Resolved: Homepage and other webpages currently unavailable

RESOLVED on April 16:

It seems that our latest bug fix to the stats report has caused a number of our web pages to go offline. This should be a relatively easy fix, but our web developer will not be available to fix it until about 11 PM Eastern (UTC-4 America/New York).

The good news is that you can still login to your account and view your stats at:

• http://www.blogpatrol.com/login.php

The pages that are unavailable at this time are:

• http://www.blogpatrol.com/
• http://www.blogpatrol.com/contactform.php
• http://www.blogpatrol.com/lostpass.php
• http://www.blogpatrol.com/topblogs.php
• ...as well as other minor pages on the site

I apologize for this added inconvenience, and plan to have these pages restored within the next 24 hours.

Server Issues

Updated on February 17, 2008 at 6:31 PM UTC-5 (America/New York)
We have completed some maintenance on the server, which should restore your BlogPatrol accounts to normal performance levels. Please let us know if you have experience otherwise, thanks!

Posted on February 17, 2008 at 5:19 PM UTC-5 (America/New York)
We are currently experiencing some issues with our server that are causing the pages to render very slowly. We are working to resolve this issue, and will post updates soon.

BlogPatrol Server Up

Updated on Feb. 12, 2008, at 11:37 AM (UTC-5 America/New York):
We've resolved the issue with our server and BlogPatrol is back online. Thanks for your patience!

Posted on Feb. 12, 2008, at 10:04 AM (UTC-5 America/New york):
Our server is currrently experiencing problems, and we are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. We will post an update when we have more information.

Oct. 19 - Scheduled Maintenance

On Friday, October 19, 2007, BlogPatrol.com will be down for about 30 minutes sometime during 5:00 PM to 7 PM (UTC -4 America/New York) for a hardware upgrade.

Website Up | Server Online

10:26 AM UTC-4 America/New York: The server is down at the moment. We will post an update when we're back up and running.

11:31 AM: We're back online. Thanks for your patience.

System Maintenance

7:45 AM, Wednesday, September 26, 2007: We are doing an integrity check on our database tables to verify and remove any corruption in our database. We will be online again shortly.

8:18 AM, Wednesday, September 26, 2007: BlogPatrol.com is back online after finding and repairing some errors in our database.

Scheduled Maintenance

On Sunday, September 23, 2007, BlogPatrol.com will be down for a few hours starting at 9 AM Eastern (UTC -4 America/New York) for site maintenance.

Around 12 noon, we completed our scheduled maintenance which included two activities:

1. Purging the database - We purged the database of detailed information older than 48 hours in order to keep the database small enough for the system to load your stats reports as quickly as possible for you.
   
   
2. Deleting spam/abusive accounts - We deleted numerous accounts that were registered for abandoned blogs and/or not in compliance with our terms of use and conditions of service. Many of the accounts removed were so-called 'large accounts', each of which were logging thousands of hits a day. This move also will help the database and the system to perform faster for you.

BlogPatrol Net Tools Website Restored

I'm pleased to announce that we have restored the BlogPatrol Net Tools Website that's been down due to the boot drive failure on one of the new servers.

Net Tool is a companion website that provides Connection Tools (Ping) and Host Information Tools such as Resolve Host / Reverse Lookup, Get Country, Whois (IP), Whois (Domain), Dig, and HTTP Request.

Scheduled Maintenance

11:45 AM Eastern (UTC -4 America/New York): The BlogPatrol website and free blog counter service will be down for up to 2 hours of scheduled maintenance starting at 11:45 AM Eastern (UTC -4 America/New York). We will return the site to service as quickly as possible.

12:53 PM: The maintenance task is complete, and we have brought BlogPatrol.com back online. Thank you!

Stats Reports Available

Stats Reports are available as of 12:30 PM UTC-4 (America/New York), Wednesday, September 5, 2007.

We are still in the process of re-building the server whose boot drive failed. The good news is that once this server is rebuilt, we will see the benefits of the migration and upgrade.

We had a few unfortunate events happen all at once this week, but as I mentioned in an earlier post: BlogPatrol.com will overcome these obstacles and continue to provide stats for you!

Boot drive failure

We've had a run of bad luck, but we will overcome these obstacles and get things back online.

One of the two servers that we upgraded to had a boot drive failure, which means that we have to rebuild that server.

You will not be able to access your stats reports during this time; however, we are recording stats for you while we rebuild this server.

Server now online, Stats Reports unavailable

The server is back online so BlogPatrol is counting stats for you again, but access to your stats reports is not available. We will post another update soon.

Working to bring system back online

We have had some unexpected problems post-migration, and these problems have prevented us from bringing the site back online in a timely manner.

We are working to bring the site up as soon as possible. We will post a status update within the next 12 hours, if we are not back online before then.

Improving Performance Levels: Server Upgrades

Migration in-process as of Thursday, August 30, 2007
Updated on August 30, 2007, 8:35 AM...

• We have added our website DNS entries into the new server and are waiting for the changes to propagate.
  
• We will cutover to the new servers once we are sure the propagation is complete.

Migration scheduled for Thursday, August 30, 2007
Updated on August 27, 2007, 9:00 PM...

• We will be cutting over to the new servers on or before the afternoon of Thursday, August 30, 2007.
• I apologize that the system has been slow and inaccessible lately, but the upgrade will include a number of technical enhancements to bring performance levels back up.
  
• Thanks for your patience!

Improving Performance Levels: Server Upgrades
Originally Posted on August 20, 2007, 6:19 PM...

It's been a busy couple of weeks for BlogPatrol. Last week, we made some major usability enhancements to the signup process to make it easier for new users to signup and install BlogPatrol onto their blogs.

BlogPatrol continues to grow steadily in the new configuration that we launched on May 19. We've reached a point, however, where our current servers are no longer giving the desired levels of service to our users:

• the web server is becoming unreliable and slow with processing http requests
• it is taking too long for the database to generate your stats reports

To help bring our system performance back to desired levels, we are upgrading our servers by moving from Woodcrest to Clovertown machines. A snapshot of the old and the new:

• Old: 2.0 GHz Dual Processor Dual Core Xeon 5130 (Woodcrest) with four cores per machine
• New: 1.86GHz Dual Processor Quad Core Xeon 5320 (Clovertown) for eight cores per machine for faster overall performance
  

• Old: 4 gigabytes of RAM per machine
  
• New: 6 gigabytes of RAM per machine
  

• Old: 32-bit CentOS operating system
• New: 64-bit CentOS operating system for faster overall performance

• Old: 10K rpm SAS hard disks
• New: 15k rpm SCSI hard disks for faster database reads/writes

We procured the new servers over the weekend of August 18-19, and we are setting up the new machines this week. I'll post an update once we are about to cutover to the new machines.

Database Maintenance

As of 4:51 PM Eastern (UTC -4 America/New York), we are doing system maintenance and expect to return the system to full performance by 8 PM.

BlogPatrol is still counting your blog stats during this time. Until maintenance is completed, however, there may be times when the main BlogPatrol web site is unavailable.

Update:
We completed the system maintenance and brought the BlogPatrol web site back online around 7:30 PM.

Remedying Browser Timeouts and Slow Loads

July 15, 2007, 3:32 PM Eastern (UTC-4 America/New York)

Over the past several days, the system has been rendering browser timeouts and slow page loads, especially for the stats reports.

You should see an improvement today, as we have disabled the banner ads on the stats report page because they often slow down the page loads. (Be sure to comment if you do not see any improvements in the page load speeds.)

Meanwhile, we are working on a longer term solution that will be implemented in the next day or two to help the database and web servers more quickly for you.

Also, can you comment on this post, or send an email, to let us know which pages are causing the most timeouts and slow page load experiences for you:

• home page
• login page
• stats page

More updates to follow.

July 18, 2007, 7:22 AM Eastern (UTC-4 America/New York)

We have added another slave database to improve page load speeds when you view your stats reports. We also have restored the leaderboard banner advertising to see how performance is affected by loading a single advertisement with the stats report page.

System Maintenance

2:23 PM Eastern, June 1 - We are tweaking the system, so the database and stats reports may be rendering slowly for the next hour or so.

5:15 PM Eastern , June 1 - We have completed the tweaks, and the database should be performing normally now.

...Migration nearly completed...

We are currently monitoring the DNS changes that have to occur when you move a website. (In this case, we're not only switching from a beta site to a live site, but also moving from a server in one data center to new servers in a different data center).

As one of the closing activities for this migration, disabled the test site by pointing it to the live site. We just don’t want people signing up for a new account on the test site and finding out their information isn’t on the live site! We’ll re-enable the beta site when the next version of blogpatrol is ready for public testing.

We expect to announce that the migration is completed as scheduled on May 19. We're almost there! =D

Migration underway: Downtime expected

We've started the site migration activities. Please expect intermittent downtime for the next 24 to 48 hours.

We'll continue to provide you updates during this time period to let you know how things are going.

Thanks for all your well wishes!

Target Date: May 19 for Release of BlogPatrol 1.5

We're finalizing our preparations to release BlogPatrol 1.5 no later than May 19.

When complete, we will have migrated the upgrades and fixes that we've been testing on our beta site to our live site. Yes, this means that you'll be able to access your stats (and sign up for new accounts)!

Just to review:

• BlogPatrol 1.0: Broken site/service (circa February 2007)
  
• BlogPatrol 1.5: New database, new server, fixed site/service <- We will be here May 19
• BlogPatrol 2.0: New site, more services (release date to be determined)
  

I hope to report good news soon... on or before May 19th!