TrackThePack
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Downtime
Starting around 3PM CST this past Thursday, April 21 and extending through about 6PM CST on Saturday, April 23, TrackThePack was inaccessible.
TrackThePack’s primary service provider is Heroku. Heroku is built on top of Amazon EC2 which, at the risk of dumbing it down way too much, is a “cloud-based” web host. The “cloud” is an entirely different post, but ultimately it lets Heroku (and in turn, us) scale up our capacity extremely easily/quickly.
At around 3PM CST on Thursday, April 21, Amazon EC2 began experiencing “latency and error rates” (ie. “an outage”) that ultimately extended through late Saturday evening.
Total, we had 2 days and 15 hours of downtime. Ouch (for us, and more importantly, for you).
We use our service too, so we know how much of a hassle it is for this to be down for so long. In this case, we were 100% at the mercy of Amazon’s EC2 service and really could only wait until they figured out what was going on.
It was a major outage that caused varying lengths of downtime for many large companies. Overall EC2 has been extremely reliable for us, and we’ve still got faith in them as a service provider. With technology as new as “the cloud” there are risks, but the benefits (cost and ease of use, among other things) ultimately outweigh them at this point.
Again, we’re so sorry about this. If you are a Commercial or Pro customer and would like a credit to your account for this outage, please contact us at [email protected] and we’ll be happy to do that.
If you’d like to read up more on with EC2, you can check out these articles:
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LaserShip Support Added
We’ve just added support for LaserShip package tracking.
There’s a little online store you may have heard of called Amazon.com that frequently uses LaserShip for regional shipments, so this has been requested pretty frequently.
So, go ahead and start tracking those LaserShip packages!
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TrackThePack: Pro
This week we launched TrackThePack: Pro, our new subscription service for TrackThePack.com power users.
Pro currently gives you these extra features:
- Unlimited tracks (Instead of 5 per month)
- Access to full archive of every package you’ve tracked (Instead of just a few)
- Forward tracking emails from multiple addresses (Instead of one)
- Receive optional notifications for all status updates (Instead of just delivery updates)
- No advertising
- The same feeling you get when petting bunnies and kittens because you’ll be helping support future development of TrackThePack
Having talked to many of you myself, I know that the new limit on number of tracks for free users is a major shock.
From a statistics standpoint, that limit actually will only affect a small portion of our users as most track fewer than 5 packages a month, but do understand that we’re still testing the waters a bit with that number. We may raise it or even remove the limit completely, but for now we’re trying things out and seeing what the reception is like.
If you like the features that Pro offers, you can upgrade right now here: trackthepack.com/upgrade
As always, we’d love to get your feedback here or in our support forums.
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2010 In Review: Interesting facts and figures
Now that 2010 has come to a close, we thought we’d take a look at some of the interesting stats from the past year. All of these stats are based only on data from 2010.
Packages tracked: 413,222
Our best year since we launched back in 2007. We’re doing about quadruple the number of package tracks per day as we were in 2009.
Christmas is, as you’d guess, the busiest month of the year for tracking packages and this December we tracked over 50,000 packages (over double from what we did in 2009).
Packages tracked via our iOS app: 45,784
We launched our iOS app back in April 2010 and overall the feedback has been fantastic and usage has been great with over 45,000 numbers tracked via the app.
Push notifications sent for the iPhone app: 18,961
Right after we launched our iPhone app, the most requested feature was push notifications. With over 18,000 push notifications sent in about 6 months, I feel proud of that number.
Packages tracked via non-web app sources: 60,297
Sources include the iPhone app, our Firefox plugin, Bookmarklet and email.
Most numbers tracked by a single user: 3,502
This one is pretty staggering. One user tracked over 3,500 packages in 2010. We had a couple of other users who tracked over 1,000. There were 9 users who tracked over 500 packages, 21 users who tracked over 250 packages and 131 users who tracked over 100 packages.
Package events: 2,988,725
When your package gets any sort of update (change in location, change in processing status) we call that an “event.” We tracked nearly 3 million such events in 2010.
Who were the most popular carriers?
Annnd that’s all for now. I may post some other interesting stats later, but I figure this is a good start.
Thanks everyone who uses TrackThePack. What started off as a fun little side project to scratch an itch has become a really solid service that 10’s of thousands of people use. I’m really excited to see what 2011 holds.
Thanks!
Josh Pigford
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TrackThePack iPhone App Launches
The TrackThePack iPhone App has launched. Enjoy.
http://trackthepack.com/services/iphone
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TrackThePack: Commercial Launches
The commercial version of TrackThePack, perfect for online shops, has launched to the public!
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Submit tracking numbers via email
This feature has been a long time coming and easily the most requested feature. We’ve been testing it over the past few weeks and so far it’s working beautifully.
I’m proud to announce the ability to submit tracking numbers via email.
That means all of those “Your order has shipped” emails with tracking numbers can just be forwarded to us and we’ll automatically find the tracking number and add it to your account!
All you have to do is forward those emails to [email protected] from the email address you have on file for your account and we’ll do the rest!
You’ll then get an email response with a note about successfully finding a number or not.
We hope you enjoy the new feature and please provide any feedback via our contact form.
