Website Down February 20, 2007

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So our website has been down for a bit--I apologize to anyone who has been trying to access the help site. Our provider's servers have gone down. Thankfully GiftWorks is a desktop application and is immune to those sort of outages. Our website, sadly, is not, nor are web-based applications.

We use some web-based applications, but nothing mission-critical anymore. Shockingly, our provider just won a reliability award. Web.com used to be called Interland, and they have been making a lot of changes. This is not the kind of change we like, but in general they've been pretty good. We hope it's back up soon.

In the meantime, post here if you need help or have suggestions!

Comments

My site is also down, and has been for several hours. It was also intermittent throughout the night last night. As you mentioned, I've also been with them for a while (from the Interland side).

I'd love to talk with them to see what's up. Unfortunately, their OWN site is also down (can't currently access web.com), and their 800 number reports all circuits busy. I think someone pushed the wrong button in their data center - it appears they're completely blacked out.

Ick.

Looks like they are back up!

I wish we had been notified earlier in some way. We're about to work on mirroring our sites so we have some amount of redundancy, but with typical DNS stuff it's hard to do so. Perhaps time to evaluate ISPs?

Web applications are a calculated risk. However their accessibility, in my opinion, outweighs the risk of data theft and unavailability.

There are anecdotes and stats that support both sides. What I'm saying is that for us, customer data needs to be local. And the performance is better than when we used a hosted app.

I am the founder of ChiliSoft, which was a server software company, so my preference was naturally to build our stuff as an ASP. So you can imagine what a transformation it took to get me to the hybrid web vision: desktop informed and supported by the web. The performance is generally so much better than hosted apps, and the data is as secure as your firewall.

That said, I love BaseCamp. I think a number of hosted apps are really useful, and I built the prototype of GiftWorks as a web application. In fact, that experience was partly responsible for the decision to go to the desktop.