Hi, I would like to point out in advance that I am starting this topic to hear the official position of IPS, not to make fun of etc. You constantly negate external infrastructures in favor of your cloud. And how will you explain your TOTAL DOWNTIME 12h 42m in the last 7 days? I would like to add that my dedicated server has had 100% UPTIME for a year. But if I was paying that much money for a cloud and seeing a 500 error for 8 hours, I would have given up on the service pretty quickly. Now let's imagine that during downtime some big business forum has important Live Topics?

 

Edited March 22, 20232 yr by Grafidea

 

And by the way...  my site was down as well from 11:01PM onwards.  I'm not exactly happy about the situation either.  However I'm going to let IPS work with AWS to determine the root cause of the problem.  My plan is to follow up in a few days to learn more because this type of outage warrants the investigation.  

Like anything online, things can and do break.  The question is what you learn about each instance and how you improve from it going forward.  A true root cause analysis not just looks at what went wrong and why, but also looks at what can be done to prevent it from occurring again.  And I think these guys know that and will work through that process.  

Thanks Randy,

We're taking this very seriously. More information will follow.

I would like to reply to this thread just to encourage Invision to continue to offer self hosting options and as new features come available I would like to see them available to self hosting customers.  I’m a big fan of this software, and but I do by far prefer the self hosting option.  I appreciate the hosted option, but it is not what I prefer.  

 

6 hours of downtime is simply unacceptable. I'm a huge fan of Invision, love the amazing software they develop and maintain for us. But when I pay 150/month for a hosted service, I expect more. In 20 years of being self hosted on inexpensive shared hosting services, I've never had more than a few minutes of downtime at a time. 

The fact that Invision relies on AWS and that the issue may lie with AWS is irrelevant to us, the customers. As a professional, if I can't deliver a service to my customer because Invision is down, I can't charge my customers. If my forum is down, I can't earn revenue from ads. I can't just tell the customers (or the ad network) "it's not my fault, the software cloud service I'm using was down" and continue to charge them the same amount. I have no choice but to take responsibility and suffer the loss in revenue and reputation. 

Invision should  take responsibility here, offer $ compensation to paying customers, and deal with whatever service providers they use on their own term. As Invision customers, that's not our problem. 

Is there somewhere in the terms of the cloud service that states 100% uptime? Do you call your internet provider and ask for compensation when it goes down as well?

If this was a consistent pattern of downtime, I would be upset. However, this is the first time my community has gone down and I understand it happens. The way I see it, I am paying for a service and if it continues to go down I have the option to look else where. For my internet provider, I don't have any other option 🥲.

Hard to foresee unexpected downtime...

 

 

If it's for a serious amount of time, then yes. However as I said earlier I've never experienced anywhere near 6 hours of downtime in 20 years of using various hosting companies. 

I think as technology grows there are more points of failure. Reddit was down for me last week and I think Facebook had an outage not too long ago as well. Your 20 year old community was probably running a basic LAMP stack. Outages happen and they suck, but I am looking forward to some of the cool new features that a self-hosting wouldn't be able to do easily.

Here's to uptime!