I’m unable to access feeds in my premium account. It’s now 5:50 PM on Sunday. Is the site down?
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Check @newsblur. And yes, Digital Ocean (my hosting provider) is having a network issue. They get paid to fix it, so they’re working hard. It’s just a waiting game at this point. This happens about once every other month and lasts 5 minutes. This has gone on for 30 minutes, but it does happen. Thank goodness it’s late Sunday night.
Thanks for your fast response. Perhaps, if you will allow me, you might want to considering replacing Digital Ocean. My Digg reader, I’m glad to say, is working without a glitch and while I currently plan to continue with your paid service, if such interruptions are, as you say, regular, then you stand to lose a lot of paying customers to Digg at the time of renewal unless you can provide a compelling advantage (such as faster updates).
And they pay a whole hell of a lot more to run their servers. Digital Ocean is quite reliable and costs much less than AWS. I’ve never had more than 5-10 minute outages, and that’s happened once every two months. This is unprecedented. Also the outage just ended, so I’m no long staying awake babysitting the servers.
As much as I understand some of the cost calculation that you are making with Digital Ocean, given that we are paying for the product, your resignation to their failures are a little discouraging. It seems like it should be a goal to strive to do better than semi-regular failures. As well, the apps (newslbur iPad and API user ReadKit) could do a better job messaging the failures. When I went to the Newsblur website, I quickly saw your outage message. But it would have been great if the iPad could have told me as well, where I do most of my reading.
5 min every couple of months is still ~99.95% uptime, which is better than many services I pay thousands of times more for.
If you want a service with an SLA, it’s going to cost you a lot more, and I very much doubt there’s a market for it.
Every website goes down, and news-blur is currently doing better than the likes of Google and AWS, who spend billions, so I think he’s doing a pretty good job.
5 minutes every couple months is ~99.95. But we just had a 4 hour outage. If you just accept that 5 minute outages are okay, then you may not have a plan for when they are not 5 minutes long. If it took 5 minutes to switch over, I get that. But 4 hours due to a single UPS outage is a serious lack of redundancy. Mostly on Digital Ocean’s part, but also on NewsBlur architecture.
I am glad to see that this issue is now resolved, but still do not know Newblur’s unique selling proposition in comparison with Digg Reader? Could you please provide your users at least one compelling reason as to why they should pay a fee for Newsblur when the Digg Reader, which seems to be functioning well and has clear graphics, continues to be free?