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 support@trackthepack.com 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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