Sure, no one likes outages, and am pretty sure this has put a damper on the SM folks weekend as well. But as others have said - our photos are safe and will be back online when this is over. Really, with everything else going on around us on a daily basis, does this deserve that much moaning and groaning?
I have two SM accounts - a pro and personal one. No other site has the cool third party tools to make using two accounts as easy as clicking a button in your browser. No other company has such fantastic support either.
And while yes we pay for this service, how many of us write to SM on an average day just to say thanks for everything they assist with? So THANK YOU for the great service.
Thanks for the silly SmugMug graphic to alert viewers - I'd choose that over serious.
Diane
pawsafe.smugmug.com Saving one life might not change the world, but it makes a world of difference for the one life you saved.
4:03 PM PDT We are in the process of restoring Amazon S3 US, and will shortly be bringing the web servers back online. We expect the service will be restored within 1 hour.
Excellent, looking forward to it being back up and running. My 2c to the newcomers to SmugMug, don't be put off, one thing you will learn about the SmugMug team is they are very open with their communication and are nice people.
I researched all the other services and SmugMug is the best hands down.
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Member now for 2 weeks and I've seen 3 separate downtime issues...
I jumped from Fotki who I was with for 3 years as I preferred the SM format and customization. I never witnessed any unscheduled downtime with those guys.
Now I'm wondering if I did the right thing.
Maybe SM does not normally have these issues, maybe I joined during a bad 2 weeks. Either way, I'm frustrated
Member now for 2 weeks and I've seen 3 separate downtime issues...
I jumped from Fotki who I was with for 3 years as I preferred the SM format and customization. I never witnessed any unscheduled downtime with those guys.
Now I'm wondering if I did the right thing.
Maybe SM does not normally have these issues, maybe I joined during a bad 2 weeks. Either way, I'm frustrated
I've said this 10x in this thread, sorry to repeat:
It's really rare for us. I'll stack our record of uptime up against any service. Yes, today has sucked and there's been another read only outage a week ago, and it seems bad and all but it's really just bad timing for you. Sorry your entry to SmugMug has been like this -- I can promise better days ahead!
Are all you photographers so caught up on work that all you have to do is upload photos?
I think I should do an understudy with you to see what I am doing wrong, maybe I'm not upset cause I spent the day on the beach, I'm not sure, but guys really, they are on top of it. They know what they are doing, trust that they will do what it takes to get you/us off their back as quickly as possible!
I have been a Smugmug subscriber since spring 2005, and all in all, I really, really love Smugmug. I rarely look at the forums and I don't participate in any communities here, but I use smugmug to back up all of my (thousands and thousands) of images and for the links to use in many websites, etc. I really, really appreciate smugmug's customer service and record of staying up. i've referred several people to the site, too. I want to say that loud and clear before I'm about to say what i'm going to say.
I've been having really slow performance from smugmug for a couple of weeks now. It was so bad last week that I contacted support and Doc ran tests on my account. I was told it was my ISP, not smugmug. However, it was NOT my ISP, and now I see that amazon and smugmug have been having all kinds of problems (according to the smugmug wordpress blog) and those problems were exactly what i was reporting. Moreover, I tested this problem on many computers not only with several ISPs, but in towns across the country. It was always happening only on my smugmug and for images on other pages that were remotely linking to my smugmug.
This has really made me "bummed out" about smugmug, because i've always had such excellent service from them. If there have been all of these problems, why not just say so? Why blame my ISP when it's not my ISP? For now, I will stay with smugmug; it's been far more reliable and pleasant--and certainly more friendly--a place than any other sites i've tried. However, I really hope that smugmug will be more open about problems and not take the common customer service route of blaming the ISP. i know on one level this is "just" the internet. However, when you make part of your living from it, it's not "just" the internet.
Get off the internet, go spend time with your family/kids/friends. Go take more pictures to put on SmugMug later when it's back up.
Yeah...let me tell that to my customers who are trying to make purchases. There is a customer-facing side to this, not just us photogs pissed because we can't upload pictures.
Get off the internet, go spend time with your family/kids/friends. Go take more pictures to put on SmugMug later when it's back up.
Tell that to my clients that had me shoot their wedding and wanted to view the slideshow together today before everyone that flew in for the weekend takes off.
Get off the internet, go spend time with your family/kids/friends. Go take more pictures to put on SmugMug later when it's back up.
Are you kidding? It's brutal hot and muggy here in NY, so I'm sittin' right here under the AC, reading blogs, and watching Criminal Intent until Al Gore's Interweb comes back up to full functionality. Hmmph. :ivar
I hope you will pass back to Amazon our complaints and let them know how badly they have soiled SM's reputation. We're at 8 hours and counting ... a lot of your customers have customers ... and those customers have no clue it's an Amazon problem. They think it's "our" problem and are blaming us.
Amazon is going to owe you "big time" for this. I don't know how you'll collect, or if it will be possible to pass anything back to your customers, but this needs to not happen again and the best way to ensure it doesn't is to hit 'em in the pocket book (same place where we're being hit).
Next time there will be redundancies built into the system...
Disaster Recovery is on top of the list of priorities. Recovery from an outage, if not caused by nature or unforeseen damage to facilities, should be in minutes and not in hours.
I've been in lead role handling disaster recovery plan.
First in my agenda is: "Don't put all your eggs in one basket."
If something fails, not the whole organization will be affected.
And as I've said in my earlier comment about mirroring, it is damned too important in any business dealing with networks to adopt mirroring. If SmugMug has this and I believe they do, it is not working.
Real time replication matters in some businesses like banks. Maybe not as serious with photo hosting. But still, this is very critical not only to the business of Smugmug but their customers' business.
This is reality check and changes in operations, backups, recovery must be instituted because this is totally not acceptable.
While I am composing this, I checked first my site if it is already up and running. Unfortunately, it is still down.
I agree, real time replicaiton is the way to go. Throw in roll back capabilities with regular backups to top it off.
This started out for us as a good idea and is now almost a full time position but my company sees the worth in it.
A total outage such as this would be unaceptable. Read only mode in the past has been aceptable but todays total outage is a major dissappointment. Especially as I sit here at my parents 40th Anniversary party with family and friends hoping to show off the multitude of pictures...
Most all my customers have my phone # if it is that pressing then they can call the order in and leave it on the voice mail if I feel that it is so much more important then the rest of my life on a Sunday and they should come before God my Family and my free time then I will get to them. I guess every one is lucky it is not in my hands because I would tell you I will start on it in the morning. It is Sunday and you are willing to complain to the people that are willing to work for you when the do not and should not have to.
Yeah...let me tell that to my customers who are trying to make purchases. There is a customer-facing side to this, not just us photogs pissed because we can't upload pictures.
Get off the internet, go spend time with your family/kids/friends. Go take more pictures to put on SmugMug later when it's back up.
Couldn't put it better myself.
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Get off the internet, go spend time with your family/kids/friends. Go take more pictures to put on SmugMug later when it's back up.
Well Pete - You obviously think very small - this is a worldwide issue, and we are not talking about just a few dollars here!!!!
i am in the UK where it is now 1 am in the morning and stand to lose a lot of money if peple cannot see my auction photos which are close to ending. It IS a time sensitive issue.
It is 1 in the morning here and frankly I would rather be in bed, but I have to wait up and create some sort of alternative which may mean no sleep at all.
Oh - but yeah - you obviously do not have much to lose by your glib comment - I think you have offended many people here.
We'll never give an exact estimate, I'm sorry. We'll be back up as soon as is practical and possible and safe. I hope it's minutes not hours.
While I appreciate all the work both Amazon and SM have been doing to get the system back up, I have to comment on your comment. I work in the manufacturing sector in Quality Assurance and, frankly, if I answered a customer with the statement above, I wouldn't have the customer any more.
The frustrating thing about this whole incident is that we can't get a time estimate for when the system will be "up" again. For those doing business using SM, time is money--they need to be able to give some kind of estimate to their customers.
We'll never give an exact estimate, I'm sorry. We'll be back up as soon as is practical and possible and safe. I hope it's minutes not hours.
While I appreciate all the work both Amazon and SM have been doing to get the system back up, I have to comment on your comment. I work in the manufacturing sector in Quality Assurance and, frankly, if I answered a customer with the statement above, I wouldn't have the customer any more.
The frustrating thing about this whole incident is that we can't get a time estimate for when the system will be "up" again. For those doing business using SM, time is money--they need to be able to give some kind of estimate to their customers.
Hi, thanks for posting.
How can I answer what I don't know?
I do know that our engineers are working as fast as superhumanely possible and we won't stop till things are back up.
I'm not going to say a time estimate only to have it be missed. There are thousands of people viewing this thread that would be very disappointed, you included, I imagine.
Let us get to it, I promise it'll be as fast as we can and not one second longer.
I wish I had a better, more precise answer for you.
To all of the "smug mugs" out there with their comments about Sunday and playing with family and Jesus and whatever else: I don't care for your attitude and glibness. That's not helpful and your smugness is lame.
I don't know if anyone else has posted this...but let's say that SM were to have 1 - 8 hour outage per month (and they don't). That would equate to a 98.8% uptime. Even that would be pretty impressive. If I reacted to every "outage" of service (internet or not), I would have nowhere left to shop, bank, etc. anymore. Let's put some perspective on this.
5:12 PM PDT We are confirming that service in both the US and EU has been fully restored. We appreciate your patience. We will provide more detail on this event once we have completed a full investigation.
We, SmugMug, we're still working on bringing things back up.
Hang in there folks, yes, it's been a long day and again, we're very sorry for the outage. We appreciate your patience, you are all amazingly patient.
Comments
I have two SM accounts - a pro and personal one. No other site has the cool third party tools to make using two accounts as easy as clicking a button in your browser. No other company has such fantastic support either.
And while yes we pay for this service, how many of us write to SM on an average day just to say thanks for everything they assist with? So THANK YOU for the great service.
Thanks for the silly SmugMug graphic to alert viewers - I'd choose that over serious.
Diane
pawsafe.smugmug.com
Saving one life might not change the world, but it makes a world of difference for the one life you saved.
Diane
pawsafe.smugmug.com
newfs4me.smugmug.com
I researched all the other services and SmugMug is the best hands down.
Try Smugfoto in Facebook for displaying your SmugMug galleries.
I've been looking at some of the threads, and there's obviously pics posted to them, but I'm not seeing them.
Here's an example: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=100146
I'm running FF 3.0.1 - could there be a setting which I need to change to see images in these threads?
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I jumped from Fotki who I was with for 3 years as I preferred the SM format and customization. I never witnessed any unscheduled downtime with those guys.
Now I'm wondering if I did the right thing.
Maybe SM does not normally have these issues, maybe I joined during a bad 2 weeks. Either way, I'm frustrated
That is not the type of response I can use to make decisions on. Please clarify - is it
a) An hour maximum
b) probably two to four hours
c) four to ten hours
d) ten to twenty four hours
e) more than twenty four hours.
Your response could be understood to mean any of these.
Also - will your team work through the night if necessary?
I understand that you are already under a lot of pressure BUT I just need to know how long "pretty fast" is.
Thanks
It's really rare for us. I'll stack our record of uptime up against any service. Yes, today has sucked and there's been another read only outage a week ago, and it seems bad and all but it's really just bad timing for you. Sorry your entry to SmugMug has been like this -- I can promise better days ahead!
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Yes, we'll stay up till it's all back to normal. We can sleep when we're dead.
Sorry I don't have a more precise answer for you.
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Are all you photographers so caught up on work that all you have to do is upload photos?
I've been having really slow performance from smugmug for a couple of weeks now. It was so bad last week that I contacted support and Doc ran tests on my account. I was told it was my ISP, not smugmug. However, it was NOT my ISP, and now I see that amazon and smugmug have been having all kinds of problems (according to the smugmug wordpress blog) and those problems were exactly what i was reporting. Moreover, I tested this problem on many computers not only with several ISPs, but in towns across the country. It was always happening only on my smugmug and for images on other pages that were remotely linking to my smugmug.
This has really made me "bummed out" about smugmug, because i've always had such excellent service from them. If there have been all of these problems, why not just say so? Why blame my ISP when it's not my ISP? For now, I will stay with smugmug; it's been far more reliable and pleasant--and certainly more friendly--a place than any other sites i've tried. However, I really hope that smugmug will be more open about problems and not take the common customer service route of blaming the ISP. i know on one level this is "just" the internet. However, when you make part of your living from it, it's not "just" the internet.
I'm sorry that there've been these problems and we'll do everything possible to restore you to normal, fast, service.
Write us this week at the desk if you continue to have speed issues, we'll get to the bottom of it.
Sorry again and thanks for sticking with us!
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Yeah...let me tell that to my customers who are trying to make purchases. There is a customer-facing side to this, not just us photogs pissed because we can't upload pictures.
Tell that to my clients that had me shoot their wedding and wanted to view the slideshow together today before everyone that flew in for the weekend takes off.
Are you kidding? It's brutal hot and muggy here in NY, so I'm sittin' right here under the AC, reading blogs, and watching Criminal Intent until Al Gore's Interweb comes back up to full functionality. Hmmph. :ivar
Member SportsShooter.com
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Amazon is going to owe you "big time" for this. I don't know how you'll collect, or if it will be possible to pass anything back to your customers, but this needs to not happen again and the best way to ensure it doesn't is to hit 'em in the pocket book (same place where we're being hit).
Next time there will be redundancies built into the system...
I agree, real time replicaiton is the way to go. Throw in roll back capabilities with regular backups to top it off.
This started out for us as a good idea and is now almost a full time position but my company sees the worth in it.
A total outage such as this would be unaceptable. Read only mode in the past has been aceptable but todays total outage is a major dissappointment. Especially as I sit here at my parents 40th Anniversary party with family and friends hoping to show off the multitude of pictures...
Arnold's pictures | Gear list
MM | Follow me | Follow II |Facetube
OK hopefully we're not far behind now...
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for you" and there/ their is no grammar check yet so please forgive me Jesus did.
My Web site:
http://Glory2Jesus4Photography.smugmug.com/
My blog: http://glory2jesus4photography.blogspot.com/
Couldn't put it better myself.
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Well Pete - You obviously think very small - this is a worldwide issue, and we are not talking about just a few dollars here!!!!
i am in the UK where it is now 1 am in the morning and stand to lose a lot of money if peple cannot see my auction photos which are close to ending. It IS a time sensitive issue.
It is 1 in the morning here and frankly I would rather be in bed, but I have to wait up and create some sort of alternative which may mean no sleep at all.
Oh - but yeah - you obviously do not have much to lose by your glib comment - I think you have offended many people here.
While I appreciate all the work both Amazon and SM have been doing to get the system back up, I have to comment on your comment. I work in the manufacturing sector in Quality Assurance and, frankly, if I answered a customer with the statement above, I wouldn't have the customer any more.
The frustrating thing about this whole incident is that we can't get a time estimate for when the system will be "up" again. For those doing business using SM, time is money--they need to be able to give some kind of estimate to their customers.
How can I answer what I don't know?
I do know that our engineers are working as fast as superhumanely possible and we won't stop till things are back up.
I'm not going to say a time estimate only to have it be missed. There are thousands of people viewing this thread that would be very disappointed, you included, I imagine.
Let us get to it, I promise it'll be as fast as we can and not one second longer.
I wish I had a better, more precise answer for you.
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You'd think differently if you had paying customers depending on you.
...And the money was coming out of your wallet.
Such apathy doesn't reflect well.
To all of the "smug mugs" out there with their comments about Sunday and playing with family and Jesus and whatever else: I don't care for your attitude and glibness. That's not helpful and your smugness is lame.
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We, SmugMug, we're still working on bringing things back up.
Hang in there folks, yes, it's been a long day and again, we're very sorry for the outage. We appreciate your patience, you are all amazingly patient.
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