UltraGuest Blog

To get in a better mood after the recent service issue, here is another contest!

The purpose of the contest is to improve the ultraguest.com free guestbook service and now you can help. Here are the rules:

• Bugs are reported using our bug tracker system (you may need to create an account in our forum)
• The first person to create a new issue is paid the following to their paypal account:
  • $10 for each major bug (functionality bugs and errors)
  • $5 for each minor bug (design, browser issues, usability etc)
  • $2 for each spelling mistake in on the front page, other ultraguest pages, and in the control panel. Spelling mistakes in guestbook posts are not a part of the contest
  • $1for spelling mistakes in this blog and in forum posts by me (Andreas)
• To get a refund you need to either register at the forum with your paypal e-mail, or send me a private message in the forum to the paypal e-mail you would like to get paid
• Duration: starting August 20 (today) and ending on December 31 this year.

As you can see from the first contest, the winner got paid $25. This time however, there can be as many winners as there are bugs.

Last night I decided to let my host perform a software upgrade on the main guestbook server to get some new features. Since I have alerts sent to my cellphone in case the server goes down and because of their expertise I did not worry about the upgrade (it was just minor software upgrade).

When I got up this morning I noticed that I had no e-mails about new messages in the demo guestbook and no new support tickets. Unusual, but it did not alert me until I typed www.ultraguest.com in my browser and got an empty page! I start to ask myself lots of questions: What happened? Is there something wrong with my Internet connection? Are my scripts incompatible with the new software? I know that every second UltraGuest serves several guestbook views. What do these users think? Will people stop using the service because of this?

It turned out my host had performed the upgrade, but did not check that the it was successful(!). Once they fixed the issue it turned out that there was an old bug in the guestbook system that the previous version of the software did not complain about, but with the new version it was not possible to create new messages.

To those of you that tried to alert me of the problem: of course the support system went down together with the rest of the website. I get all support tickets sent to my blackberry, but with no support system - no support tickets.

I have already looked at a few solutions that will prevent this from happening in the future: an expensive load balancing system with database clustering and  less expensive system that notifies my when pages do not display the way they should.

I would like to apologize to those of you that were unable to access guestbooks during the downtime and sincerely thank you for your patience. While I don’t have an SLA agreement for those of you who have paid to upgrade, I ask that you contact me and I will provide a compensation for the downtime.