[EDIT 3]
The site is now up, my thanks to Emily for the heads up. Luckily the opp I took last night and posted on was still available. The requested link had only changed by one word, so I didn’t need to change much in the post at all. Anyway, see below for the original version of this post…
I attempted to enter the details for my last sponsored post through Izea’s PayPerPost scheme, to find that the site was not responding. As I have had problems with my internet recently, so the first thing to do was check if a few other sites were working. Google, a few favourite forums and friends’ sites were all working. So, I opened up NetFront on my phone, waited for the Edge connection to be established, and confirmed that the Izea sites were not accessible via KCell’s servers either.
At this point, I thought I’d try and check Izea’s blog to see if they had posted anything about planned downtime/maintenance issues. D’oh! The blog is based on the same servers, so this didn’t help. I did a quick search, and checked the Google cache of the Izea blog. Sadly, this was five days old, and held no helpful news. Eventually, I checked on Google’s Blog Search, and lo and behold, there are unexpected problems right now, posted on the Izea blog. I could only see a three line intro to the post, as the blog itself is still down, but I at least know it isn’t just me.
I hope they fix the problems soon, it is 4am, and I only have an hour or two to enter the post’s details before I lose my reservation on the opp. That and I need sleep soon 
[edit]
OK, so head on over to here for Izea’s post on the situation.
[edit2]
See the comments below for a quick hello Izea’s Karen. As tempting as it may be to throw my toys around, obviously I understand this is effecting more than just me and my $15 opp
PLEASE do head on over to the Izea blog post I’ve linked to, BUT just in case there is another hiccup with Amazon’s server this time, I’ll include a copy of that post below…
We’re not quite sure what’s happened just yet, but our data center seems to have gone down. We can’t get voice calls into them to ask why either.
We have people travelling there right now (with large sticks) to see what’s going on, but for the time being at least PayPerPost and SocialSpark are both down.
We will of course be working hard with the data center to restore normal service ASAP.
Update 1 17:06: Just found out that the connectivity between the data center and their main Internet carrier has gone down. This is still not good news in so far as the sites are still down, but for us at least it means less work when they fix it. The machines are actually all up and running just fine, they just have absolutely no-one using them.
Update 2 21:36: Well, the data center has not been so helpful so far. It seems the problem was not the carrier at all, but someone or something in the center itself. The ‘engineer’s (see the quote marks there) haven’t had a clue what’s wrong, haven’t offered us any decent updates and generally just suck. However, they are, at long last, making progress and apparently we should see some servers come online shortly. In the meantime, we’ve deployed static elements of izea.com to an Amazon EC2 server and pointed some of our domains at it. We’ll be posting up a message on those sites soon for those visitors that don’t know about the blog. Hopefully we’ll have gone to a lot of effort to do that though and won’t need because our servers will be visible on the Internet once again.
What a crazy nightmare.
Search Terms That Led To This Post
). Now that our speed has doubled to 256kbit (actually it comes in at more like 384kbit normally, but I’m not about to volunteer that info to our ISP), download limits are probably going to be hit in half the time… At least the throttled speed on our ‘unlimited’ account has now also doubled to approx 64kbit, so I’m still better off than on dial up.