SmugMug down @ 4:20pm Pacific

onethumb

We've narrowed down the cause of the problem, we think, and are implementing a fix. See this older thread for more information.

I'll post more when I have time, but I want to get things fixed fast.

Don

onethumb

onethumb wrote:

We've narrowed down the cause of the problem, we think, and are implementing a fix. See this older thread for more information.

I'll post more when I have time, but I want to get things fixed fast.

Don

I would guess we'll be down for an hour, but you never know. Sorry about that.

Don

photogmomma

I just wanted to thank you for the informative note and the link here! I was a bit surprised to find it down, but glad I didn't have to track down the actual thread the problem was listed in. Thanks!

Seymore

Understood. Thanks for posting this Don...

Manny

Don,

This is of course a bad time for this question :-) But I had an awful bad day at work where I got bashed by my customers for having poor redundancy on one of our mission critical apps. So I ask you, why is there no redundancy built into Smugmug? I mean, not even the RAID is redundant? There is a single RAID controller ? no hot backup? :-)

This is a loaded question and I realize I am putting you on the spot, but you have been candid with us and you make it easy for us to talk directly with you guys and you make it easy for us (the customer) to make requests that can improve the service. I think the question is not totally unfair.

I ask also because in the past few days, I have had more downtime on my Smugmug account than I care to... I just sold about 5 people at my job on getting rid of their crappy Kodak accounts and switch to Smugmug. Now they are looking at me as if I misled them...

In any case, maybe when this is all over you guys can tell us more about plans to have more redundancy? if possible?

Cheers and good luck with your current challenges.

onethumb wrote:

I would guess we'll be down for an hour, but you never know. Sorry about that.

Don

kiwigoh

Upset over SmugMug Service
Hi,

I'm new as I just sign up for the SmugMug Service. But in a short duration of 3 days, I have encounter 4 down time.

It have since cause me alot of inconvenience as I'm trying to upload my photos and it keep on having problem. Evertime it happen, I would have to reload all my photos again as I do not know which is loaded and which is not.

Is it possible to inform us when the problem will totally be reslove before I try to upload my photos again.

Please Advise.

DavidTO

kiwigoh wrote:

Hi,

I'm new as I just sign up for the SmugMug Service. But in a short duration of 3 days, I have encounter 4 down time.

It have since cause me alot of inconvenience as I'm trying to upload my photos and it keep on having problem. Evertime it happen, I would have to reload all my photos again as I do not know which is loaded and which is not.

Is it possible to inform us when the problem will totally be reslove before I try to upload my photos again.

Please Advise.

Hey, Kiwi,

I'm no official spokesperson or anything, just wanted to let you know that what's happening right now is highly unusual. It'll be fixed very soon, I'm sure. They're almost through the worst of it.

RWilliamson

Hello KIWIGOH....I have been a member of SMUGMUG for two years now and I can honestly tell that it is VERY rare this happens. I do not work for smugmug, I am just a regular joe like most. Your SMUGMUG experience will be wonderful. They are truly the greatest. WOW!!!!THIS was my first post!!!!!!!!!!!!!

DavidTO

RWilliamson wrote:

Hello KIWIGOH....I have been a member of SMUGMUG for two years now and I can honestly tell that it is VERY rare this happens. I do not work for smugmug, I am just a regular joe like most. Your SMUGMUG experience will be wonderful. They are truly the greatest. WOW!!!!THIS was my first post!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Over a year of lurking....shame on you!

EZRyder

I know this is a vent on my part, but I just within the last hour, sent out a ton of invites to my site - my "unveiling" as it were - and some of these are to places where it's a one-shot deal; if they click on the link and they get a SmugMug message saying it's down, I will defintely lose them forever. The timing coulldn't be worse, and I hope dearly that this will get back online VERY soon. Thanks!!!!!

You'd be bummed if you were me, too. I know it's not your fault. A failover system would be nice, though.

DJKennedy

DavidTO wrote:

Over a year of lurking....shame on you!

I read somewhere that if you lurk for over a year, they (SM) get to charge you double next year.

Or did they cancel that?

DavidTO

DJKennedy wrote:

I read somewhere that if you lurk for over a year, they (SM) get to charge you double next year.

Or did they cancel that?

Yeah, you get a dollar for every lurker you de-lurk. Just PM Andy.

billfink

Once things are back up...
Hi kiwigoh: Once things are back up and normal, call in your entire set of pictures using the style, "all thumbs." That should let you see whether you have duplicates due to multiple upload efforts. If you do, call in the pictures using the bulk delete, mark the duplicates, and delete them. Then start uploading where you left off. That will at least save having to reload everything and then having to deal with duplicate uploads anyway.

I've been a pro user for a couple of years, and this is indeed a very unusual circumstance. I love my SmugMug.

Bill, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan

blackholewon

If everything were perfect....
we would never miss a shot. :lynnsite

Darron

I'll chime in that this is pretty unusual. Also, I think they are readying for some new display features for the default styles. And as far as redundancy goes, your images are very safe. In many different locations.

kres

I've been Smugg'n for 2 1/2 years now and this kind of service interruption is very odd. Take heart those who are new to the service - this is not the usual pattern of things.

I am still intrested to hear the answer to Manny's question however. I was making the choice between using SmugMug for my ambitions for going "pro" and getting hosted at an ISP and doing the Dreamweaver thing. Smug is still leading, but as timing would have it, everytime I started to fiddle with my eval-pro account the service would get slow or wonky, or offline.

Egads! Maybe it's all my fault!





Regardless, this string of slowdowns and outages are the first I've ever seen here - Service is usually top notch. As a rule sometimes stuff breaks, and sometimes simple problems turn into snarling monsters. What is refreshing is that we are not getting sunshine blown up our rumps about the issue - and in this buisness that is a rarity.

'Thumb, and Andy have a good attitude showing for us, and I encourage us to follow suite.

dancinkate

billfink wrote:

I've been a pro user for a couple of years, and this is indeed a very unusual circumstance. I love my SmugMug.

Plus, they always let us know what's up and that someone is working on it and a general ETA on fixing it ....as opposed to other servers/hosts.

kened11

I'm trying to run a business and my smugmug website is my shop window (and shop for online sales). To a large extent, when my website is down my business is crippled.

I have a MAJOR gig this weekend, where I have a huge percentage of my target market for my startup company in the same room. I will be inviting them all to check the photos on my smugmug website. Can you give me some reassurance that smugmug will actually be online next week? Being in Australia, all your downtime this week has happened during peak business hours here. If all my prospective clients get to see is a Temporary Service Interruption screen, you will be putting a MAJOR dent in my business prospects for 2007. I am really worried.

I would also like to know the answer to the redundancy question. Surely this is fundamental to offering a 'pro' service?

alixmiles

This is not typical of the service you get from Smugmug....I am very happy with them...outstanding customer service.

This couldnt have happened at a worse time...I left work early to work on a large Senior Pic order that ships tomorrow.
Hey I know one feature I would like to see....the image names on the email for the pro orders. That way I could still be working on them right now.

Barry

RWilliamson

DavidTO wrote:

Over a year of lurking....shame on you!

I have not been lurking.......I like to call it "Walkin Aimlessly....."

DJKennedy

RWilliamson wrote:

I have not been lurking.......I like to call it "Walkin Aimlessly....."

Hey - hey! Pace yourself!! Thats twice in one hour!!!

(just kidding)

kiwigoh

Hi all,

Thanks for all the advise.

But the frustration part is also when I try to delete all the photos repeated, It's down again. Not forgetting I have selected about 500+ photos. Do I have to keep on doing it and hope that it will not crash on me?

haiii... Sorry, I do know hardware is nobody fault but at least fix it once and for all and not keep on having down time every few hours.

DJKennedy

"... everytime I started to fiddle with my eval-pro account the service would get slow or wonky, or offline.

Egads! Maybe it's all my fault! ..."


I'm telling Don, I'm telling Don!! :nono

Z06Nut

Please hurry I need to upload some pictures. :bluduh

blackholewon

No time like now...
to work on the art of patience... try going to photoshop for w while... before you know it you'll be back online and with even more to upload!

Steve Cavigliano

RWilliamson wrote:

I have not been lurking.......I like to call it "Walkin Aimlessly....."

Welcome to the world of the living

In the military we used to call it "milling about smartly"

Steve

steveL

Thanks...
Thanks for the openess and outstanding support. You guys are first class.
I have belonged to hosting sites that would rarely, if ever, talk to their customers.

Melhopper21

This has been my experience so far....
I've been a Smugmug member for 4-5 months, I'm really not surprised the site was down when I logged in tonight to upload pictures. I have had issues with the site being down at least 5 times since I joined, typically when I need to upload pictures, or right after I've posted a link to my images in a forum. This time it seems that's it's been down longer than normal. One time I even had another member's image appear in my gallery that I had to contact them to remove.

kygarden

While I too will admit that this outage/downtime is not the norm...I'll also have to admit that I can specifically recall a couple other unplanned downtimes (maybe 2 or 3) in the last several months. I remember because I remember stating that I left Pbase for this reason - unreliable service. While I'm not looking to make enemies (I love SmugMug), I also have to agree with others that are saying there just has to be some way to prevent this from happening this often. I don't have to rely on this service for my business, but I AM paying for it. Whether I'm simply posting photos in forums or selling something on ebay (that would be my biggest complaint - photo not available for ebay shoppers), I do expect my photos to be available.

I work for a multi-billion dollar software company so I hear many many conversations about uptime at work (I'm in the IT dept, but work on the telecom side though - convergered voice and data though - VoIP). I realize there are challenges sometimes to providing trouble-free service. But at some point you reach a breaking point and it gets to be too much. Would I leave SmugMug (and would anyone care if I did anyway)?....if this continues to happen sporadically, yes I could and will. Especially if my photo work becomes more important to me and I need a rock solid hosting service. I guess at this point I'm officially "spooked."

Again, I don't doubt for one second that the folks running smugmug and trying to take care of us all are very nice people. Everything I've seen indicates they are. But ultimately, business is business and someone being frustrated about something they are paying for not being available is a big problem. Check the dpreview forums and other photography forums. You don't think there are complaints (loud complaints) about smugmug's service being shaky here lately? You better believe it. That complaining only scares off more businss. Justly or unjustly.

I guess I'll hush now I hope it's back soon...and here it is internet rush hour time for the U.S. That's bad.....

Baldy

Manny wrote:

Don,

This is of course a bad time for this question :-) But I had an awful bad day at work where I got bashed by my customers for having poor redundancy on one of our mission critical apps. So I ask you, why is there no redundancy built into Smugmug? I mean, not even the RAID is redundant? There is a single RAID controller ? no hot backup? :-)

Hi Manny (and everyone else),

Ouch, we're really sorry for the outages we've seen over the last few days. It appears to be the same hardware failure happening repeatedly, and the guys think they've isolated it now.

We've been working hard on redundancy for some years now (we've always been redundant on storage) to eliminate almost all single points of failure. However, there are a few things that can still go wrong, and things we're working on currently to reduce the chances of an outage like this one.

I just suffered the same embarrassment as many of you: pointing the press to my galleries and having them get an error. :cry Hopefully we'll get this put to bed quickly.

Thanks,
Chris

teamracephotos

I’ve been smugmug’n for two almost two years now, and have had nothing shy of a great experience. For those of you who have just joined our community this is way out of the norm. I'm sure things will be back up and running better then ever (I can’t wait for the big changes Smugmug has planned) very soon. MM

onethumb wrote:

We've narrowed down the cause of the problem, we think, and are implementing a fix. See this older thread for more information.

I'll post more when I have time, but I want to get things fixed fast.

Don