nov 7, 2000

The Chaishop Disaster

one month offline - the full story

Text by Sam

The last month has been a nightmare for us and probably a disappointment to a lot of chaishop users. One month that chaishop was totally offline, even including it's mail server. Cut from the world. And not much possibilities to resolve the problem...

Stage 1: Light Server Problems

Since early 1999 Chaishop is running on a mac server at the provider Reprahduce in Los Angeles. The reason for this configuration was the use of the database Filemaker in conjunction with the database serving language Lasso. Filemaker / Lasso had the advantage of it's cross platform availability. A shared server soon became a dedicated server which soon became two servers. Stability was a problem from the start. There were some improvements achieved but we learned to live with crashes once or twice a week. This generally was no problem since the restart system usually got the server running again within a few minutes.

Stage 2: Problems with the restart system

In late summer 2000 from time to time the restart system didn't work that reliable anymore. Sometimes it just wouldn't restart. I complained with our provider several times and he usually answered he would take care. He didn't. I expected that I might have to check alternative providers soon but currently had no time to do so.

Stage 3: Problems with our provider

In September 2000 our webserver crashed again and could not be restarted. I told our provider to do so but he managed not to answer daily emails and phonecalls for a week. Finally I got an answer: There was a hard drive crash and he'd replace the hard drive very soon. After this didn't happen for another week I agreed to run the webserver from Chaishop's second server for the meantime. Additionally I ordered a G4 as an upgrade to the old Umax webserver. I was happy to see Chaishop at least online although slow. I hoped that the G4 would be ready within a few days because the load was just to much for the second server...

Stage 4: Predictable Disaster

...and so it crashed unrebootable by Oct 5th. I did not search for a new provider before because I was super busy with two other jobs but now I had no other choice: I would have to check an alternative because I doubted that our provider would get the situation under control. And so it came: I didn't hear from him for two weeks while bombarding him with emails. Webserver and email was totally cut and I received daily telephone calls from people inquiring what is happening. While researching providers and asking for offers I caught the flew which actually dropped my motivation even more. After comparing offers I selected Digital Forest (Washington, USA) for our new provider. Their reputation make them appear the worldwide best provider in Mac Database Hosting Solutions. We finalized the contract but it would take them two weeks to install the servers.

Stage 5: Sun in November

By the first of November the mailserver was running again, by today also the webserver is online. Hopefully stable now. The webserver has been upgraded to a G4 400 MHz as intended. There is no throughput limitation with Digital Forest. As a result Chaishop got significantly faster and especially Chaishop Bazaar should improve speed by 100%. On the other hand our providing costs did rise by 50%.

The future

Going though such a long time of problems, taking financial losses and deciding to invest more money for the future shows that we're still convinced to keep the Chaishop going. We can't promise that everything will work smooth now but we're doing everything we can on it. In the end it's you - the users of Chaishop and it's supporters - who decide on it's future. And we'd be happy if you still believe in us after all that happened!

If you want to comment on this please go to Chaishop's Guestbook!