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

Thanks Mike, it does. We have ours ending 8:00PM - 11:00PM, EASTERN TIME, so I think with the time difference they will be fine.

Ditto to Bobmill's Comment to everyone with Auctiva!

Beer and wings are on me Saturday..ok?

Let's get this rockin!
Donna

I think it would make a little more sense to start at 2am PST though my logic being that prime time (for me anyway) would be 8pm PST until 10pm PST. I figure it this way I live on the east coast and schedule my listings to start at 11pm EST thats 8PM PST. THe reason I do that is the people on the east coast are probably willing to stay up until 11 or 12 and the people on the west coast are already home from work done with dinner and off to ebay to spend their money. I don't know how well early morning sales between 2am and 6am but mis you started at 2am PST thats 5am EST and most people are either sleeping or getting ready for work who has time to be bidding anyway. You might want to consider that. I am only making the suggestion because afterall it is our listings that you are affecting.

It is not all about you. this is much bigger then just you so lay off and let them do thier job. Once done it will be better for all of us!

where did i say its about me? I am making a suggestion whats the problem?

what no one is allowed to think here?

Elfin, you are allowed to think but just realize that Jeff and crew have been thinking about this for weeks.

I used to be in IT and a move of this size is not something for any company to be looking forward to. The amount of work involved is atrocious. And the possibilities of problems is endless.

Like Jeff said, just moving a server that has been running non-stop for 12 months is asking for trouble, not to mention the parts that can get shaken loose in transport and the trouble-shooting that unforseen problems can entail.

If they were to wait until 2 AM PST and then hit a glitch, we could see auctions down until 2 pm. That would not be a good thing on a Sat.

As for all the whiners, if you think you are having to work overtime due to the site problems, imagine what Jeff and crew are doing to bring us better service. I promise you , their work load is considerably greater at this time.

Auctiva is a great site. I think they are providing a terrific community service. And there ARE other auction host providers out there who will gladly take your money for their services.

For the people who want to complain about the level of service here, please try some of the other image hosting sites.

I appreciate this website a lot and have made some suggestions in the past that seem to have been put in place. I am looking forward to seeing how things work over the weekend. But like you say "Jeff and crew have been thinking about this for weeks" Then why not email us weeks in advance and say we are moving the servers on march 3rd if you don't want to experience interruptions or image outages that could result in loss of bids on your auctions ending that day plese don't schedule listings to end on this date." It's cut and dry. I don't think this is bad I just think it's bad planning and to have someone who calls himself the CEO of the company tell us to go elsewhere that makes me think it's all about him and not about us the people who are using the site.

The level of service here has been great I send a suggestion it gets put in place, I have a problem it's dealt with quickly. I don't have a problem with that at all. When this is all over will I still be here you betq I will. BUt like I said how would you or Jeff & Crew feel for one thing if you took the day off thinking "ok they will make the move and tomorrow will be a better day" only to find now you wasted a day and tomorrow isn't looking any better. Also How would Jeff and crew feel it "The New Datacenter" decided we need to move our servers around so we'll just take everyone offline to do that but we don't have to give any notice. I don't get to come on these boards very often and yes I see that it is posted at the top of this thread if you click that link but what is it so hard after they posted that notice to click Ctrl C (copy) then open their email address books and click Ctrl A (thats select all) paste the message in the email and send it. Then we all would have known about the move on 2/26. Plain simple nothing to cry about. I am not whinning too much and I am really not that upset and it sucks that I have to experss myself like this because I can come off as being angry and so can others.

Oh well I am off to scan images. Good Luck tonight there Jazzy Jeff Mikey Mike & and the funky bunch. And let me tell you after these guys work all night they sure are FUNKY.

quote:

Originally posted by Auctiva Mike D.:
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 hope this helps=)

-Mike

Mike or any of the Auctiva support team - To add pictures thru the "revise item" link on ebay in our listings will cost me money. I have over 60 listings, is Auctiva going to credit my account for this?

I have a suggestion that I really can't post here probably. And no it doesn't involve curse words. It will be a pain in the butt to do but it can be done.

email me auctiva@astoriabooks.com

I am not affiliated with auctiva in anyway shape or form I have several different email address to deretmine where my mail is coming from.

OK well here is my suggestion. Go to www.sparedollar.com open a 30 free trial account. Then make a listing profile and select a pre-designed template that you like or look in the community's template forum and find the template warehouse they have custom templates stored there also. They have similar ones that auctiva has. Upload the images that you want to use to sparedollar. Open a new ad copy and paste the title and description from auctive to sparedollar and fill in any information that you want to use. once you have done that scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will see a button that says "preview" click that button. The ad will open up and you will see what it will looks like on ebay. right click and the the drop down window will open select "view source" the HTML code will open. Copy that code and paste it into ebay's revise your item in description area, and then save it. Make sure that you clear auctiva's code from the description. Your images and description will be working off sparedollar and will not be affected by auctiva's servers being down. It's tricky and sneaky but it will save you from being down while auctiva is. I am considering it. I have an account over there that I dont use but i might have to do that also.

I cannot believe that anyone would spend the amount of time its going to take to join SD, then go thru all that rigmarole for 60(or who knows how many) listings, when our Auctiva is only planning to be down for 12 hours (we fervently hope!) After reading all your comments, my advice to you is "Grow UP!".

quote:

Originally posted by Cindys Treasures:
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

Yep, ditto for me. Hang in there.

quote:

Originally posted by Mikebiker:
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

During the move, if the server your images are on gets unplugged and physically moved to the new datacenter, the images will not be available until that machine goes back on line. If everything goes as planned, the images should be back up within a few hours.
They are making the move during the absolute deadest time during the week, everyone should be up Saturday morning with everything intact.
The issues like DNS, nameservers and the like are already handled in advance and will go into effect very quickly once your server is connected to the network again.
I say list away, the pictures will only be out for a short while.

quote:

Originally posted by efilnikcufecin:
OK well here is my suggestion. Go to www.sparedollar.com open a 30 free trial account. Then make a listing profile and select a pre-designed template that you like or look in the community's template forum and find the template warehouse they have custom templates stored there also. They have similar ones that auctiva has. Upload the images that you want to use to sparedollar. Open a new ad copy and paste the title and description from auctive to sparedollar and fill in any information that you want to use. once you have done that scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will see a button that says "preview" click that button. The ad will open up and you will see what it will looks like on ebay. right click and the the drop down window will open select "view source" the HTML code will open. Copy that code and paste it into ebay's revise your item in description area, and then save it. Make sure that you clear auctiva's code from the description. Your images and description will be working off sparedollar and will not be affected by auctiva's servers being down. It's tricky and sneaky but it will save you from being down while auctiva is. I am considering it. I have an account over there that I dont use but i might have to do that also.

Use your web site space.

I have unlimited storage.

You'll be good to go and have a backup at the same time.

Best of luck to everyone!
This site is working so sweet today.
Donna

quote:

Originally posted by Roamer:
I cannot believe that anyone would spend the amount of time its going to take to join SD, then go thru all that rigmarole for 60(or who knows how many) listings, when our Auctiva is only planning to be down for 12 hours (we fervently hope!) After reading all your comments, my advice to you is "Grow UP!".

That depends if I had listings ending tonight after midnight you bet i would. I get almost 90% last minute bids. It would take about 2 mins to set up an account and about 1 min per listing so what wasting an hour of my time isn't worth it to make $375 bucks rather than $75 that I have bid on right now?

quote:

After reading all your comments, my advice to you is "Grow UP!".

Do you have a clue about how an ebay business runs? I am not sitting on my ass making extra money part time. NO PICS = NO BIDS. NO BIDS=NO Money. I don't like wasting a day listing only to have images shut off at the time that my listings are ending. I depend on this for my livelyhood and what you may thgink of is not being grown up I think of as I need this site to be working and the staff to be professional. Shutting down the servers and not notifying all users through email is not quite professional. If you ask me. I don't know what you sell opr how much but I am very successful and don't like losing sales because auctiva decides to shut the servers then can't make up their mind to do it today or tomorrow. Like I said I took yesterday off thinking this would all be done today and i'd be working worry free. It's that simple. If your boss told you "next week we are going to be off on thursday and your not getting paid" and you take the day off and then calls you and says "well we really didn't get around to it today so we are closed tomorrow and you have another day off with no pay." how would you feel? This is a business for me not a hobby.

Besides that I have no complaints sow WTF is your problem with me? That siad I have no listings ending tonight anyway.

I think I'm going to take my chances here with the team of Auctiva. I'm not going to spend $.35 (or whatever it is) on each auction adding a picture through ebay. I really like it here just worried about last minute bidders and not being able to view pictures BUT if they do all of this transferring in the deadest times (very early am) then I think I'll be ok. My auctions are due to end until around 8 and 11 am (cst time). If I'm reading everything right then my listings will be fully viewable by then.

IF I was told by Auctiva that they were going to do this I would not have listed last week. That is one thing that does upset me, is that we did not get any type of warning.

Well I guess I have a free weekend. Going out tonight and having a few margarita's. Jeff, Mike, & entire Auctiva team - I'll have a few for you and cheers for the hard work.

Hey How's your antique glass???

Here's hoping all goes well tonight, I have complete faith in you guys

I'm off to the Strawberry Festival in Plant City this weekend and I'm sure I'll return to a new and improved Auctiva!

Keep up the good work guys


Skips away singing "Strawberry shoortcake cream on top . . ."

BTW - www.Vrane.com can bulk add anything to all your listings at once if you wish, or just a select few.

Anyway my point is that it will take 60 seconds to add a "blurb" about the images being down to all your auctions if you want.

Plain and simple

Edited to add this direct link: http://www.vrane.com/pa.html

Thanks, wahm922. I did it and it worked like a charm. And I would just like to say to efilnikcufecin that I understand your anxiety about losing business, but I would really like to know if you purchase any insurance thru auctiva?

No I don't. I usually don't use insurance it's very rare. I will insure it if I am asked. I don't charge handling either. Priority mail flat rate envelopes cost 4.05 and that is what I charge. Want to combine up to 6 mags thats cool no extra charge. Priority mail flat rate box I charge 8.10 for as many will fit in the box. Of course I have no no suplies to buy either though. I get all my supplies from the PO, and use carrier pick up so I don't even have to leave the house. and I don't either. Thats the sad part .Well just to pick up payments at the PO and go to the bank. I haven't had the oppertunity to use the insurance yet.

Let me add that I do use USPS insurance when needed because I don't want my customers to have to deal with auctiva or any other company than the post office if there is a problem. I haven't looked into auctiva insurance because it hasn't come up yet.

Moonandstarman,

No, Auctiva would not credit your account for image fees to eBay.

-Mike

quote:

efilnikcufecin

I've decided to get on the insurance bandwagon because it seems that money may be at the root of auctiva's problems. Maybe if more people used what they sell (of course not everyone sells items that need it)they could provide better service. I have started requiring insurance on every item, which no one has complained about yet. Like I've said elsewhere I've had problems buying the insurance from auctiva because they cannot seem to update my sales files quickly enough, if at all, but am hopeful after the move they'll be able to fix that. It seems like it ought to be a priority. Anyway it seems wrong to complain that a free service (the value of which easily translates into real dollars) is costing you money. If we support them monetarily, then we will be justified in asking for better service.

Personally I think it would be worth 8.95 a month for auctiva just the way it is. They have come a long way. I have no real complaints other than the fact that they didn't contact us last week. I have not had a problem with usps yet and I have mailed over 5000 packages. I have customers that spend $600 a week sometimes.