A Word About The Recent Service Interruptions.
In the wake of our recent series
of service interruptions, we posted the following message in a few different
places (the forums, our Facebook page, etc.), but it seemed like it was a good
idea to make it available here on the blog as well.
Dungeonaday.com
uses a service provider called SubHub. It's the same service provider the site
has used since Monte launched it and, prior to the recent (admittedly massive)
problem, we've never had ANY issue with them at all.
A few
weeks ago, SubHub's hosting partner, Softlayer, had a major hardware problem,
and our site went down. This was NOT a hack nor any kind of security breach--just
a case of a lot of hardware going wrong all at once. Since SubHub's hosting
service proved unable to fix their problem in a timely manner, SubHub move to a
different hosting partner. All SubHub's data was retrieved and moved to
Voxel.net (who include benefits such as guaranteed 100% network uptime,
advanced proactive monitoring of the servers, and the faith of clients such as
the Mozilla Foundation).
However,
upon arrival at Voxel, SubHub began encountering some DNS issues with the new
hosting service, and their site began confusing which Subhub clients went with
which DNS numbers. So, for instance, if you went to Dungeonday.com you might
see the Ecuadorian Tourism Bureau's web site, or one belonging to a federal
employee's credit union. They weren't cyber-squatters,
just other SubHub clients that also had messed up DNS issues.
Ultimately,
our solution was to create a new landing page for Dungeonaday.com--one that was
not part of SubHub, but resided on a different ISP's server entirely and
included a link directly to the SubHub URL, rather than masking that URL with
"Dungeonaday.com." It was a quick fix, and easily accomplished.
The
funny thing was, we already had a plan to make such a change. In fact, work was
underway to executing that layout because it makes it easier to create a two
separate Dungeonaday.com experiences--one that subscribers are familiar with
(the current SubHub-based site), and one designed to give newcomers a more
positive and robust experience when they come to the site (in hopes that they
will then take the plunge and become subscribers, too).
The
problem is, we had only begun working on the practical implementation and
design of the new landing site. So, for a while, frequent visitor might have
seen a different landing page on EACH visit as we tried to make it first
somewhat presentable, and then continued to fine tune the experience. As of
right now, the front pages are close to where we would have wanted them to be
on Day 1 of a switch-over. Of course that means there is still room for
improvement and expansion, and we intend to follow through with that. But at
least it no longer feels like a ramshackle emergency shelter of a landing page.
More
problematic, though, are the links within Dungeonaday.com. One difficulty we
had not fully anticipated was that making this URL change breaks many (perhaps
most) of the links on previously published encounters. And there is no easy way
to searh and replace those links with new correct ones. So we now have a NEW
project on our hands -- going through the entire site, encounter by encounter,
checking all links by hand, and fixing those that are not functioning properly.
That work has already begun, but it will take some time to accomplish fully.
So
there you have it ... the state of the site. We remain committed to meeting our
daily encounter output and to getting the link problem fixed as quickly as
possible. And we further are committed to polishing and tweaking the new
landing site so that it can help show the world how terrific Dungeonaday.com is.
Most of all, we remain committed to making sure we provide our subscribers with
a first-rate, high-quality dungeoneering experience every weekday of the year.
Thanks
for being here and taking on this great adventure with us!
Copyright 2006-2010 Monte J. Cook; Copyright 2010-2011 Super Genius Games
