Moonfruit Lounge

Comments

1. On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, 11:38 by John

Thanks for the update Walt. Any ideas how much longer this is going to take to fix? Are we talking hours, days or yet another week?

Thanks,
John

2. On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, 12:24 by Walt

Hi John,

Well part of the problem may have been our load balancer for the web servers. We have now replaced this and it appears to be holding. But we will continue to monitor this closely to see if this is the magic bullet we were looking for.

Walt

3. On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, 12:48 by John

Let's hope so, it definitely seems to have done the trick for the time being. My site is loading flawlessly at the moment (touch wood lol).

Cheers,
John

4. On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, 14:22 by Forum6

Hi walt the chat widget doesnt seem to connect to the server is this a bug??

5. On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, 15:27 by Toronto Printing

Amen, I know I have been running around here and on the forum pointing out the obvious.. it is just frustrating obviously for everyone... I manage a number of sites and I just haven't experienced this before.
I think this update was the right thing to do. we need to be up to speed (lol) on whats happening and when a possible fix is coming in situation like this.

My sites are running fine this morning and look forward to any updates especially on increased speed possibilities.

Thank You,

Jeff

6. On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, 16:50 by Walt

The dip in speed we had around 14:00 BST was a by-product of the new load balancer we installed which used some default settings. We ramped these up to avoid any repeat of the early slowing and all the graphs look back on track with an upward (amount of data being served to customer computers) trend.

Please bear in mind we are using a new set-up so some tweaking may still be in order but it looks like each little step we take is building a more stable network supply. But please do keep us posted with any changes. We can test all we like but how customer sites respond in real-time is the best gauge for us.

We are aware of problems with Chat. We will fix that within the next few hours. It has it's own connections to the servers and with our new configuration needs to be modified itself. Our main concern was getting sites up and running which we seem to have managed so we'll sort out Chat next.

7. On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, 17:22 by Ange C

Thanks for the update. Having been with Moonfruit for over 3 years, to be honest this is the first time I have experienced slow loading to this extent, but I quickly realised it was not just my own website but all moonfruit sites too. Hopefully it will be resolved quickly. Mine is running at normal speed today!

Thanks

Ange

8. On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, 18:29 by John

Walt, can I ask why all of a sudden all this happened? I mean what does it take for Moonfruit to run smoothly for 5 years and then all of a sudden this happens?

9. On Wed, 25 Jul 2007, 09:38 by Walt

Hi John,

Well, we have a bit of hardware that manages our web servers (a load balancer) that has been extremely reliable for many many years. When the problems surfaced a few weeks ago, they were not only intermittent, but we could see no triggers for these outages and our tests could not locate any problems. Our assumption was the Network Supplier who did tests but who also could find no faults. After several frustrating attempts to isolate the problem we swapped out that load balancer, changed the configuration and everything seems to have stabilised. We still aren't sure what initiated the failure, whether it was an intermittent hardware failure or something external triggered it.

The network now appears both stable and running at full speed but we will keep monitoring the network. Thanks for the interest and hopefully we can now put this issue to bed!

Walt

10. On Sat, 28 Jul 2007, 08:06 by brunophotography

I cannot access the main moonfruit.com site. Is the site down? Or am I the only one experiencing this??? I can't edit my website, and I can't even see it.

11. On Sat, 28 Jul 2007, 09:05 by Titus

Yes, I noticed that as well. I could not access my website for at least 5 hours. Moonfruits main site was down with all the other sites made on it. Also the network itself was a bit slow loading after the problem of our sites not appering. What happened?

It is getting frustrating for users and I am sure it is for you to ....

Also can you tell us when you will be releasing the next monthly updates?

You guys are doing great and i do understand how hard you are working on a fix.

Keep up the work and do please fix it quick ...

12. On Sat, 28 Jul 2007, 09:13 by criptor9

Hi,

When i type on my website it misses out loads of letters and when i type on say my email, then its alright!

I've changed the batteries but the same thing still happens!

All of my moonfruit websites.

13. On Sun, 29 Jul 2007, 06:26 by Allex

Hi Walt

Whe I received a email from my site, it comes with the sitemaker brand on the mailing sender. Is this going to be chenged? Also the protected pages (Logging box) comes with the site maker brand as well. Are you guys planing in removing the brand from this sites elements? It just because does not look good

Many Thanks

14. On Sun, 29 Jul 2007, 17:02 by 25 Hour Printing Service

I agree with the branding idea, if we are paying for the hosting etc... then lets go with our own site name also with the option of multiple email forwarding... more than one address ?

Thanks

Jeff

15. On Mon, 30 Jul 2007, 09:32 by Jeff

Whats Happening Now Moonfruit?
After the problems of the sites Crashing Out again Last Week 24th July we was assured that all was stable now...

But again on Friday Night 27th July untill 8.10am on saturday Morning the whole Network was off yet again...

Furthermore the Chat Area on Moonfruits Sites went off on saturday Night and still haven't come back on...

Thats one of the main attractions to my community site...

This really is killing peoples hard work in designing their sites and wasting Money that has been spent on advertisng them, Let alone the cost of the sitemaker packages...

The service is becoming very unreliable.

I think Moonfruit should pay someone to Monitor and Fix any overnight problems until things settle down... People's online businesses are suffering because of these problems... and who is going to re-imburse em? Nobody is the answer.

Please do realise that we are losing visitors/customers so show some customer care from your end please.

Thanks, jeff
www.liveforlondon.com

16. On Mon, 30 Jul 2007, 13:02 by Walt

Our load balancer fell over at 4am Saturday and was restarted by 8:15am. We are still investigating why this happened as there were no indications why it should fail. That said we have implemented an additional service to prevent this happening again.

The work we are doing on the web servers and load balancer are independent of any releases we do...as they are back end and critical to the operation of all sites. Our next scheduled release (new features) will be in about 4 weeks time. Joe will highlight those in a post in a few weeks time.

Criptor9 - I doubt this is related to the recent Access/Speed issues but could you drop us query (Submit from the Support pages) and indicate what Operating System you are using - e.g. is it Vista and if so what version, and any other details you might consider relevant? Thanks

Allex (and Jeff) , I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The only time you see branding is usually on the free or trial site. When emails are sent they usually display the Site Name in the 'From' segment of your Inbox. The trial site branding goes once you pay for the site. But please feel free to submit us a query from the support pages and give us a few more details and we will have a look for you.

Jeff (no2), we had down time from 4am to 8:15am Saturday. Chat has been fixed (as discussed in email). Reliability is something the whole team at SiteMaker take very seriously. The 4 hours downtime Saturday morning was corrected and steps have been implemented to prevent that specific failure happening again.

All your comments are being heard and we are doing all we can to reduce any further issues. It is in our interests to provide as stable a service as possible...it means we can concentrate on providing new features and widgets rather than fault finding/fixing. Besides more features and less bugs means happier customers - which makes us happy! But thanks for your comments guys.

17. On Mon, 30 Jul 2007, 21:15 by damian

No one can get on my website is this a hosting problem or what? when you put the address in all you get is a blank page with a timmer on it, most frustrating!! can anyone shed any light on this matter?

18. On Tue, 31 Jul 2007, 11:17 by Walt

Hi Damian, can you give us some more details on yourself or your site so we can check. Everything is currently and was as of 21:00 last night running smoothly according to our monitoring software.

19. On Tue, 31 Jul 2007, 12:29 by John

Although I never experienced any issues myself, looking at my site stats for yesterday it does look like something peculiar was going on. Yesterday, my adsense page impressions were up 50% on an already high average for the month, while according to Google Analytics visits were down about 60% to an unusually low number. This to me suggests people were having trouble getting the site to load and were hitting refresh a lot (thus the high adsense impressions.)

20. On Tue, 31 Jul 2007, 20:07 by John

Ignore my last comment, I just checked my analytics account again and it has updated my stats for yesterday. Visits were in fact up 50% which corresponds with my adsense stats so I guess it was just a busy day for my site.

However, as i'm writing this (8:10pm Tues night) Moonfruit is down completely and I'm starting to get really worried about the whole reliability issue. :o(

21. On Tue, 31 Jul 2007, 20:14 by Suzette

Hi everyone,

I'm getting really worried too as we can't even get on the homesite of moonfruit.
Glad this is still working.

Hopefully it's fixed soon..fingers crossed.

Suzette

22. On Tue, 31 Jul 2007, 20:25 by Pacca

Hi Walt,
i'm new to moonfruit. I just created my website a few weeks ago.
I have red about the problems above.

Just for you to be aware of it, I wanted to let you know that I cannot connect to either my website or the main Moonfruit page.

I opted for the free version as I am not using the site for business as yet, so I won't be complaining about loss of potential visitors and revenew -altough I agree with the point made by Jeff above- but I thought it best to inform you of the situation.

Ta.

Pacca

23. On Tue, 31 Jul 2007, 20:28 by Pacca

OK, disregard the above. Now I can access my website.

Thanks

Pacca
(PictureThat)

24. On Wed, 1 Aug 2007, 10:18 by Walt

Hi guys,

And thanks for the feedback. We did have a very brief outage last night (we monitor these issues very closely) but we have installed a 'script' that corrects any network 'drop-outs' very rapidly once discovered. While we are still working on finding the no-errors solution at least this ensures greater stability and provides you guys with a more consistent network while we dig around under the hood a bit more.

25. On Fri, 5 Oct 2007, 19:56 by sue

i have just got a new PC with vista and found that it is impossible to update my moonfruit site as it doesn't register what is being typed correctly. neither can i type into the guest book or contact box. any suggestions what the problem might be? the site works ok from other machines.