Tag: technical issues

Reason for last week’s issues: HACKER ATTACK! :(

April 16, 2012 /

Those of you who are using your Spin Rewriter subscription and our other services to the fullest, have undoubtedly noticed that we were experiencing some issues last week.

Our servers usually became much less responsive at 30 minutes within every hour (8:30 AM, 9:30 AM, etc.) and these periods of low responsiveness lasted for 3 to 9 minutes most of the time. There were also some sporadic time periods of connection issues, these usually happened towards the end of the hour (5:46 PM, 9:48 PM, etc.). We launched a thorough investigation as soon as our monitoring systems started reporting these issues, and we’ve been working practically non-stop for 50+ hours in order to resolve these issues.

I’m sad to say that the primary reason for these issues was an outside attack. We’re still tracking the attacker and will have more information shortly. This attack only caused additional load on our servers, so there’s nothing to worry about – we’re just sorry that you had to deal with these issues at all.

Here’s to doing honest business, and never having to deal with things like this again! 🙂

Spin Rewriter is more robust now

April 13, 2012 /

As part of our on-going efforts to make Spin Rewriter is robust as possible, we have introduced a couple of changes to the underlying algorithms and to the user interface. Our server load should be more consistent with less blocking when a random spike in traffic occurs, and users will give much more detailed reports about various issues that arise every now and then, along with suggestions about  overcoming these issues.

Oh, and don’t get us wrong – Spin Rewriter is still working perfectly fine 99% of the time. 😉 We’re just committed to delivering the best possible product! 😀

Spin Rewriter is FAST (once again), hooray!

November 28, 2011 /

You might have noticed that Spin Rewriter was a bit slow at times during these last couple of days … there’s a number of reasons for that, but – in the end – we reached our goal and made it faster than ever! 😀

The response of the Internet Marketing community has exceeded our wildest expectations, and Spin Rewriter is growing at a rate of hundreds of new users per week, which means we’re constantly upgrading our server-grid specs, tweaking settings and optimizing algorithms to make sure it works well for everyone. We finished a big part of this project about 40 hours ago, and the results that we’re seeing are amazing:

  • average server load dropped over 70%
  • 85% of all requests are now handled immediately, i.e. within 0.5 seconds (!)
  • 15% of all requests are waiting on average less than 1.5 seconds before being fully processed by our server
  • this makes the Spin Rewriter web app one of the fastest web applications available today!

We hope you love the new “snappy” Spin Rewriter, and we’ll keep on working hard to make sure you’re satisfied with us in the future as well! 😀

Database issues

November 9, 2011 /

We’d like to publicly apologize for the on-and-off availability of the Spin Rewriter software earlier today. We believe we have successfully resolved all issues.

We have been working crazy hard to fix the database issues and we’re still investigating the matters to make sure this sort of thing never happens again. Something like this has never happened before ever since we launched Spin Rewriter, and we’re doing our very best to make sure this never happens again.

What went wrong? The response of the Internet Marketing community has exceeded our wildest expectations, and Spin Rewriter is growing at a rate of hundreds of new users per week which means we’re expanding our computing resources to make sure it works well for everyone. In the process our primary database got overwhelmed and crashed. We believe that everything should be perfectly fine from now on.

We’re constantly working really hard to further improve our product, and we’re very sorry about this inconvenience. We’ll do our best to make sure this doesn’t happen again, ever.

If you run into us, we owe you a beer.