We feel we owe you an explanation and apology for the downtime of GoSquared yesterday (11th November.)
Note: Some techy stuff right here so if you’re not too bothered about the ins and outs of domain name servers you may not care too much for this article.
We have been running GoSquared (including LiveStats) on Amazon EC2 for a few months now to cope with the dramatically increased load we’ve been experiencing, and to efficiently scale our other web apps that will be released in the future.
However, we also kept our old servers running with (mt) Media Temple as a backup while we learned the ropes of EC2. Yesterday we decided to end our (mt) hosting because a) we hardly used the servers for the last month, b) we have a much greater understanding of EC2 now than we did a few months ago, and c) keeping the hosting running when we weren’t using it didn’t make much financial sense.
When we finally ended the hosting with (mt), our DNS records and domain zone files – the files that tell “gosquared.com” and several other domains to point to our EC2 servers – were also lost. This meant everyone going to http://www.gosquared.com/ was met with a rather horrendous error page.
After much time spent frantically phoning around and emailing everyone that could help, (mt) restored the zone files while we switched things over to EasyDNS.
On a side note, anyone monitoring their traffic in real-time with LiveStats, please ensure you embed the GSTC right before the </body> tag in your Site’s HTML. This way, if there are ever any problems on our end they won’t affect the loading of content on your Site. Thankfully, the DNS issues suffered yesterday did not cause adverse effects on Sites using LiveStats.
We are pleased to say GoSquared is well and truly back online. We hope there won’t be any hiccups during the domain transfer phase – it usually takes several hours, if not days to ensure the DNS changes propagate throughout the world.
