24-Sep Downtime

[bracciodiferro]

Simply put, this should not have happened! All the hardware and sofware to prevent the downtime has been available on the market for many years. I am trying to find an excuse for you, but I can't. This is a major goof up. I hope you have learned your lesson and will not allow this to happen again. Ever!
The one month free service is not a favor. It is a must.

...this is 'what' that everyone should know !

Furthermore one month of free service is a difficult thing to understand, when we do not know when PBase will return operating at 100% !!!
Paolo

[sjphoto]

I love PBase and do not think any other brand comes close to PBase in appearance. It's not perfect but they try.

[yardbird]

Thank you Pbase for the updates and the work done to bring things back up. I am not sure why people are saying there was no communication, because everyday I saw an update on the main page. I didn't feel I was left in the dark at all. I actually felt this was the first time when you really kept us in the loop.

Looking forward to those new updates. We need it now more than ever. I have been a Pbaser for a long time and will continue to be so.

[mathildaportfolio]

Thanks for the explanations, and good luck with all the work ahead.
To be fair, Pbase.com did leave an update on the main portal every day, telling us about their progress and problems. No one enjoyed this, I bet least of all the Pbase staff who knew they were going to face the music for a long time, even after the site is up and running again.
Let's get back to photography!

[mccartney]

Glad to have PBase back online!

Yes communication could have been a little more forthcoming during the outage, but overall PBase is just much more of a professional looking site than the alternatives like Smugmug, Zenfolio, etc. - I have had a look at their samples and find them all to be lacking in professionalism.

The new speed of PBase is most welcome - generally nice and snappy now! I plan to be a longtime PBase member.

I agree lets all get back to our photography! - the event is over.

[pegsam]

Thanks for the update, Emily. Not to shoot the messenger but I think the no charge for September is a bit premature. The site is still experiencing problems and doesn't have the same functionality as before the crash. PBase may want to consider something more aggressive than one month free. The frustration of not having access to the site and time spent looking elsewhere doesn't even come close to the value in your offer. Again, I'm not directing this at the messenger but PBase needs to understand that this was a major blunder. My loyalty to PBase has been shaken, and that is an understatement. I am cautiously optimistic that PBase will do the right thing.

[desertrose_images]

Thank you Emily, for the update and the free month offered to us for September. I understand things happen and so thankful for this site as it is the best online. When it was down, was I cranky and complaining? Yes! Big time. But I felt you all kept us fairly up-to-date and I appreciated that.

Sorry you all had to go through this. I am sure you all are doing the best you can. I am sorry I had lost you all for a week, but I will get over it! Just thankful you all are back up and running and the site seems to be working better and faster than ever!

Many thanks for everything and your compensation to us customers.

[michaelsv]

Couple more thing.

- Pbase is still flaky. From time to time it spits message pages instead of what it's required to display
- The space usage should be corrected to what it was before the downtime. There is no explanation why after the recovery we're all using 10% more space.
-The list of Pbase servers/OS/tools http://www.pbase.com/server_info should be updated It's not been updated from 2004. Some of us will feel better knowing what is used to run site.

Lack of communication since the Sept 29th.... I've sent email to support three days ago. No answer until today. Today got an email pointing me to the message fro Emily. Unacceptable...

Michael.

[mikelong]

- The space usage should be corrected to what it was before the downtime. There is no explanation why after the recovery we're all using 10% more space.

Maybe the free month they're offering is meant to offset the 10% additional space we're now being charged...who knows? This is pbase after all.

[pinemikey]

Thanks for the update, Emily.

As for that stats, may I suggest you not implement them as they once were, as the slowness of the profile page startup calculating stats was a cornerstone of the "Slow" Pbase users, those affected by slow servers, that is.

Of course, none of the news should make a difference to those who never use Pbase for anything else except as a vehicle to snark all over Pbase. Wonderful useful lot that crowd is.

[santamonica]

Most things seem to be working just fine now. But when I go into Profile>Full Statistics, it shows that I have had zero page views for the past 10 days. Ordinarily, I have between 125 and 900 daily views. I've never had a day with zero views, so something is wrong, clearly. It made sense to have zero views when pBase was down (for obvious reasons), but something is wrong. Since I had about 25 comments made on different photos a few days ago, I'm definitely getting page views. But no idea why these are not showing up on my statistics.

Anyone else had this problem? If so, what did you (or pBase) do to resolve the issue?

Thanks for your help,
-josh

[sbbish]

Most things seem to be working just fine now. But when I go into Profile>Full Statistics, it shows that I have had zero page views for the past 10 days. Ordinarily, I have between 125 and 900 daily views. I've never had a day with zero views, so something is wrong, clearly. It made sense to have zero views when pBase was down (for obvious reasons), but something is wrong. Since I had about 25 comments made on different photos a few days ago, I'm definitely getting page views. But no idea why these are not showing up on my statistics.

Anyone else had this problem? If so, what did you (or pBase) do to resolve the issue?

Thanks for your help,
-josh

Josh,

Go back and read the beginning of this thread. Emily stats in the initial post, "The current stats collection method is limited, and due to site performance reasons is currently disabled. We are working on an improved method, which will be better, faster, and retroactive. Once completed, statistics for pageviews since the power failure will be available to you."

[cis]

My Special Thanks, for keeping us informed and for the free month.
It was truly appreciated!!!

[ssim]

I am not going to come on here like most others and thank you for the information. That is a something that should have been done and should have been done more often during the outage. I had put customer’s files for their review shortly before the outage. This reflects on me as they questioned my reasoning for using a system that would go down for days, particularly in this day and age of storage space being very affordable and the simple fact that this sort of an outage is unheard of in business. Yes Virginia, this is a business and it is high time that the principals behind PBase started to treat it as such. I get the feeling that it is like a lot of photographers that hang out an online shingle calling themselves professionals when they have a full time job elsewhere. This needs and deserves priority attention.

PBase was one of the early entrants into the image hosting business. They have the makings of greatness but they seemed to satisfied with mediocrity and did nothing to add functionality or improve things. Slug seemed to think that it was fine as it was and then I think he woke up one morning to realize that there were a slew of new entrants that offered everything that PBase plus more and they were price competitive. I don’t hold Flickr in the same league as PBase but you certainly can’t dispute their success.

If one goes back through this forum, one of the most sought after things from the user community is communication. I have never seen a company so ambivalent towards its customers than this one. You’ve had a few users than have tried to champion this cause for you but it not the same as getting that information directly from the people that make the decisions. I just cannot imagine why the managers are so afraid to talk to the users. Other than ambivalence (which equates to I don’t give a damn), I can see no reason why you have not responded to these requests. It doesn’t have to be something like the PBase magazine that some users were doing but a simply email at least once a month telling us what you are working on, how things are, general state of the union kind of information.

If PBase continues to use the same approach to its customers going forward you are going to lose many of them. I would think that you are going to see a significant hit in this area as a direct result of this recent outage. It is time for Slug to sit back and let someone lead the charge. He would do this if he really cared about the customers which also equates to his own personal success. I’ve seen many companies where they had to take the owner out of the mix in order to be able to continue in the business.

There is no doubt that some things have happened in the background to make PBase a better place but there has been little, if anything done to make it easier to customize its look. Not everyone is a techno geek that can write CSS and when I see what some other sites are doing in this respect, it time you sat up and took notice.

I personally think that you are undercharging and that you could quite easily charge more for a PBase but only if you acted like a business that cared about its customers. Sure there would be a cry of foul from some users but so be it. I would rather pay more money knowing that things are improving.

[soenda]

Surely if your business depends on it you should have a backup plan for when instances like PBase's recent debacle occur. What prudent business owner would let their livelihood rest exclusively on a $23 per year hosting situation?

I should think you would have a subscription to another hosting service and a way to redirect all your customers there for the duration of the first site's difficulties. Nothing else makes sense.