After 12 hours of network outage (a routing problem?) at our hosting provider in Germany we are finally up and running at full-speed! Thanks for your patience!!!
More details later, I need some rest now. I will tell you then about our new backup system and explain, why your data is 100% safe at Wikidot.com
- Michal
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
I am impressed with wikidot.com and appreciative of the service, which I have been mentioning on various forums. During the most recent outage, however, I was obliged to remove a link to a wiki page and duplicate another page with a page on a wiki elsewhere. I also began a project on another wiki service that I had intended to place here (and, regrettably, explain why on another forum).
What was really disconcerting was the absence for a lengthy period of any notice; an explanation of the problem should be one of the first moves. I'm a fairly recent arrival here and this was the second outage within a matter of 10 days so my faith was sorely tested. Enjoy your rest and a break. - Terry
Terry, hello, I'm head admin around here. I'm currently spanking Michal as we speak. He's the owner and developer, but believe me, he's getting a good talking to about this. (The spanking started an hour after wikidot went down, actually.)
To his credit, this does not appear to have been a planned outage and has little to do with the burps of the server (he was updating with new features) and when he realized that wikidot was going to be down for awhile, posted a public message visible to all.
Another note, other free hosts do not take any responsibility for your data. Backups are considered your responsibility. It appears that Michal has gone above and beyond the norm by installing a back up mechanism (spoken about in his downtime post) and we have come out of this perfectly fine. Before coming to wikidot I had several paid hosts destroy my database only to respond "So what?" I don't think he places a legal guarantee that your data will remain perfectly safe, but does his best to protect it.
What I need to get him to do is notify the community for server maintenance and "update downtime" in advance. This is my responsibility, and I am the one who is responsible for asking him for this information, so I'm at fault there. Recently things have run so smoothly and the update burps so short, I haven't bothered to make this an issue with him.
—hartnell
"Early in life I learned that I was a firestarter. When I learned that I could light fires of passion I became a pyromaniac. My greatest desire is to set the world on fire." — Shawn Hartnell
One more thing I have to say :) If you are ever feeling unsecure about wikidot, check to see if I've been posting or updating anything recently. Michal does not pay me, I'm a volunteer. Before and after I joined wikidot my career has been developing wikis, so the stability of wikidot is a very important issue to me. I'm still here.
—hartnell
"Early in life I learned that I was a firestarter. When I learned that I could light fires of passion I became a pyromaniac. My greatest desire is to set the world on fire." — Shawn Hartnell
I have been here for a while, and I have only seen one outage that has not be recent (And it was less than an hour). Lately it has been a bit flaky, but this is not normal, and will likely be fixed soon if not already. It would however be very nice to have a page hosted on some other server to look at for info when wikidot goes down.
Michal, I wish you luck getting through this problem. Too bad the last two outages started at about 1 am in Poland; I see why you need rest.
- Craig
Hi there,
The outage indeed started after the midnight (Friday/Saturday) but I was unable to contact anyone at the data center. It looked like routing problems because all traceroutes stopped 2 servers away from our machine. There was also a notice from the hosting company that they are experiencing some problems, but these should be short-time outages only.
I was monitoring the situation really hoping things would get back to normal within minutes. Since it was 3AM1 and the outages were expected between 12-3AM I thought it was nothing to worry about. I did not want to switch to the failover server at this point.
However in the very morning it appeared that the hosting company has some problems (at least this is what I was told) and they will fix it in max 5 hours. So I put a quick notice at Wikidot (in fact changed DNS stetting for Wikidot to another server) and keep contacting the tech team. Apparently things were fixed after 6 hours from that moment.
So far we did not experience any serious problems. One recent 1-hour break was also caused by routing, once there was a Slashdot news linking to NOOOXML.org campaign that slowed Wikidot before we tweaked the server configuration. The only really long outage was on 2nd Jan 2007 (routing problems again).
I am really sorry about the outage. This should be something to fix within 1 hour max but apparently it does not work like this.
Another thing is that we have decided (a few days ago) to change hosting company and move to another datacenter. There are a few reasons:
We are seriously considering moving the servers to US since most of the traffic is coming from Americas. We would keep a server in Europe for hosting static files to reduce response time for visitors from Europe.
I think we will move in a month or 2 months. I believe this will improve things a lot and will make Wikidot more reliable, responsive and… better. This is even more important since we host websites and data that people rely on and we are fully aware of this. The excuse that "Wikidot sites are free and therefore do not have to be reliable" is not an option for us, believe me.
best regards and thank you for your patience!
Michal
BTW: Yep, and we need to improve the ways we contact with our users and the community. Starting ASAP.
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
I'm sure we all wish you well. I intend to start a wiki about an office software suite here and anything I can do to help, I'd be glad to do.
As far as new features are concerned (like the new ultimate hot backup host), we're working on a new version of front side layout. Check it out at http://quake.wikidot.com/ .
Piotr Gabryjeluk
visit my blog
Gabrys,
I have a problem with the "followed" links.
Since the links are not underlined, once followed, the link colour becomes too close to black. I.d. the reader does not further see where the links are.
