Overpowered or underpowered?
You might have noticed: our beloved gc.com and forums sites are down for more than 24hrs now (and still are as I’m writing this). I find this a shame.
The reason for the outage is a fire in an electric vault. The damage was apparently even worsened by a sprinkler system. When I read this, I was flabbergasted. I work for more than 20 years now in the IT business for several companies with an own data centre – including a internet provider – and I never seen/heard such a crap.
First of all, what is a sprinkler system doing in electrical rooms? There was 6 inches of water. Unbelievable. One doesn’t need to be a genius that water and electricity don’t go together. So why use it as fire fighting system. Argon and CO2 are used for fire fighting electrical equipment for ages now and there even more modern techniques available.
Secondly, why does one need to bring portable generators to provide backup power. Every self respecting service provider has a power generator as backup. The internet provider I worked for had not one but TWO ship engines – I’m not talking about a yacht engine here – as backup with TWO 5000 litre diesel tanks which could provide electricity – 24/7, as long as it takes – within a second that the disaster happened.
Why doesn’t Fisher Plaza have all this? This company doesn’t take the ISP business serious and looks like a cowboy to me that takes all the money without investing anything. Or is it because one wants to get rid off?
Anyway, Groundspeak is also to blame. Most sites are up and running, even after ‘as little as’ 3 hours. But gc.com remains behind. Why’s that? The usual answer we get is that one is that one can’t afford. Sorry, but I find this bullocks. Sure, gc.com is a free service and there might be not as much premium member as one wants to have. But one is stretching that argument much to far. First of all, all local approvers are volunteers, so the only real cost lies in the Groundspeak staff (how many?), accommodation, the servers and hosting. Where does the premium membership fees goes to? I know that it isn’t a huge amount a year and the total income of fees might not cover the costs. But let’s face it; what do premium members get more than non paying members apart from the PQs? Nothing at all:
- The servers are even slow for paying as for non paying members. I even stopped counting the times that I get a SQL errors when I want to read the forums at 8AM CET
- How many times did the emailing failed? The are many WE that I didn’t get any PQs. I even stopped the notification service since it’s more down or late than anything else. I’m not a FTF hunter anyway.
- How long does it take before bugs gets fixed? A perfect example is the TB distance, which I still need to recalculate manually in order to get the correct amount
- When will one starts finally to learn that there is a world outside the US of A? Personalised date/time functions like showing the date in the local format is the least one can do. Then I didn’t say anything about scheduling or the stupid idea of pushing US centric rules for authoring geocaching to the whole world.
There are 2 solutions to this debacle:
- Reconsider your business model. There are plenty of free services that work well and give more to their ‘customers’ than Groundspeak does. The sport off geocaching is so popular and comes apart at the seams. It’s totally inappropriate to stick to the same philosophy/methodology as is the ‘good old day’s’.
- Make the fees higher, but ONLY if you give something more in return: better service and redundant servers mirrored over the world.
And that doesn’t need to be that costly at all. There are plenty of solutions available on Linux machines and there a plenty of providers which deliver a lot of functionality for less money. The provider I’m hosting this blog on gives me more reliability to an individual like me – not being able to afford a lot – than Groundspeak seems to get. There are plenty of creative solutions like Cloud hosting, grid hosting, etc.
Let this be a lesson and I hope that Groundspeak comes to repent.
July 5th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
I’m with you. If the overall gc.com experience had been great I’d probably be more apt to just let it slide. But overall performance has been slow, which is something that as a paid subscriber annoys me.
I don’t really agree with the option to raise the fees. Hasn’t it gone up every year for the last couple years as it is? Maybe it just seems like it. Service has just gotten worse as the popularity increases. They just aren’t scaling the site good enough.
I don’t think anyone pissed in your cornflakes. Or maybe it’s just that someone pissed in mine too.
Either way, I feel the same as you.
Major props for the post. GC.com needs to get their crap together. Now is the perfect time for the next best thing to swoop in for the kill.
July 5th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Craig,
Happy to see that you agree with me. I though that I (together with some BE members) was (were) the only voice (crying) in the wilderness.
I have nothing against raising the fee as long as we get (a lot) more in return than the current members get for the moment.
Eddy
July 5th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Interesting post with many good/important questions. Some points hit right on the nail, others I do not follow (completely). Having experienced such nation wide “problems” from very near, I have thus a good sense of how it is: heavy critic gunfire, “why did we do so obvious mistakes ?”, frustration from customers, etc…
It would be an interesting discussion topic if we meet in the field or at an event. Especially around a glass of beer.
July 6th, 2009 at 8:02 am
Looking at the response I get in the GC.com forums, there doesn’t seem to be public support for a discussion on the matter.