Update on Update!

So, as we announced before, we started the process of porting our servers from some dedicated servers to Amazon’s cloud servers yesterday.  The process itself was supposed to take a few hours, and the worldwide DNS update should have taken up to 24 hours (depending on viewer’s geographical location and ISP).  This was / is the biggest change since we launched Fotomoto, and based on Murphy’s law, we knew some things would go wrong.  We were fool enough to think we could outsmart Murphy.

Somewhere in the middle of our process, we lost power in the heart of The Startup Zone of San Francisco (read about it here, here, and here), which could have been a nice break, if it hadn’t been our upgrade day.  With all the work we have been doing, we could have really used that break.  After spending a couple of hours in the office hoping and praying and cursing, we decided to go home and work from there, just before we realized that we couldn’t open the parking gate (yeah, we know, we’re in San Francisco, and we should bike - it’s on our to-do list, right after fixing the launch issue).  And the story goes on, but so does life.

The broken launch broke a lot of things that we didn’t even realize were broken until much later last evening and early this morning.  As far as we can tell, things are stable now, and except for a couple of issues that we’re working on, everything should be in order.  We are still updating and regenerating our image thumbnails, which will take a few more days, but it does not affect the functionality of the site.

We are sorry for the bumpy upgrade. We will have a lot of goodies for everyone once things get stable, which shouldn’t take long.  Please stay tuned!