Zooomr is down since yesterday (1, 2, 3, 4), and they blame it on a hardware failure. Kristopher Tate was working till 4am yesterday, according to Thomas Hawk. I know these things can happen. However, they can happen only to a company where the number of employees is =1 (Kristopher). I guess they do not want to hire anybody to save some bucks but when your company’s reputation is on the line you should hire someone, unless you are thinking that nobody out there is smart enough to be part of your company. Finally, from what I understood zooomr has the “farm” servers in the basement of its offices/home. Get a professional hosting space I guess you will increase the reliability. Use RAID and then you will not have to recover from backups. (UPDATE: Ignore this part . It was my misunderstanding as Kristopher pointed out! Zooomr has a co-located facility.)
The recipe to see your reputation going downhill is:
- give bloggers free pro accounts
- a downtime (hardware failure)
Simple! Now all the images hosted in zooomr for all the blogs around the globe will show this:
AAAhhh! Something else look at the comment made by tim. Kristopher is working to setup a new downtime page? This is going to last LOOOOOONG. You dudes should be repairing the fault not changing the downtime page eh?
3 responses so far ↓
1 Kristopher Tate // Oct 28, 2006 at 11:16 am
[I am the CTO and Founder of Zooomr]
Hi There, thanks for posting about us!
First off, there is nothing wrong with hiring others and we’ve been looking into hiring some people for quite a bit.
The servers are in a temperature-controlled, co-located facility 20 miles away from my house and the zooomr hq, so I can assure you that they are far from any such basement.
Our failure is actually due to a problematic RAID controller which failed while I was on my way back from Seattle, WA to San Francisco, CA — I’ve been migrating to a better solution over the last week, but am still working on funds for the equipment it will require.
The service will be back online soon starting with static.zooomr.com (everyone’s photos) and then the main site to follow shortly there-after.
Hope that helps clear-up some things.
-Kristopher
2 Taavi Toomasson // Oct 28, 2006 at 12:51 pm
This was just bad luck. Kristopher just happened to be away on business, so he couldn’t deal with the problem right away. Although Zooomr’s in beta stage, I have never encountered a problem that would prevent me getting my things done. Any problems have always been fixed within a couple of hours. So you shouldn’t call Zooomr unreliable for one mishap. Kristopher stated that their servers are in a professional hosting space and I believe him. Kristopher is working as hard as he can, I’m sure Zooomr will be online quite soon again. Well, anyway, I still have complete faith in Zooomr.
3 admin // Oct 28, 2006 at 6:27 pm
Don’t take me wrong I did not say that anybody around here is lazy! All I said is hire more staff otherwise you have to stay up 4am. If you have proper facilities you should have a backup server, which is always a good idea. Hardware failure of any kind will not be a problem, because the backup server will take over the service. I appreciate the fact that zooomr is still beta, but you need more staff monitoring your server(s), aiding the service development and etc. otherwise this is going to be always a pet project.
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