I don't understand it all, but I think that it's my server - NOT bludomain. I really hope it's just a coincidence. I'll be sure to update as I don't want anyone thinking blu did something if they didn't.

Bobby

Oh, and the last to access was about 4pm PST, according to statcounter. I can't access anything other than that (not even my cpanel).

BLUDOMAIN DID NOTHING - IT WAS MY SERVER.

I recently filed a complaint against BluDomain with the Better Business Bureau for failure to deliver goods and services in accordance with contractual terms of service. While I have doubts this will make a significant change in their business practices, there will be a record of the complaint on file at the www.bbb.org web site for anyone who does some research and a record to protect my own business interests.

I thought huevos meant eggs??? Cojones looks seems way more macho. lol. Eggs are for Blu Domain and those other scallywags, El DJ tiene Cojones grandes...muy grande ahahaha. My spanish is like whoa!

My site is down. I was told that there is server maintenance going on, nothing has been said about anything being deleted or lost. Who knows.

crap. mine is gone. after being w/o email or slideshows all day, i finally thought things were back up and running, well at least my email and slideshows were, but my site was a big fat blank.

and i just got one of the "sorry but your site is gone" emails. ugh.

First off I'm sorry for everyone who's going through this. I've had a host split on me and lost everything and it was one of the worst experiences of my life.As a way to help out and offer relief for those who's sites are gone we are considering opening up our service early for ONE DOLLAR a month for three months until you can get through the wedding season and make a decision on what you'd like to do for your website.Showit Sites is still in beta but sites can be made very quickly and we use Amazon S3 for our hosting so we have everything stored and backed up in two places on separate sides of the country so you know that even if a natural disaster happened your data and your business will be safe with us.Post up here or email me directly if you're needing to get your site up asap.All the best,DJhttp://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Opensourcep...ur-website.html

crap. mine is gone. after being w/o email or slideshows all day, i finally thought things were back up and running, well at least my email and slideshows were, but my site was a big fat blank.

and i just got one of the "sorry but your site is gone" emails. ugh.

So you're saying that AFTER blu lost some people's sites, they lost more again? Or was this in the same initial problem? If this happened again, people should post all over the place about it. That's just insane.

BLUDOMAIN NEWS

10:45 HOORAY all servers back up again. This is the worst roller coaster ride in history! We are camping out at BLU headquarters until we have are 100% confident that the outage is over. Thank you for hanging with us through this crazy day and trust that we are here all night in case Florida's storm is not over.

Once we have 12 hours with NO servers down then this POST is GONE. One thing we hate at BLU is negative energy. So read it because shortly we will announce the NEXT BLU PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR and forget this ever happened! If you are up ... hello!

8:30 PM The servers all went down for about a half hour and now just a few are down. We have found out 4 well known hosting companies in Florida are down also. Everyone is being affected. We are going to be here all night so please do not panic unfortunately this power outage issue is causing some major issues today. Please email us at info@bludomain.com if you need us at the moment.
Here is another hosting company going through the same power outage as us www.surpasshosting.com

GOOD NEWS - the issue is rectified- we have tested every server and everyone is back and up running smoothly. We will keep two people at work through the night to ensure the outage is indeed done. We can't thank you enough for your patience and the kind emails. It really felt like a whole community of teamwork today and that is the best feeling in the world. Seriously thank you for being so kind and patient!

From our hosting company

** Keep in mind only a few servers are still effected and the rest are running smoothly.

At approximately 8 A.M. EST a segment of our data center experienced a power outage. Shortly after that we realized the city had experienced a power outage as well which attributed to the loss we saw in the NOC. We immediately went into generator power and we are still currently running on generator.

What happens when there is power loss is that we immediately go into UPS for a few minutes meanwhile the generator powers up. The UPS ensures no service disruption meanwhile the generator turns on. This happened normally but approximately 40% of the servers tripped during this process. Power loss and going into UPS followed by generator power has happened a few times in the past. But we have never experienced what has happened today - the power surge during this outage was extremely high.

We are meeting with our electrical engineers as we speak to analyze the situation to learn exactly what happened. We still have the data center running on generator as the power in the city could still be unstable and we do not want to risk any further outages. As many of you know these kind of issues do not happen often and we are taking this incident very seriously. The data center is equipped with a high level of UPS and generators are in place to ensure maximum uptime. We apologize for the inconveniences as we know this has effected a lot of you and your clients.

NEW UPDATE - there appear to be some areas of power loss ongoing in the area that our server providers are located. Most of the servers are up and running but some are still experiencing the effects - including our blusupport server. IT appears phone lines are down too. Unfortunately we are at the mercy of the technicians working on this but we are acutely aware of the situation and will do all we can to expedite things. We are very sorry for the continued inconvenience. Rest assured that there is no loss of data - this is strictly a power issue and no loss of data will occur. As we hear more we will be posting it here.


NEW UPDATE- our blusupport.com and our own template ordering page and server 3 are still down and those are the FINAL servers being updated. Thank you for your patience. Every other server is back up and running smoothly.

As noted on our BLOG at midnight all servers were going to be updated through out the night. A process that needed to be done. The update was to be done by 5 AM this morning. Each server done one at a time to ensure minimal downtime.

We have just been told that between 5-7 AM our hosting company had a NETWORK power outage. We are not sure when that happened because we were under the assumption a few servers had not finished updating.
There are two final servers now being finished and we are told they will be back online momentarily. We are sorry for any inconveniences. We are also told we will get a detailed report of the updates so that we can see why a few of the servers took longer. This also included our own server being updated. BLUSUPPORT.COM is last on the list for updates and will be up shortly.

Almost every server was back online around 7 AM. Thank you for your patience.

Please email us at bludomain@gmail.com

I hope they're implementing a BACKUP system... what a thought.

The bad: It appears that they are using a hosting service that isn't capable (yes I know they had batter backups and power generators, but they didn't work) of handling power outages reliably.

I'm trying to check out Show It Sites and I'm stuck. I get to the part where it says "An email with a confirmation number has been sent..." But no Email has appeared (this was yesterday). I have no spam blockers on or anything like that.

I have a Blu site and although mine was not affected, their complete lack of communication along the way has always had me frustrated. I sent an Email over 3 weeks ago that has never been answered and it was a serious concern I had.

I'd love to check out Show It. Can anyone help me out here? I even tried un-installing and re-installing it an it just skipped to the part where I had to enter the confirmation number again.

Chris

Hey Chris

Sometimes the emails get caught even before they hit your mail server b/c certain web hosts have their own filters...if you have another email address give that a try and it should come there and it's really important that we confirm that you can get our emails otherwise we won't be able to communicate with you in the future.

Rock on!
DJ

Hey Chris

Sometimes the emails get caught even before they hit your mail server b/c certain web hosts have their own filters...if you have another email address give that a try and it should come there and it's really important that we confirm that you can get our emails otherwise we won't be able to communicate with you in the future.

Rock on!
DJ

Since Showit sites doesn't seem to be working for you, Chris... I have the deal of a century! Join SHANESITES now, and I'll give you free car! These prices are INSANE! Act now, and I'll even wash your SHANESITES car for free for a whole year. I'm really sorry that Showit Site's email is not working, but I can promise our email will NEVER, EVER be down.

Is this really what we're getting back to in the business world? Barracudas...

Shame, shame, dj.

I am totally missing the point. Why you bustin' dj's chops?

How are you missing the point, tami? It's pretty straight-forward what's going on here. DJ is running a competing business. As soon as one of his competitors has a problem, DJ posts about it, and offers a discount or deal for his service.

I've been one of DJ's biggest supporters. I felt comfortable joining this forum because there was an overall spirit of friendly competition over cut-throat tactics. This is not the first time - DJ made sure to slam his other competitor, Bigfolio, in another post. Of course, it's his forum and he can do whatever the hell he wants to do. But let's not pretend that DJ is just trying to be a good guy and help people out here. He's promoting his business at the expense of another.

This has been a pattern lately and I really can't ignore it. It would be like me targeting a local photographer if they got sick and couldn't perform or their business was hurting.

Of course, it's DJ's choice how he runs his business. But I can recall DJ promoting the book, "Love is the Killer App." I read that upon his recommendation. You should read it too, tami. Everything about this thread spits in the face of the spirit of that book. It's all about working to improve the industry you are in, not in spite of, but with the help of your competitors. The idea is that there's more than enough business for everyone.

I'm starting to think Niiiiiiiiiice is just a facade. And I'm probably the least cynical person on this forum. But this thread was anything but nice... It's so transparent and you guys are being even more naive than I was about the Tim Miller thing.

out.

I love this avatar!

What I got from that post is DJ trying to explain why he may not be receive emails and I thought he did so with great tact. He could have been much more direct.

I am totally missing the point. Why you bustin' dj's chops?

Jim, can you not see the irony??? The entire thread is about BluDomain's customer service. Then DJ has a customer service issue in the very same thread! Chickens coming home to roost!

Tell me what I am missing....

(1) this is a thread about blu problems
(2) Chris Steele goes off topic and says he is having trouble with getting an email from showit sites and he has a blu account.
(3) DJ, like anyone else, assumes that he is trying to use his blu email account. Explains a possible cause and solution as tactfully as he could.
(4) Shane jumps on him as being a barracuda.
(5) Chris explains not a blu email
(6) DJ reports on a fix coming tomorrow

Seems like a pretty innocent thread to me for you all to be jumping on DJ.

I think the thing is ironic is you are equating a missing email with a total loss of peoples site with NO backup. That is like saying a firecracker is like a nuclear bomb.

Tell me what I am missing....

(1) this is a thread about blu problems
(2) Chris Steele goes off topic and says he is having trouble with getting an email from showit sites and he has a blu account.
(3) DJ, like anyone else, assumes that he is trying to use his blu email account. Explains a possible cause and solution as tactfully as he could.
(4) Shane jumps on him as being a barracuda.
(5) Chris explains not a blu email
(6) DJ reports on a fix coming tomorrow

Seems like a pretty innocent thread to me for you all to be jumping on DJ.

I think the thing is ironic is you are equating a missing email with a total loss of peoples site with NO backup. That is like saying a firecracker is like a nuclear bomb.

I agree...geez Shane...mellow out dude. I never slammed anybody. I simply said that I thought charging $20+ for hosting was a lot and then this offer was about offering photographers whose sites got deleted a solution to get something up and running for free.

I think your rant is off base.

...and we are changing up the confirmation thing to make it easier tomorrow.

Rock on!
DJ

1. Thread about Blu problems, that DJ clearly states in the title that Blu deleted sites, and then in first line of thread mentions a past host of his splitting (although Blu seems to be stepping up on this problem, not "splitting"
2. Chris says, "Hey I'd like to check out this Showit Sites you speak of but your system is faulty." (in this thread DJ directs to ShowIt Sites, not off topic at all)
3. DJ does not mention in anyway that it is a possible Blu/Email issue. He simply states that some email servers auto spam block (Ironicly the same issue Blu claims to have)
4.Shane calls DJ out.

I have to agree with Shane on this one, too.

As a way to help out and offer relief for those who's sites are gone we are considering opening up our service early for ONE DOLLAR a month for three months until you can get through the wedding season and make a decision on what you'd like to do for your website.

I'm sorry, but how does this NOT sound like one of those bait-and-switch infomercials on TV that everybody can see right though?

At best, it's not classy, at worst, it's unethical.

That is pretty cynical view of this... Let me make an analogy....

A photographer dies and leaves brides stranded. Another photographer agrees to provide a discount because of the issues they are having while they work out issues with the photographer's estate. Is the 2nd photographer unethical because (1) he saw an opportunity to fill a need and (2) provides a discount to them?

I see how you can take it that way.

IMHO, the analogy is more like this:

(A newsprint ad:)

Did YOUR photographer's car break down?! Well, do I have a deal for YOU! For just PENNIES, I'll show up at YOUR wedding, and take some pics! My camera's kinda new, so please don't point out if I have the thing turned 'round backwards... just TRUST ME!
ACT NOW!!


^{FinePrint: After I photograph your wedding, the prices will jump right back up to an undisclosed amount. You must pay this amount for me to photograph your reception. If you choose to go back to your original photographer after their car is repaired, you will loose any photos that I took in the interim.}

I see how you can take it that way.

IMHO, the analogy is more like this:

(A newsprint ad:)

Did YOUR photographer's car break down?! Well, do I have a deal for YOU! For just PENNIES, I'll show up at YOUR wedding, and take some pics! My camera's kinda new, so please don't point out if I have the thing turned 'round backwards... just TRUST ME!
ACT NOW!!


^{FinePrint: After I photograph your wedding, the prices will jump right back up to an undisclosed amount. You must pay this amount for me to photograph your reception. If you choose to go back to your original photographer after their car is repaired, you will loose any photos that I took in the interim.}

Holy wow! You guys are hardcore!

Thanks DJ for looking in to the issue. I'll try again tomorrow and see if I can get in. Maybe I should just PM you if I have further problems?

For the rest of you tearing the guy apart...step away from the computer, take a deep breath, and chill. You have got this thing so derailed and so out of proportion it's insane.

You guys are basically saying no one can do an act of goodwill unless they have absolutely nothing to gain whatsoever from it. Really? What about all the companies that shipped water and food to the hurricane Katrina victims with their big ass banners all over them and made commercials about it. Were they trying to cash in on what they were doing? Hell yes they were, but you know what? People got much needed food and water and it wasn't any less real to them because of banners and commercials. Those companies donated hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of product to help people. If they gained some customers as a result, then good for them.

I'm willing to bet there are some of you posting in this thread that give your clients "discounts" or even give away free sessions under the guise of "hooking someone up." I know of a couple of photographers that even shoot a wedding a year for people that can't afford it. I have no doubt that those people do things like that to truly help people. But don't tell me that knowing those people will sing their praises to anyone that will listen from here to eternity doesn't help too. Seriously. You all know that when you "give" something away or "discount" something that it will not only make you feel good because you helped someone out, but it will help your business long term as well. Right? Right.

DJ never slammed Blu in his original post that I can see. He simply said, "Hey I know this happened, I know some of you probably read my blog, I will extend this offer to help out if you need it." The end. The only sharks I have seen posted after him.

You know what? While I was typing that I got an email from Show It (Todd) apologizing for the problems and gave me a code to use. Then said they are working on making it easier from here out.

That is customer service.

My email to Blu that I sent over 3 weeks ago about something that was concerning me has yet to be answered...