CBG Speaks

The Cool Blogdrive Guy (one of the two Blogdrive admin) speaks in responce to a member's complain in the forum. Read the complain first.

Blogdrive has tortured me enough. I've been a customer for one year and I'm actively looking for other options. This is the third unannounced outage and unresponded to help tickets in less than 2 weeks. Even when it's "working" it takes over an hour to make one post due to crashes. I've had the patience of a saint, hoping and praying. Yet, Blogdrive appears to be flatlining. I've simply had enough. I'm not going to waste my time even commenting much more. It's time to get serious and find a host that is ready for prime time and living in the real world. I feel foolish for even giving my business to this company. Maybe, instead of Yahoo buying Blogdrive, we should see if Toys R Us would be willing to take over. Or maybe the Salvation Army. Message to Helpee: I get the sense that you're trying to help, that you want to help, but that you just can't help. People need a blog host to have things that work and it's simply not working. It's very sad, but it is just not working. It's not. If I saw a light at the end of the tunnel, that would be lovely. But, all I see are the pleas of my fellow members virtually begging for improvements to the pathetic levels of outages. Is everyone familiar with the oft-quoted definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. That's really what staying on as a Blogdrive customer equals: insanity.

And here is his reply:

Hi Rich, I feel your pain. Any unexpected outages have been just that, unexpected. Earlier today there was a flood attack on the servers. The unusually high utilization caused a database error which propagated to the other servers. It took some time to correct it across all the servers, but all is well now with no data loss. We are now looking at implementing new measures to help protect against this type of scenario.

Most of the other "outages" you experienced before are do to spammers or spiders causing DOS attacks. We have been in the process of both a data center move and network overhaul to better supply us with the network capability and bandwidth necessary to handle these situations better. unfortunately do to the scale of both projects it is taking some time to complete.

I can't say it says a lot, but it certainly keeps the member's mouth shut for the moment. Let's see for how long.

Reference: Forum,
Tags: blogdrive, customer service

Why Blogdrive was down again?

As everyone can tell, the downtime for our favourite blog host has just occured. Cause of downtime is of course unknown, it's top secret (Blogdrive will have to kill you(in secret) if you figure it out the secret, it's bad for publicity)

There has been a HUGE, I mean it HUGE voice of anger in the Blogdrive forum. And not a single response from Blogdrive themselves.

The frequency of downtime is occuring more and more frequent compared to a few years back. Here are some of the most popular reasons given by Blogdrive whenever there's a down time:

1) Hurricane, this is an annual event and it doesn't just occur once a year but several. Whenever lighting strike, when the storms are strong, one of the internet router will *boom* and so there goes the 30,000 other Blogdrive blogs. This is far worst than a woman's PMS.

2) Upgrading server (or software), I'm not sure what its updating really. Whenever it say upgrading server, I hardly ever see any new features that comes with it either. Well, maybe sometimes (like the comment spam protection) although the down time could be of entirely different reason.

3) DoS attacks. Oooh... I absolutely hate it when these hackers have nothing better to do and choose to launch an attack on Blogdrive. Come on, why would anybody want to harm Blogdrive, there's 30 thousand innocent souls at stake. Say no to War on Iraq!

4) Spammer steals bandwidth. Yeah, these dirty bastard who are trying to make a quick buck on pharmaceutical products and pornography "steal" bandwidth. How? Erm... I don't know... I just know that it caused down time here on Blogdrive. (oh, really?)

5) Seige's Fault. It's all my fault. I didn't meant it. I didn't want anybody to get hurt but because the toilet isn't working I had to find an alternative target to satisfy my "nature calls". All this downtime is caused by waiting for the server drying up and for the toilet pump to be fixed. Disaster eh?

(In case you haven't realise, number five is totally made up and I've never actually seen the server before. Accept for a sexy picture of it here.)

Oh, and don't ask me why on earth update.blogdrive.com wasn't updated with any news about the downtime. All I know is that if you found out why Blogdrive was down, you'd better watch out because you might be murdered in a tragic death where all your body parts are broken into pieces and thrown into the river with no trace at all.

What was I on again? Right, WHY wasn't update.blogdrive.com UPDATED?

Tags: blogdrive, server, forum, downtime,

BlogDrive Disaster

It appears some members have been experiencing trouble viewing blogs on BlogDrive for the past few days. Somehow the problem has gone from bad to worst today as most blogs can't be accessed at all, not even after refreshing the page.

According to most members, this affects only blogs and not the administration section. This is a relief as we can still create an entry without much trouble.

There has been no responce from BD regarding the issue, the person in charge could be working hard fixing the problem as of this moment or he is asleep and will get to it soon. (It just means human needs sleep)

Since there's not been an explanation, we can only make assumptions of what might be causing this uneasiness:

Server overloaded would be the most likely explanation. It's could be fixed pretty soon.

BlogDrive could be upgrading server, hence we get a temporary outage. In the past, there has always been a notice about server upgrade but currently we get nothing after . There was even a homepoll surveying what members message members prefers but the BD admin must have decided to obmit it. To be honest, I would rather have the server upgrade message than nothing.

Exceeded monthly bandwidth. Sounds stupid but it is one of the possibilities.

Could be a DoS attack. DoS attack is an attack on a computer system or network that causes a loss of service to users, typically the loss of network connectivity and services by consuming the bandwidth of the victim network or overloading the computational resources of the victim system. Let's all hope this is not the case.

It could be something else, if you have any suggestion you can post a comment. Let's hope it's just temporary.

Reference: DoS attack, BlogDrive forum, BlogDrive User's Review,
Technorati Tags: BlogDrive, bandwidth, denial of service, Internet,

*Update: there's word on the main tagboard from the admin, about some new software updation. Let's keep our finger's crossed as this disaster comes to past.
Helpee » I'm going out to the data center again. Things will be bichen soon. Been updating some new software. - There you have it.