Today during our launch of Keebtalk, the website was quite slow. Many users experienced 502 Bad Gateway requests and overall it wasn’t a great experience. We had contacted our hosting provider - www.discoursehosting.com - prior to the launch to request that they give us extra server bandwidth and we estimated traffic for them based on the amount of outreach we had planned. They had assured us everything would be fine today - and they failed in that capacity.
They are based in Europe, so they didn’t wake up until just a few minutes ago and they drafted us this email.
Hello Andrew Lekashman,
Richard replied to your support request, #527768 with the following response:
First things first - I have scaled up your site and it’s much better now. We’ll be monitoring it closely from here.
Then, our deep apologies. That’s a really bad experience. We f****d up here - three times.
What went wrong:
1) there was less overcapacity than we anticipated on the server we put your forum on;
2) apart from that, we still underestimated your peak traffic;
3) our monitoring and alerting apparently wasn’t working correctly on your account so we missed the fact that the server was overwhelmed and we missed your complaint for over three hours.
We’re going to sit on top of your forum and we’re going to make sure it won’t be missing a single beat today. Next up, we’re going to make sure that monitoring and alerting will be working correctly, we’re making this top priority so it will be fixed today.
Because we clearly missed our service levels here, this months hosting fee will be on us.
Again, our apologies.
In our mind - this is an appropriate and excellent response to the situation. It is clear, open, and honest while also showing a sincere desire to improve. We want you all to know the steps that we are taking to make sure that Keebtalk is accessible and assure people that we have an actual plan to provide better service going forward.
We plan on working closely with our hosting provider to make sure that we scale properly and don’t have service interruptions like today. Thanks for giving us a chance at this and please let us know if the forum isn’t working the way you feel it is supposed to!
