ServerBeach Steps in to Bolster Server Capacity

Last night I posted here and to my personal blog about Spanning Sync's popularity problem, and ended with an open invitation for any interested vendors to step in and help:

So tomorrow morning I'll be looking to beef up our infrastructure in a big way. I don't have time to comparison shop, so I'll be provisioning more hardware from our current provider, ServerBeach. But if another vendor wanted to be the hero in this story, there's a great opportunity.

As it turns out, one vendor did step in as the hero in this story. This afternoon I got a call from ServerBeach VP Robert Miggins, who said he had read about our need for a lot more processing power and wanted to work with us to help.

The result of our conversation is that we'll be bringing some serious hardware online with more than enough capacity to reopen the public beta and take us through our launch.

Much credit is due to ServerBeach—and to Robert himself—not only for listening, but also for being willing to accommodate the unusual flexibility needs of a modern web startup.

Our new hardware should be online and fully operational by tomorrow. When it is, I'll post a note here.

Update: We want to make sure we don't run into the same problem again, so we're carefully planning how to reopen the public beta while at the same time bringing our new servers online. We may also work a new release of the client into the mix, so this will take a few days longer than we first expected. Look for v1.0b12 to be released tomorrow (Friday) and the public beta to reopen this weekend.

Comments

[Randall]

So sad that it's not out yet! Help appease our calendars! They want to be sync'd! (and no, that doesn't mean that they need to have Justin Timberlake and crew added to them....)

[尼古拉]

I concur completely Jason, this is very aggravating!

Jason posted this on January 31, 2007 at 05:28 PM:
Great tool, unfortunately I can not remove the menu-bar notification icon, using the "Standard" command-drag way. It can not be even turned off, because you need to Sync first, to have the "Off" option available. I'd also suggest a submit button" right after the email-password input forms, currently it is a bit confusing.

[Charlie Wood]

Deacon, Jason-

This is fixed in b12, which will be available later this afternoon. In the mean time, you can run the Spanning Sync Uninstaller that came with the download. If you no longer have it, you can download it again from http://spanningsync.com/beta/Spanning+Sync+Beta.zip and run the Uninstaller.

Regards,
Charlie

[Randall]

Ya prolly dislike me already from all the comments...but any word on what's happening? I'm assuming you guys are a mid-west company considering your servers (or blog) is set to a GMT time zone, so it's past the afternoon time now... Any updates?

[Ronsu]

Charlie, can I make you an off topic question? Which soft used to made the screencast? The quality of image an sound is very good. I'm searching soft to do this with this good result.

Thanks and I'm impacient for the reopenning!

[Brian]

I'd like to suggest a forum. I don't think this comments section is going to be efficient enough, especially as more users get up and running.

Thanks for all you're work.

[Charlie Wood]

Ronsu,

We use SnapzPro to make screencasts. Even though it's not Universal Binary it does run on Intel Macs. At $69, it's well worth it. http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

Brian,

In fact, there is a forum! There's a link at the top-right corner of this page, or you can use this one:
http://groups.google.com/group/spanningsync

Regards,
Charlie

[David C.]

Oh, the wait is killing me! I will be very sad if it's not up by the time I go to work and then come home tonight and find out the beta was opened and closed again!

[Charlie Wood]

David,

We're putting in place roughly 10x the server capacity we had when we originally opened the public beta, so once we reopen it we shouldn't need to close it again. And in the unlikely event that we do, we now have the process for adding more capacity down to a science. :-)

Regards,
Charlie

[Mike Shear]

Hey Charlie,
I was one of the people who got in during the brief public opening. But now that i've upgraded to the new version 12, its stopped working. Is it me? or have you guys turned off syncing for a while?
Mike

[Charlie Wood]

Mike,

No, it's up. Could you please click create a report ("Reset...", "Create reoprt") and mail it to beta@spanningsync.com with a detailed description of the behavior you're seeing? We'll get it sorted out.

Thanks,
Charlie

[Mike Shear]

Will do. I got it working now. So maybe it was just temporary glitch.

[ptc]

That "new version available" message was such a tease. I thought you were up and running! And thanks for providing me with one more reason to but the iPhone when it comes out (like I needed another reason.)

Congratulations on your program, and thank you. Also, I think it's beyond cool that you had too much traffic for your set up in the first few minutes. Way to go.

All fired up and waiting...

[Charlie Wood]

PTC,

Thanks! The encouraging words are really nice to hear, especially when we're going on something like 20 hours sleep in 5 days.

Regards,
Charlie

[Ken]

Is v1.0b12 out? Where can I download it please?

Very exciting about this program!

Thanks.

[Charlie Wood]

Ken,

You can grab it from:

http://spanningsync.com/beta/Spanning+Sync+Beta.zip

Regards,
Charlie

[Jonathan]

Keep up the great work Charlie--can't wait to try this out in a few days!

[Mike]

Sunday a.m. 8:44a.m. - Any update as to when the servers will be back up? I have been DYING to get this running on all of my macs.

Thanks,

Mike

[Brennan]

It's up!

[Roman]

Fantastic service! I've been waiting for months. Thanks!

[Simon Iannelli]

Nice that it is up finally.

Two questions: Is goolgle automatically sending out invitations to people on my guestlist (synced through ical)? If so, how to turn this off?

Some times I have people on my guestlist who don't have an e-mail adress. When Spanning sync is syncing back, ever person without e-mailadress is changed from "Simon Iannelli" to "Simon-Iannelli@no-emailspanningsync" (or somethin similar, can't remember).

Any chance to fix that? Makes it really unusable for me with this bug.

Regards
Simon

[gonx]

No news?

[Charlie Wood]

Simon,

Google shouldn't be sending out invitations, but we've had one report from a user where this was happening. We haven't been able to reproduce this, so if you see this behavior please submit a reporting by cilcking "Reset...", then "Create report", and emailing the resulting file along with a detailed description of the behavior to beta@spanningsync.com.

iCal allows attendees without email addresses, but Google Calendar doesn't. To address this, we assign an email address of "UserName@noemail-spanningsync.com" to those users, which is not as elegant a solution as we would like. If you have an idea for how we could better address this issue please let us know.

Thanks for helping us test the service.

Regards,
Charlie

[Ben]

I thought Spanning Sync was supposed to work with Google for Domains? Why then can I login using my googlemail.com address but not my own domain?

[Simon Iannelli]

Charlie thanks a lot for the very quick answer.

What about allowing the user to set in the preferences which fields to sync? (or just for the attendees-field). For me this would be a good way, since I could live without the guestlist on gcal.

So far I don't know if invitations have been sent. I just asked because gcal said "waiting for response"

I've seen that many german strings are not translated yet I'm offering to do that.