Servers Moving Friday night 9pm

Suggestion for next time: when you state Servers Moving Thursday Night.. .why not ACTUALLY move them on Thursday night... instead of WEDNESDAY night????!!!!

The IT folks that Auctiva employs must be real cheap... or just plain dumb. Why not move the servers when eBay is down? WHY do this on a regular production night? And why not send an email to all users letting everyone know WELL IN ADVANCE that this is happening??? Like I said.. they're either very cheap (and inexperienced) or just plain dumb. Or maybe a little of both...

Dear Jeff & Auctiva Staff,

Just wanted to send a you a BIG THANK YOU for all the hard work you and your staff have done. This must have been a trying yet exciting time. I, along with many Auctiva users, appreciate all the efforts and long hours put into making Auctiva work smoothly. I'm sure there were lots of bumps and obsticles along the way but in the end you guys have provided one great service. Your response to our questions and concerns speaks measures. Thanks for keeping us updated as much as possible. Keep up the good work!

Hi Jeff,
I too had assumed that you did the move last night because not only did my pictures disappear, but half of my auctions could not be read due to problems with the templates.
It did not seem like the usual maintainence cycle.
This is not a complaint, just letting you know what we were experiencing here in Florida.
Not sure when it started, but I could not view most of my auction content from 2AM to 6:30 AM CST.

This isn't a reply but a question. The last two items I sent to e bay through auctiva haven't went completely through. E-bay has sent me emails stating that they want to thank me for choosing their gallery service, but that "The host in your url could not be found". I checked the links and they are correct all other pics are working. Any clue as to what may be going on. Sine you are doing all this work and moving thought it may have something to do with that so I didn't want to bother support with this yet. Thanks, Lyssa

Thanks Jeff, for all your hard work that you and your staff do, to make this a great service to us for FREE... don't let the people that nag get to you. Have a great day, and looking forward to the new transaction. Cynthia

quote:

wlslady

Hi wlslady,

I think the links have changed the new ones will not have www. on so the old images links do not work.

James

Congratulations on the move. You guys have a great site! I am looking forwards to seeing it improved. Your listing form is the fastest and easiest of all! Keep up the good work!

This is by no means a complaint. Just scared. I'm not very computer savy, and the terminology scares me. I love using Auctiva, but when the problem is resloved with the pictures will I have to do anything? I find this site very easy to use, and that is very important to me. I have stuck it out in the past and will continue to stick with you. I just wish I could use the insurance option to generate revenue for the site. But when I use it, it does not allow me to combine purchases. I hear that ebay will be working with you guys soon to resolve this issue. Thank you again for a novice user friendly site.

I agree with everything Bobmill stated!

Thanks for the kind words. I can assure you, we are working our tails off to make this happen. We have run through every scenario possible to make this as seamless as possible.. and I can assure you the best solution was to do maintenance last night.. and do the move tonight. We want to get these SUPER fast servers in our SUPER fast colo working by this weekend as we know how important weekends are for our sellers. Many of our staff are planning on working 24 hours today and tonight to get this done before Friday (in fact a bunch of them worked all last night in preparation). I don't think people realize what a monumental task it is to move the amount of equipment we have for our site.

Part of the move involves changes to the DNS, which as most people now takes time to propagate... so we had to start part of that task ahead of time, hence some issues this morning. We are doing some things to attempt to minimize the risk of downtime, but with something of this scale there WILL BE issues and downtime. But if everything goes as planned, and we are up on Friday, everyone will be happy with our performance this weekend.

Hang in there, and trust we are doing 100% of everything in our power to get this done and also are being completely open about the process.

Bill Belcamino
COO - Auctiva

Roars of Applause!!!

My second question. Should I wait until this weekend to list?

I'm keeping the faith and listing away as we speak!

Mike, what about your pictures?

Right now I am down. If it is not up again by friday aevening I may have to end everything. Yikes I had a great week going too.

You and me both. But I would rather wait to list. Then to waste money with no pictures. I've been getting emails all morning.

I just started on ebay for a while just to avoid a terrible situation. If all goes well I will be doing alot of cutting and pasting this weekend. I just hope they get the pictures up again as soon as possible. I think they said that will be first priority.

Hey Jeff can you try that in english for us non computer ling people? By the way my pictures are back.

Could you guys make that alert sign a little less flashy and not as big? LOL. JUST KIDDING. Thanks for at least letting us know.

My only problem today was that I didn't know it was happening! I didn't get a message about it and could not get to the website. All I knew was that I had no pictures on Ebay and was a bit upset and scared. If I had known, then I would have been fine about it. When were we told and how were we told? I have checked my emails... nothing and yesterday did not see the red notice sign that is on home page.

I just want to add that in the future if you are planning a major move why not at least extend the courtesy to us and give us a weeks notice. This is something that had to be planned you could have emailed us and said "If you are planning to use auctive to launch or schedule listing that will end on 3/2/06 please reconsider because we are planing to move our servers and the site would be down. That would be a fair thing for us to ask I think.

I also agree that a little more heads up would be nice to have in the future. I am a new eBay seller and still cutting my teeth. I do have an auction ending at 11:30am PST tomorrow and would hope that you are moved, back up and running smoothly by then.

I am a computer programmer by trade so I understand the ramifications of the work involved with this move. I also understand the need and applaud your efforts to position yourself for the present and future of this great tool for eBay sellers. I want to wish you folks good luck on a smooth and quick move.

Everything is working now for me; better than ever. Does that mean the move is completed?; somehow I think not but the site is vastly faster than the last few days; my pics are all there and uploading is rapid. What gives? Also many thanks to Jeff and Co for getting things fixed.

Is the new image server ip address going to be 209.209.37.61, or is this ip address going to change? I was going to revise my auction to use the ip address instead of the domain name to deal with the DNS propogation issue.

Thanks.

why not use flight service instead?

I think you click START>RUN>then type in >ipconfig /flushdns

quote:

Originally posted by Auctiva Jeff:
Lol, I hate to say it, but if you can wait, then yes. Once you see everything is up on Friday morning it should be safe to list.

Everything is expected to go smoothly tonight but we're moving 50+ servers 81 miles. From my past experience just turning off a server that's been hot and running for 12+ months straight leads to them sometimes not restarting. Hard drives fail, things wiggle lose, connections on the motherboard.

Will I current listings be down again like earlier this morning and last night? What should we do on our end to prepare for this, except for waiting to list new items after this weekend? My auctions will be ending Sunday and my store items of course on on for another 18 days.

I had so many buyers emailing me this morning about not able to see pictures. Am I going to have the same thing happening when you switch servers??

Not complaining I love Auctiva and I still spread the word about you guys. Just want to be prepared.

Thanks
Chuck

I usually schedule listings between 11pm and 12 mid eastern standard time will my scheduled listings be effected by this. When do you hope to have this completed. I am losing sales because of the image outages and all the work that has been taking place. Is it too much to ask that in the future if you know a week in advance (according to the link to the thread posted 2/26/06 at the top of this thread) thatyou give us a warning so we are not wasting money having listings end when you plan on doing major work. Not all of us come in the community or have time to read these long threads. Some of us have work to do. I appreciate the site and all the hard work you put into it and I am very happy here. I can't complain about a free service but when it's going to cost me bids and money because things are not working right I think I am entitled to an email notice.

Are we going to lose our pictures and auctions that we currently have running? If so how long. many of us end auctions on Sunday. Will they be up and running the.
Thanks, Mike

Jeff thats great but I planned on having tonight off because of the move now what do I do?

Can you take a minute from your excitement and answer my question? Will tomorrow nights scheduling be affcted by this move? I took today off because I thought it would be, and by tomorrow everything would be working again. I need to know now because I don't want to miss 2 days worth of work for this. A simple clicking of the quote button on this post and then typing a yes or no will be enough.

If you're scheduling listings to start during the time they say the servers will be offline I think it's safe to say that they won't start at that time.

I don't know how it'll work when the servers come back online, though -- maybe the previously scheduled listings go into a queue and they catch up, I don't know.

It might be a good idea to schedule your listings to start before the servers go down, or -- if you don't want to see any missing pictures -- after they're back up.

Jeff I'd like to comment on your comment of if we don't like it here are some suggestions...

For a CEO you aren't very bright..suggest that we leave.

You betcha in droves! C ya!

What will happen the the listing running while the change is being made? Will they go down or will they stay up and running?

Hi all, I think we need to remember one thing. Even with all the down time (which is really only minimal and in our best interest) Auctiva is a FREE SITE. In the few months we have been using Auctiva, it has saved us over $500 just on the fees we normally pay to schedule our auctions out in 3 minute intervals. So far, the customer service has been excellent, and for a recently new site like this, that is something in itself. (Thanks Mike) I think we need to look at this downtime (if you want to call it that) in a positive way, it's growth!! That's a good thing. I, for one, am very much looking forward to all the new features which will be coming soon (bulk scheduling for sure) and want to say "THANK YOU" to everyone at Auctiva for all the hard work and effort you put into this site. May it stay free forever!

Hi all,

Listings that are schedukled to begin during the down time will not be posted as the site will be completely off line. However, if you schedule your listings for before 9 PM PST or for Saturday or Sunday, they will remain in your shceduled listings page until being launched at the scheduled time.

Listings that are running will still be on eBay during our downtime but the images and store window listings will be unavailable.

-Mike

Thats all I wanted to know thanks. I kind of understood that but just wanted to be sure.

Hi Mike, I just read that the picture servers will be up first and just wanted to verify that the listings we have on ebay now, ending Friday, Sat, and Sun will have the pics available? Thanks again.

agemortwo,

The images will most likely be down Friday night from 9 PM PST to about 2-3 AM PST, so if you have listings ending during that time period, you may want to add an image or two through eBay's "Revise Item" form.

I know when I spoke to you on the phone earlier I said the move would be made tonight, but this has been pushed to tomorrow night for reasons explained in Jeff's previous post.

I hope this helps=)

-Mike