inicio mail me! sindicaci;ón

In Case of Etsy Emergency: Off-site Blog for Updates

May 5, 2008 at 6:13 pm · Filed under Down Time, Etsy Communications, Site Maintenance · By JB

As reported in this Storque article, Etsy will now be using their old blog for emergency updates, if the main Etsy site goes down. The Storque is hosted on the same servers at the ETsy site so when the site is down, so is the Storque. The old Etsy blog is hosted on a different server, so it will still be up and can be used for emergency updates.

Etsy says:

Since we’ll only use this blog in the event that Etsy itself is totally unreachable for a significant amount of time (which means, I hope we never use it), you might want to make a note of the url now and bookmark the link. Typing the address in directly will be the only way to get there.

We have decided to use the off-site blog in lieu of emailing everyone for several reasons: it takes over 24 hours to send all Etsians an email; when our servers are down or unreachable we most likely can’t send any emails; and we’d be emailing thousands of people who don’t want to get an email.

UPDATE May 22, 2008
The site for updates in an Etsy emergency has been changed to fix.etsy.com.
Bookmark this siite and look there for updates when Etsy.com and the Storque blog are down.

6 Responses to “In Case of Etsy Emergency: Off-site Blog for Updates”

  1. 1
    andymathis Says:
    May 5th, 2008 at 9:14 pm

    that’s needed at the moment- it’s about 9:15 and can’t connect to the site.

    or something is wrong with my computer, but it seems to be working fine on other sites.

  2. 2
    lowwattage Says:
    May 5th, 2008 at 10:11 pm

    Does this mean Etsy will also put view counters on another server so they don’t go down again as has recently been reported?

    Downtimes seem to be increasing, but since activity is also down with views and sales, I only go to the site when I have to. Which means I am not buying either.

  3. 3
    JB Says:
    May 6th, 2008 at 7:16 pm

    the view counters go down because Etsy views are stored in RAM (temporary cache memory) and not written to the hard drive. They don’t need to be stored on another server, they just need to be stored in the permanent memory. Simple downtime does not equal data loss, it doesn’t have to. Etsy only loses data with every reboot because it wasn’t saved periodically.

  4. 4
    JB Says:
    May 22nd, 2008 at 3:38 pm

    UPDATE May 22, 2008
    The site for updates in an Etsy emergency has been changed to fix.etsy.com.
    Bookmark this siite and look there for updates when Etsy.com and the Storque blog are down.

  5. 5
    ilikeyoursleeves Says:
    June 28th, 2008 at 11:31 pm

    I’m in Australia and haven’t had this happen to me before - Etsy seems to be down. The browser has problems loading the page even when I click an external link found in google. Is there some site maintenance going on?

  6. 6
    JB Says:
    June 29th, 2008 at 12:04 am

    No it is up for me right now. I just checked th bugs forum and it appears there is some known issue with people on a few internet providers not being able to access Etsy.

    the first post says:

    RevolvingDork says:
    Hi all,

    We’ve gotten some scattered reports of users being unable to access Etsy, generally receiving “cannot connect” errors from their browsers.

    We’ve run all of our diagnostic tools, and everything appears to be running properly within our network. Our global monitoring tools also have not shown any activity out of the ordinary.

    We have been in touch with various ISPs, and we believe we have found the root of the issue. With their cooperation, the issue should be resolved quickly.

    We’ll share more information with you as we receive it. In the meantime, if you or anyone you’re in contact with is having Etsy connectivity problems, please post their location here and the nature of their problems.

    Thank you!
    Posted at 5:24 pm, June 28 2008 EST -

    there is another post by another admin at the end of the thread

    Rokali says:
    Hi everyone,

    As people here have seen, this is a DNS issue. Anytime any changes to DNS are made, those changes have to propagate to servers around the world. This can take a bit of time.

    We’re in the process of migrating from one data center to another (larger) data center. As part of this migration, we moved our DNS servers. This means they got a new IP address. (There are always at least two DNS servers, for redundancy, so it’s multiple IP addresses, and we set Primary, Secondary, Tertiary etc. status for each of them).

    It’s these new IP addresses that needs to propagate. Being well aware of this, we kept our old DNS servers up & running, so as the new IP addresses propagated, even if people still hit the old IP addresses, it would work.

    This did work, but we recently discovered an edge case, which causes problems. This edge case is a good example of how intertwined the Web is.

    In order for Etsy not to be loading for you, the following three ingredients need to be in the recipe of how you connect to the site:

    1. Your internet service provider (ISP) has been slow to update its own DNS servers (this happens daily for almost all ISPs), and hasn’t recognized the new IP addresses of our DNS servers

    2. You’re hitting the secondary DNS server at our old data center

    3. You’re getting a specific type of error message from this DNS server, due to how your request has been routed (what “hops” it’s taking)

    *Then* you have problems accessing Etsy.

    We have made special changes to how the secondary DNS server handles these requests, and we expect this to resolve the issue. It might still take a bit of time, because the fix needs to propagate out to the rest of the world.

    In an ideal world, our changes would propagate out to all the DNS servers in the amount of time they’re supposed to (1-2 days). Alas, some ISPs take their time, and for that ~1% it can take more like 5 days.

    As some people here have noted, you can manually change what DNS servers you use on your computer, but in general this isn’t something we’d recommend. It can slow down accessing other sites on the Web.

    Of course please keep letting us know here if any of the issues persist.

    Footnote: What is an IP address? It’s a numerical locator, that gets mapped to a domain name. For example, http://www.etsy.com is also 72.37.157.20 — you can copy that string into your Web browser and use it to visit this site. (Your browser might try and force you to use the domain name though.)

    Back when the Web first started, there weren’t domain names, there were only IP addresses. But these were really hard to remember, hence the need for domain names.

    A DNS server is what connects the domain name (www.etsy.com) to the IP address (72.37.157.20), approximately speaking. There are master lists on DNS servers around the world, and anytime a domain name points to a different IP, these servers need to update what domain points to what IP address.

    Disclaimer: This explanation is oversimplified, and I’m not a system administrator. This is what I’ve learned from reading up on the issue, and getting some input from Etsy’s own sys admins, who have been amazingly busy keep the site up & fast. They’re doing a great job.

    If you *really* want to learn more, there’s always Wikipedia:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address
    Posted at 11:19 pm, June 28 2008 EST -

    ———————————————-
    I will make a new article for this since it’s probably affecting lots of people

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.