Yesterday’s Profy Downtime

As some of you may have noticed, yesterday Profy was down for more than 20 hours. Now that we have everything back up and running and our authors are back to the normal writing process, I would like to explain the situation. The reason for this problem is private switch network outage at our hosting provider which they explained in a blog post. Unfortunately Profy was in a reportedly small group of customers affected by this problem. As a result, both the blog you are reading now and the blogging platform were not available for more than 20 hours (which on a side note I honestly think is too much even for a very difficult hardware problem).

The most disappointing thing is that we spent quite some time choosing the hosting provider for the blogging platform - and ServePath was the only company that actually offers the solution we were looking for (but in a beta status) - thus our choice. But it proves that when a beta sign accompanies a hosting solution, it can be too painful for the startups using it when too much is at stake. Believe me, it is not the most pleasant situation when you see the 404 error on your website and can do nothing about it.

And though this outage was not our fault, we will try to work with the hosting company to decide how we could prevent such situations in the future - especially after we publicly launch our blogging platform: we fully realize blogging is a continuous process and it can not be interrupted for hours and our goal is to provide the most reliable and powerful blogging tools to all our users. Thus we are considering various choices, including moving to another data center as well. In the meanwhile I apologize to everyone who missed Profy yesterday and promise we will do our best for such situations not to repeat in the future.