Update January 4, 2011: It appears as though the feedbooks site is now up and running as it should.
Update January 3, 2011: The current feedbook.com backup that has been installed is one made very late yesterday, prior to edits that I made online at the site. That leaves me wondering if feedbooks was using a RAID array, thinking that backups weren’t necessary because of the redundancy of RAID. If that’s the case, they must have received a huge shock.
There has been a total lack of communications from feedbooks.com regarding this debacle. One tweet saying they were having datacenter power outages, followed by a second a day later telling us that everything was back to normal when in fact it wasn’t, is not good business practice. In fact, nothing has been back to normal for two days since that last tweet, as evidenced by the partial backup installation now running, and the partial backups installed multiple times yesterday.
If you’ve done any online editing of your work over there in the last three days, you’d better download a copy to determine if it’s a current version. I’m thinking it won’t be. I shut down my two publications yesterday. I’ll be uploading fresh copies to replace the incorrect versions today. We’ll see how it goes from there.
It’s now 1500, January 3 in Paris and feedbooks is unavailable yet again. I wonder which backup they’re restoring this time.
It’s 0100 January 4 Paris time. Feedbooks is back up, but experiencing some outages so far, as it has done all day today. Still nothing on twitter, the book of faces or the blog about a major outage. I find that inconceivable, given Feedbooks huge audience. Absolutely ridiculous, and thumbing one’s nose at one’s lifeblood – customers. Free or not.
Second update January 2: They must have some serious problems going on beyond power failures. A completed book I had uploaded an hour ago has been replaced in it’s entirety by a copy from early this morning, and is now unpublished. I’d say there’s more going on than servers with power failures if they’re restoring old backups this late in the game.
Yes, serious problems. Another work I had published has also been restored as a backup, and is minus the edits I made to it today. I can leave it up as is, but I’m wondering how many others there are in the same predicament but don’t know it because of the lack of communications from feedbooks.com.
When they’re resorting to restoring outdated backups there’s something very wrong going on.
If you’ve got work published there, I hope you all have current backups on your own computers.
The most recent tweet, now some hours old, says everything is fixed. That is so not true.
Yet another backup has been restored, and it too is out of date. Serious problems, folks.
I took my publications offline because of the unreliability of this outfit.
smashwords.com is starting to look pretty good.
Update January 2, 2011: It appears to be up (for now), but it’s virtually unusable for doing anything should you want to attempt any editing. I tried doing some last night, but it looks as though a backup has been installed, since all of the edits were gone this morning. Now I can’t do anything. At this time I wouldn’t recommend trying to edit, because the site keeps going down.
At best, editing remains spotty and unreliable, although it could be because of increased demand since the outage.
* * *
All we get is a single tweet yesterday(December 31) morning saying feedbooks had power problems with their servers? Nothing on their blog. Nada. Rien.
Nothing on their book of faces page since December 28, when someone remarks that the online editor isn’t working and that feedbooks will fix it next week.
Next week?
WTF is with this place?
Is it a one-man operation running out of a basement in Paris or what?
When might it be back up? Tomorrow? Next week? Next year?
So much for communication in this age of enlightenment.