Software Channels

Folks, today the platform was slow, produced some errors and sales took some extra time - during the afternoon up to 1 hour to register.

That happened during our update progress, which we planned but messed up while we started the database changes. I am sorry for that! Today was NOT a good day in revenue and we had some extra support load, too!

I think the worst is over now and we have the database back under control. Some of you already saw the new products, which can not be purchased yet. That messed up the catalog order, too.

After a few hours under extreme pressure, we have solved the biggest issues and the platform works now like it should be. If you suffered from these outages during the day, I sincerely apologize! We try to improve tradebit fundamentally at the moment and it is a complicated process…

Bare with us, while we grow - quality is important to us!

In the last 12 months, the amount of traffic on tradebit.(com/de/es) almost doubled. The amount of storage we currently use is well above 24 Terabytes. With around 150,000 unique visitors and combined with all the spiders (like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and all the others), the affiliate calls, Javascript shops and free MP3 previews we are currently pumping around 50-100 requests per second from our webfrontends out to the world.

The bandwidth usage is quite ok, because we deliver so many text and small files that we are not in trouble here, yet we pump around 60-90 Megabits per second in Houston and few Mbit/s on our regional outlets.

We have constantly at least 2 FTP users uploading, sometimes 20, record currently is at 41 concurrent FTP uploaders.

We have an average load of 35% spread on the cluster nodes and host more than 40 Linux servers around the world. More than half of that with ThePlanet in Houston.

Tradebit had 2 major and 3 minor outages in 5 years. We have been hacked 2 times, but we overcame that without data loss.

Next week will be a big event for us, because we will double the amount of products on Tradebit. Until then, I will stop blogging and focus on the updates unless something important should be posted.

Folks, we had a little server problem on one of the frontends just about 10 minutes ago. Let me give you a short update this way:

One of the frontend webservers failed and dispite our efforts to redirect the traffic automatically the redirection partly failed and we had some problems delivering pages on one of the cluster nodes. That could effect a few sales, when notifications from Paypal ended up without response on exactly this machine.

We are investigating right now, what happened. The traffic is now redirected to our other servers while we dig through the error logs. The platform is back at 100% delivery and the outage was only partly effecting the site for less than 30 minutes!

Sorry for that, we do our best to improve!

Update: everything back to normal, server back in operations!

We are currently preparing around 3 Mio. new products for our catalog on tradebit.com/.de - this ridiculous amount of additional files will put up some extra load on the system and we have to be careful with that. Excuse us, if we are a bit slow in responding to your emails at the moment, there is a lot of work involved with the new setup and all the files to handle!

Also: Martin will fly over to the Paypal developer conference (www.x.com - that is a darn cool domain they got there!) in San Francisco on the 3rd and 4th of November and will be in town for a few days to catch up with some webmaster friends in the valley. If you have ever wanted to meet our chief coder and you are in California - let us know so we can arrange a meeting in the Bay Area early November.

We want to finish the big import by mid-next week, because right after Martin I will be flying out to Boston and Las Vegas on the 7th next month. So to maintain the site stability we need to test and finish the major changes until then.

The amount of new products is pretty amazing and we are very excited about that new partnership which we will reveal when the products are online - I guess you will like it!

The past weeks we have been very busy with minor updates, illnesses and some projects we had to finish for our clients. Now these projects are done and we are back on track to make your life on tradebit easier!

The first thing I will work on is the download manager. We still get a lot of support requests, because the downloads of larger files still fail or the download codes land in the SPAM filters. Trust me: that is as annoying for us as it is for you and I will try to improve that process a bit.

Further there are some glitches on the pages with IE8 which are not major, but get on my nerves since I updated to Windows 7 and actually use that browser now. I think with the release of Windows 7 and the enforced update Microsoft is rolling out, we should look nice on that browser and not just OK. More and more people will use it as they also use more Bing these days!

Another part is IMHO also crucial for us: the affiliate codes.

With now over 10 Million files on tradebit it is almost impossible to find the top-sellers quickly. Affiliates really do want to promote us and that is not the way I want it to be. So there will be a top-seller recommendation and an improved Wordpress plugin coming soon. The major steps should be taken before I head out to Vegas for Pubcon in November, where I also want to sync with some of the merchants who are selling on tradebit.

So: we are on it and prepare more content for you. Have a good weekend!

I got around 20 SPAM mails today, claiming that my email settings have changed. These fraudulent phising emails came to all sorts of accounts I have and it also looks like these scammers use our sitename as the sender!

We do not send out links to any other site than tradebit. Please be careful with these “notifications” - I took a look at the destination and it offers you a SPYWARE!

If you have the google toolbar installed or if you use the safe browsing capabilities of Firefox, you will be warned by these tools. Do not fall for that crap or your computer will be under control of someone else!