[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.
June 26th, 2008 4:12 am
hei, i experience the same too:
http://www.makemoneyonline-x.com/2008/06/payperp0st-and-socialspark-is-down.html
June 26th, 2008 4:37 am
This looks like a serious downtime and if I recall, since joining PPP, this is the first time it has been down for this long and unplanned too.
June 26th, 2008 5:18 am
Yeah… I still have task to do… -_-
June 26th, 2008 5:18 am
I’m getting bored. I can’t even remember exactly when my opp reservation runs out. 5.20am and I want some sleep.
Giving up soon…
June 26th, 2008 6:56 am
should be up soon, it was just back on for a minute.
June 26th, 2008 7:43 am
Thanks for the info; I was wondering why my PPP ads weren’t working, found I couldn’t get to PPP or SocialSpark or Izea, and figured it was on their end. A google search brought your blog up, which confirms it for me. I wish they had some off site way to get news to us about outages like this, like LiveJournal does…
June 26th, 2008 8:00 am
Yup, I panicked a bit as FF said the certificate does not match the domain name. Then when I clicked OK, all I got was a 404 error – page not found! I have no reserved opp right now but have been waiting for a new one for days. I hope they fix it soon. Wonder what happened?
June 26th, 2008 8:04 am
Thanks for writing this post! I was wondering if my husband paid the bill or not, but figured it out eventually. Talk about frustrating! I’ve become a stalker lately, refreshing the opps page like 10 times an hour… so I’m in withdrawal.
Good luck to everybody!
June 26th, 2008 8:53 am
Hi there,
Just saw your post, and wanted to let you know our tech folks have been on this since the sites were affected. It appears the issue has been identified and it’s being addressed. They’ll continue to work hard ’til everything’s back.
We apologize for the inconvenience we realize this has caused, but look forward to being back online for you soon!
Karen Allen
IZEA, Inc.
June 26th, 2008 12:36 pm
The fact that I’m currently #1 for “socialspark down” and in the top 5 for “izea down” shouldn’t be any consolation for me, but it is 🙂 I got a little more traffic over night from this, and who knows maybe some of the people who left comments above will become regular visitors?
Anyway…
>>Noemi, yes I had a similar thing occur, except mine was complaining that the security certificate belonged to OpenDNS, not PPP. (This occurred because if a site is down or too slow to respond, OpenDNS’s system gives you a plain English explanation. If you had been looking at a page that began with http, instead of https , this wouldn’t have occurred. (I use OpenDNS as Kazakhstan’s DNS servers suck. REALLY badly.)
>>Mary, no problem at all, and re. refreshing the opps page 10 times an hour, don’t worry, there are many others who refresh a LOT more than that, especially during American business hours 🙂
>>Karen, thanks for dropping by and letting us know you guys are on the case. I know others have mentioned this to you and your crew already, but it must be time to move datacentres – the page load times have always been atrocious, and with their crappy response to your initial enquiries, I think jumping ship may be the order of the day.
June 26th, 2008 12:52 pm
are possible that they lost all data like our money?
June 26th, 2008 1:43 pm
No, I don’t think so. I should point out I’m just a fellow blogger, with no ‘inside’ info. IF the company that host’s Izea’s data centre(s?) is to be believed, then all data is secure, nothing has been lost OTHER than their actual connection to the internet.
I’m surprised that this company does not have redundant backup connections, however the only thing most of should lose is possibly one or two opps. If you have already posted a job for PPP or SocialSpark, then it is possible your reservation will have expired before you get the chance to submit your task’s URL etc.
June 26th, 2008 1:51 pm
PPP is back online. All seems fine except that it’s slow.
June 26th, 2008 2:07 pm
Thanks for the update 🙂
June 26th, 2008 2:58 pm
gosh the opp i reserved before the outage is not there, i will submit a ticket after i write this.
June 27th, 2008 4:24 am
Is true that ppp back online? cause i still can’t open it
June 27th, 2008 9:51 am
it’s so sad my $7 is gone because of the outage:
http://www.makemoneyonline-x.com/2008/06/just-update.html
June 27th, 2008 10:03 am
I was able to get an opp yesterday as soon as they went up but today, PPP has just been so slow I missed like 10 opps as they came up! Is it just my internet connection or is PPP really slow?
June 27th, 2008 1:48 pm
PPP is definitely online again. TBH, it is no slower for me than previously. That said, since April 2007 when I first started taking jobs, it has always been painfully slow. Between 30 seconds and a minute to refresh the opps page (qualified opps only, listing just 5 per page!), and upto 30 seconds to open an individual opp page. I once managed to grab a $50 1K Tuesday opp – I don’t know how I managed to beat anyone else to reserving it.
Good luck to all.
[edit]
To anyone wanting to join PayPerPost, you can do so via this link. ( You can of course just visit the site directly, but that link earns me $15 🙂 )
July 9th, 2008 6:00 pm
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