Downtime in the working week outside North America

[des]

I'm sure we all understand the need for BlogHarbor to do upgrades, maintenance and fixes that sometimes need the system to be down, although there do seem to be a *lot* lately. And I'm sure those of us who live and work outside the USA understand the logic of scheduling these events for what is probably sleep time for most of your customers.

But the schedule promised for today puts me out of business as far as my main blog is concerned from 12 noon till 5 pm on a weekday. If this is going to be the pattern, I have some concerns on my own behalf, concerns which would no doubt be shared by customers and prospective customers in Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, Hong Kong ....

At the very least, from a business point of view I would hope that these events could in future be confined as much as possible to the weekend (and early in the weekend at that - when it's Sunday night in the US, we're back at work on Monday).

I know it's not possible to please everyone equally - I would just like that my fandom for BH be not too frequently tested in this way and I wonder what consideration this matter might be given by BH management.

Des
_________________
Des Walsh
Gold Coast, Australia
www.thinkinghomebusiness.com
Author, 7 Step Business Blog
http://www.7stepbusinessblog.com

[john]

I'm sure we all understand the need for BlogHarbor to do upgrades, maintenance and fixes that sometimes need the system to be down, although there do seem to be a *lot* lately.

As I am sure any regular reader of these forums will agree, there have been some problems with our system which manifested themselves at the end of the summer which caused posting problems. We have publicly acknowledged these issues many times, and have embarked on a program for increasing the performance of our system. We've done our best to communicate that to you and all of our customers. We sent an email to to all customers on 9/16/2005:

Performance is Top Priority
---------------------------
Our development focus is now on ensuring the highest performance of
our service. We have internally reorganized our development team and
are working with database experts in order to enhance the stability,
scalability, and availability of our network.

Over the next several months, we will be strengthening our system
by:

* Deploying additional hardware throughout our network
* Implementing additional load testing systems to ensure
that upgrades will perform properly upon deployment
* Enhancing our Quality Assurance environment
* Upgrading database servers and software
* Performing additional database restructuring

In order to implement these changes designed to provide you with a
superior hosting service, it will be necessary to perform a series
of upgrades over the coming months. This maintenance window on 9/17
will bring us closer to our goal, but it will be one step of many
steps we will be taking to make our system the best possible home
for your weblog. We will do our best to inform you in advance of any
maintenance which will affect the availability of your weblog.

We'd hoped that would be interpreted as a pledge to focus on improving the system in order to eliminate any of the performance issues you and others have experienced and posted about on these forums. Tonight's maintenance is us following through on that pledge...

I know it's not possible to please everyone equally

That is an understatement... We do have a significant of users in Europe, and a growing number in Asia, in addition to the North American users. I myself lived for a very long time near your part of the globe and still spend a great deal of time outside of the US, so I am quite cognizant of the fact that there is life outside this continent.

We are doing our best to schedule maintenance when it would inconvenience the least number of users AND when it will allow us to have the maximum number of staff on hand for the longest duration of time through the maintenance window.

That's the tricky part... It's easy to schedule a maintenance, but hard to manage one. What if something goes wrong? Are the staff on hand to do something if something unexpected occurs? Where is the developer who wrote that code that passed all the quality control tests but now is behaving poorly in the production environment?

If you take a look above at some of the issues we are trying to work on at this time, you will see that we are trying to build out an environment where we can more accurately simulate an upgrade before we perform one. As we improve this process, the need to have staff on hand just in case will decrease and we will be much more free to perform maintenance windows simply by looking at the usage graph and picking out the lowest utilization of the week with less necessity to balance that against a staffing chart...

[des]

Thanks John
As always, a thoughtful, considerate reply. I do appreciate your responsiveness on these and other issues.
Des
_________________
Des Walsh
Gold Coast, Australia
www.thinkinghomebusiness.com
Author, 7 Step Business Blog
http://www.7stepbusinessblog.com

[bucksrugby]

We host our blog on 3rd party servers. However, when ever Blog Harbour is down for maintenance so is our site.

Should that happen or have configured something incorrectly?

[john]

All BlogHarbor sites are hosted on our own servers; it is not possible to use our system but host your blog elsewhere. You might be using your own domain name as your blog address but your blog is still hosted by us.

[abacquer]

But response seems very slow this morning. Anybody else having trouble?
_________________
-- Abacquer, A.K.A. Chuck Seggelin

[john]

We are seeing some sluggishness and our operations team is already investigating this.