet tooth cbd gummies just cbd cbd cannabidiol gummies buy green lobster cbd gummies king kong cbd gummies cbd gummies leave bad aftertaste cbd gummies for muscle and joint pain cbd hemp gummies do they work leaf remedies cbd gummies reviews proper cbd gummies pure organic hemp extract cbd gummies legal in ct cbd gummies manchester nh high peak cbd gummies reviews 2024 biolife cbd gummies tastebudz cbd infused gummies reviews cbd mango gummies medallion greens cbd gummies shark tank cbd gummies affiliate programs colorado gummies cbd are cbd gummies allowed through tsa pure cbd cbd gummies was regen cbd gummies on shark tank buy cbd gummy retail ma

where to buy cbd gummies in dc free cbd gummies free shipping how do cbd gummies make u feel cbd gummies flagstaff az how much cbd gummies can yoy take to sleep maxibears hemp gummies cbd where can you buy spectrum cbd gummies best cbd gummies for anger select cbd gummies smilz cbd gummies creator reddit cant feel cbd gummies cbd gummy 3000mg next cbd gummies how many gummy bears with cbd oil should i take do delta 8 gummies have cbd 10 mg cbd gummies effects jane cbd gummies broad spectrum cbd gummies 300 mg cbd gummies sanjay gupta green ape cbd gummies stop smoking cbd gummies costco redeem therapeutics sleep gummies cbd red devil cbd gummies cbd gummies for sleep for sale stopping cbd gummies cold turkey tiger woods cbd gummies reviews just cbd gummy worms cbd gummy stores cbd gummies los angeles best way to make cbd gummies does cbd gummies make u gain weight alan shearer cbd gummies gummy bear cbd oil cbd gummies with ashwagandha orange county cbd gummies how much cbd gummies should i start with vegan cbd gummy chews should i take a whole cbd gummy

keto kickin gummies how does the keto gummies work apple cider vinegar capsules vs gummies what are the side effects of keto gummies dr jennifer ashton keto gummies impact keto gummies chemist warehouse are apple cider vinegar gummies keto friendly quantum keto gummies oprah winfrey spring valley apple cider vinegar gummies review diet gummies snacks apple cider vinegar gummies while pregnant can i eat gummy bears on a diet keto one gummies review what is the active ingredient in keto gummies sureslim keto gummies reviews sure slim keto gummies side effects shrink x weight loss gummies keto bhb gummies official site buy keto acv gummies keto excel gummies maggie beer keto flow gummy review go keto weight loss gummies keto acv pro max gummies myni diet gummy raven symone keto gummies ultrabio slim keto acv gummies which acv gummies are the best tru fit keto gummies reviews

trinity acv gummies keto gummies bears when is the best time to take keto acv gummies keto life plus gummies side effects ket o zempic gummies acv keto gummies for health reviews for biolife keto gummies simpli acv keto gummies where to buy royal keto gummies reddit keto gmy gummies ingredients list collins key edible gummy bear slime oprah windrey gummies is there a gummy for weight loss how to take the keto gummies ki keto gummies reviews f1 keto and acv gummies nucentix keto gummies price watch shark tank episode keto gummies where can you buy sure slim keto gummies when is the best time to take keto blast gummies