Site down again

I don't want to be piling on, as I too work in this type of industry and feel your pain. I tweeted and FB'd the issue, and hadn't heard anything back either. Is there a prefered method you'd like us to use in the future?

My concern is that one day BT will just be DOWN FOREVER and we will never get an explanation, and we'll never be able to access our data or archives. I have 13 years worth of workouts and life events documented here. I don't want to lose that, and I don't want to have to print it all either.

One thing that we use to check our public website is www.pingdom.com .  I hear that www.pingability.com has a free service? I've never used them, but I'm sure there are other monitoring services out there as well.

Basically, the service just checks your site at something like 1 minute intervals and notifies you (email, text, etc) that it's down. That might be a good business solution.

(not affiliated or endorsing either of those sites, but we use the first and I've heard good things of the second)

Something like that is not a bad idea. We used http://www.watchthatpage.com/ many years back. Like Laura, I'm not saying it is the best answer, it is one way to go about this.

Thanks,

Alice - I appreciate your forthrightness. I know outages aren't an easy situation to deal with.

So, right now does all communications come directly from you? Do the server administrators have access to the BT Facebook account? For example, this morning did they know the site was down and were working on fixing it but couldn't let us know? Or are the server administrators hired guns who do work based on what you tell them to do? I guess I'm just trying to get an idea of whether it's all you or whether there's a team looking out for the website. If it's all you, then that's quite a big job you've got and it's easy to see how site outages can go a few hours without being noticed (I mean that in a "you're only one person and can't be expected to be working around the clock" kind of way).

All that said, I certainly don't speak for anyone other than myself, but I think a lot of bad/frustrated feelings could be mitigated by a "BT is down and we are working on it" Facebook post and tweet as soon as you know about the situation. Communication is comforting.

Thanks for entertaining this discussion. I've been with BT now for a over a decade (12 years? I'm user 3341, I believe) and while I've not been active on the forums for a number of years, I am on the site daily (even despite the fact that I haven't actually done a triathlon since, like 2011) and want to see it succeed. This is, indeed, a special corner of the internet for many of us.

Thanks for starting this discussion. As another member of the BT-decade-club  and someone who visits daily to input data, I would love more communication when outages occur. As others do, I follow the Twitter and Facebook accounts and am on the email newsletter distribution list, so it's pretty discomforting to have complete silence during an outage. 

In the grand scheme of life? A first-world problem. But for us data-driven and sentimental folks with 10+ years of data on this site, it's a noticeable disruption when the site is down and there's no communication.

Alice - thanks for taking the time to update this thread! Love it when you find that the service you already know and love has features that make you know and love it even more.

Thanks for the heads up.