Monday, December 22, 2008

Website outage (The Joys of Entrepreneurship)

For much of the last week, our website was down affecting both access to the information on our website and access to the Olap Underground tools we distribute on our site. Fortunately, we distribute our commercial products on a private website so access for our customers was not interrupted.

Our website is hosted by a web hosting company and they had some type of problem in the software they use to host our site. Unfortunately for us, they were not very helpful during this time and I got pretty @#$%^&* frustrated at times. In the end, they referred us to some of their former employees that we could contract to fix the software used to host the site and apply patches to prevent the same problem from recurring. It seems like we pay a good bit of money to them every year to make sure the site is up and running 24/7; they don't seem to be up to the task.

Unfortunately, one of the side effects of the problem was that Google listed our site as 'harmful to your computer' which prevented many people for being able to access it at all. About an hour ago, I received an email from the contractor telling me the site was back up and that they were working with Google to get the 'harmful site' status reversed.

Thank you to the dozen or so individuals who took the time over the past few days to send me email letting me know there was a problem with the site.

Update 12.23.2008: Our website is back online, has been tested by Google and found to be clean. Hopefully things can get back to normal now.

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