No. More. Downtime. Damn it.

Things have been a little shakier with our new online performance scanning service the last 2 days then we would have liked. And while we have an amazing team none come from an operations background. This makes managing and maintaining an always-on, always-in-use system a painful learning experience. Case in point: yesterday was Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday. Like the smart, security-minded folks that we are (who want to avoid the painful Exploit Wednesday), we have Windows automatic updates turned on for our scanning server. Oh wait, doesn’t automatic update mean a system reboot? Oh crap, when it reboots at 3:00am, will our scanning software come back up? Hmmm. Looks like no. Hence some unplanned downtime.

We apologize for the availability issues over the last few days, first with our hosting provider and then with our systems. In some ways having availability issues is a good thing: it means enough people know about you and are using you that they notice when you aren’t there. Of course, the much more painful downside is that you aren’t available and the first impression someone might have of you is a broken tool managed by people who doesn’t know what they are doing.

These are silly, stupid, amateur mistakes. We will do better. Specifically we are working to improve the quality of the connection between the website which accept scan requests and displays reports and the scanning server. We plan to introduce better error handling, as well as status updates to tell you what’s happening while your report is being generated. We plan to introduce an email fallback system, where if something does go wrong we notify you are allow you to enter an email address to email when the problem has been resolved and your report is ready.

Thank you to the thousand plus people who have used Zoompf’s service over the last 4 days. We hope you continue to do so. We are committed to making free, high quality tools to help developers make faster websites. Any feedback, questions, comments, or hate mail should be sent to info@zoompf.com or on twitter @zoompf.