Upload limits have been eliminated totally for now, as a guesture of good will. Hope to see the Mark III site when it’s done. Whenever that may be.

Obviously something substantial has gone wrong (or many minor things).

Let’s hope that once they do get the site operational again that the majority of the MIII teething pains will be over shortly after that.

Hopefully it won’t be prone to every-other-day db corruptions or grid crashes like another how-do-they-make-money web 2.0 site that I frequent, Second Life.

http://www.jmg-galleries.com/blog/2007/03/16/zooomr-a-promising-future-on-hold/

A while longer (usually measured in years and a few more ‘events’ like this) before the experience is able to inform his gut instincts from deep in the subconcious.

That kind of thing is what made me twitch in the first place when I saw what was transpiring. Ahh, youth, inexperience. They are so fleeting.

The point that was being made was that the plan for upgrading the Zooomr server with new software would NOT pass muster in a commercial/production environment. It wasn’t an anti-Zooomr commentary, but rather was a comment on the lack of planning that went into the upgrade.

In this new “global economy” there is no room for downtime, especially for an internet business such as Zooomr. Gone are the days where you have a maintenance window during the night outside of business hours, there are no “business hours” on the internet, just 24/7 baby. That means that upgrades need much more careful planning, staging, and testing.

In Zooomr’s case, it would have been relatively simple to bring up a 2nd server with the new software to use for migration of the data while leaving the original one online. Several test loads of the data could have been done with no downtime on the production servers, and yes that would include “processing and storing photos in new and different ways”. Certain portions of the original site could have been disabled or restricted during the final conversion pass, nothing elaborate, just the site in read-only mode to ensure that no new data could be introduced during migration. Don’t have hardware for another server? That should not have been an obstacle either, VMWare server is free, anyone can afford that. Comments on Tom’s blog that Kristopher has been “coding like mad” only emphasize the lack of planning, let alone testing of the new software. No one should be coding like mad during a conversion, if you are then you weren’t truely ready for the conversion. Testing is crucial before attempting the migration of data off a live site.

There was no reason for downtime other than a lack of planning. There is no reason that a plan could not have been put together on how to migrate the data. Downtime like this can *kill* a commercial site, especially one that might have less than technical customers that don’t understand (nor should they need to) the technical issues involved. The downtime is nothing more than an indicator that the site operators didn’t understand the technical issues involved either. The fact that Zooomr is NOT a commercial site yet should not be an excuse for the downtime. If you want to become a commercial success you need to demonstrate the ability to operate without incidents like this. Potential investors would not look on this favorably, there is even a good chance that this incident could cause some to walk.

I’ll urge Tom and Kristopher to take Trever’s comments for what they are, not a flame, not a anti-Zooomr posting, but rather the application of his cumulative experience managing commercial sites. He knows what he’s talking about, he knows how to do it right, and if he’s bitching about how you’ve done something you should listen. If he didn’t think the site was worth the effort, he wouldn’t waste his words on complaining.

Cheers,
Camz.

Anyhoo. Yes, please do learn from this. As you grow larger and DO take money, you really really really can not be doing this sort of extended downtime in the future.

Looking forward to seeing the new stuff strutting its stuff, and perhaps porting all of my flickr (or at least the better ones) over to zoomr when that feature is available. Who knows maybe I can get a nickel for a picture here and there.

BTW if you need some sysadmin types to manage the back end for you . . .

Trever, as part of the rebuild for Zooomr Mark III we’ve completely rebuilt the site from the ground up. Part of this involves completely transferring all photos from the old system to the new system.

We needed to turn off the old Zooomr to ensure that we got 100% of the photos, edits, data, etc. over to the new system.

Part of the conversion to the new system involves processing and storing photos in new and different ways.

Unfortunately this has taken us longer than it should. But Kristopher is working in the next room over and is working his ass off on getting it finished up. It needs to be right before we release it though.

Keep in mind that we are a 2 man, one developer beta site and have never taken a nickel from a single user. Your comment, if they take money is actually wrong.

Yes, it would be nice to have three engineers instead of just Kristopher at the time being and hopefully we will be hiring some new people in the near future.

But right now we are doing the best we can with what we’ve got.

Nobody wants the site up right now more than we do. Feel free to criticize us if you want.

This conversion and our difficulty is definitely a learning experience and hopefully we will be the better for it in the end.

Cheers,

Tom

I am not going to spend my time researching on what you do and what not, and anyway it is not my problem you have the right to do whatever you feel like.

As far as I can remember (from zooomr blog) you have not made any criticism towards zooomr. If that is not true my apologies.

My point is that only a minority of people see outage as problem to zooomr’s service and usually the majority does not raise its voice and you know why because they do not care, if zooomr fails (not that I do care. In a quite afternoon I just said my opinion).

When somebody raise his criticism there is always someone to make excuses. Don’t you find that strange?

Anyway,
Take care.

The more you know!

Anyways, my point if I am still not making it clear, is that for a commercial web site (and if you take money, you are a commercial web site) should be held to higher standards. The least of which is to not have extended periods of downtime, planned or not, announced or not, users-updated-hourly or not …

I will cut them a very small amount of slack right now, but they had better learn from this if they want to play in the big leagues.