The Cool Blogdrive Guy (one of the two Blogdrive admin) speaks in responce to a member's complain in the
forum. Read the complain first.
Blogdrive has tortured me enough. I've been a
customer for one year and I'm actively looking for other options. This
is the third unannounced outage and unresponded to help tickets in less
than 2 weeks. Even when it's "working" it takes over an hour to make
one post due to crashes. I've had the patience of a saint, hoping and
praying. Yet, Blogdrive appears to be flatlining. I've simply had
enough. I'm not going to waste my time even commenting much more. It's
time to get serious and find a host that is ready for prime time and
living in the real world. I feel foolish for even giving my business to
this company. Maybe, instead of Yahoo buying Blogdrive, we should see
if Toys R Us would be willing to take over. Or maybe the Salvation
Army. Message to Helpee: I get the sense that you're trying to help,
that you want to help, but that you just can't help. People need a blog
host to have things that work and it's simply not working. It's very
sad, but it is just not working. It's not. If I saw a light at the end
of the tunnel, that would be lovely. But, all I see are the pleas of my
fellow members virtually begging for improvements to the pathetic
levels of outages. Is everyone familiar with the oft-quoted definition
of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a
different result. That's really what staying on as a Blogdrive customer
equals: insanity.
And here is his reply:
Hi Rich, I feel your pain. Any unexpected
outages have been just that, unexpected. Earlier today there was a
flood attack on the servers. The unusually high utilization caused a
database error which propagated to the other servers. It took some time
to correct it across all the servers, but all is well now with no data
loss. We are now looking at implementing new measures to help protect
against this type of scenario.
Most of the other "outages" you experienced before are do to spammers
or spiders causing DOS attacks. We have been in the process of both a
data center move and network overhaul to better supply us with the
network capability and bandwidth necessary to handle these situations
better. unfortunately do to the scale of both projects it is taking
some time to complete.
I can't say it says a lot, but it certainly keeps the member's mouth shut for the moment. Let's see for how long.
Reference: Forum,
Tags: blogdrive, customer service
Posted at 05:57 pm by Seige
June 13, 2006 10:11 PM PDT
It is very rare for CBG to reply but the good thing is whenever he appears. Things get done.
June 13, 2006 08:35 PM PDT
CBG replied to me for the first time the other day, and I was grateful. I AM, however, concerned about a lot of the bloggers coming into the forum and telling people they need to calm down. It was totally RUDE the way Ssprite told rich that he was bitter about "other" things(?). People such as her are bloggers for the sake of hobby; Rich actually makes money (or tries to, given Blogdrive's recent unreliability issues) and he needs his blogging host to be reliable!
Granted, things like spammer invasions and such happen. However, the downtime is much too frequent as of late. My own blog -- Aria -- is morphing into a publication (of sorts) for the discussion of underground music. I need my blogging host to be WORKING when I contact celebs for interviews! It looks bad when I tell them to check out my blog and it's NOT THERE!
The help that I've received in the Help Forum (from users) is priceless. However, it's just plain insensitive to patronize people and say they have a problem when in fact -- BLOGDRIVE isn't serving it's duties on occasion. It tells you at the registration page that it's good for new service type blogs -- they need to live up to that better!
June 4, 2006 04:13 PM PDT
Some server downtime is okay really... but having so many downtime over such a short period of time is really bad.
Unlike yourself, Jfz... Blogging isn't just a part time hobby these people do. It's a serious business. There are people who make a living from Blogging. And/or reporting on serious matters such as political news/social commentary/or product marketing... If Blogdrive (or yourself) choose to think of these people as stupid for taking blogging so seriously. Think again.
Don't underestimate the power of Bloggers.
Don't underestimate the seriousness of frequent server downtime.
It is serious!
June 4, 2006 03:50 PM PDT
I understand when people get frustrated not being able to get their immediate fix of digital candy on BD -- I get frustrated too -- but some people simply need either lithium or a real life when they get so animated about some server downtime.
June 4, 2006 04:05 AM PDT
We need cats (not dogs) to catch mice, and
We need cops (not lawyers) to catch thieves..
All seemed to rely on BD to solve problems.. But who's perfect ? CBG's a guy and the server's a machine.. Even machines break down sometimes..
CBG needs to think of a solution. He's not a know-all either...