ActiveRain Technology Update: May 20

Happy Friday Everyone!  In our commitment to improving communication on ActiveRain technology, this is our weekly update.

Progress we are making:

• We continue to optimize the database and the configuration of the hardware to deliver better stability, more reliability, and better speed for ActiveRain.
• On Tuesday May 17, we experienced a sporadic login problem with ActiveRain that lasted roughly from 6am PST to 8am PST.  ONLY some of our customers were not able to login and some of our customers were not able to access the site at all.  It turned out that one of the eight servers was not functioning properly.  When caught, Chris Beahm from Market Leader quickly took the server out of the rotation for the load balancer.  Once this happened, everything went back to normal.  That server was then fixed and returned to the rotation.  The thing to notice here is that we were able to respond quickly once we were aware of the issue (since it wasn't systemic for all customers, it was harder to detect.)  We are getting smarter every day.
• We are starting to get our legs beneath us.  Uploading graphic headers to ActiveRain blogs had been broken.  We fixed this on Wednesday.  Read about it here.  Now that we are getting more comfortable with the infrastructure, we are making progress on other aspects of ActiveRain. 
• In an effort to have better communication across ActiveRain, our Member Services team started the "In the Loop" blog to keep you updated on both technology and customer service issues that we know about, work arounds for problems and items we are fixing or are fixed.  Watch for greater presence from ActiveRain staff ... on ActiveRain. 
• Rackspace: As discussed, we had placed Rackspace on notice that we were unhappy with the performance of ActiveRain.  They researched the issues and we had two conference calls this week.  We lay all the issues on the table.  We set expectations on the plan to resolve the issues.  We assigned deliverables to the ActiveRain team and to the Rackspace team.  We then had another call to start from ground zero in terms of educating our ActiveRain team on what Rackspace does and does not do and what we should expect.  I feel like we are moving in the right direction.  Not there yet, but it is always better to connect with people with voices rather than simply with companies or products.  There are still issues, but I am feeling better about the relationship.
• We also executed the first survey of ActiveRain on Tuesday May 17.  We have received 1793 responses and have learned an incredible amount.  I will be talking more about what we learned and what we are going to do about it.  Several have asked, "Where are my points?"  We are starting the process today of adding points to everyone's account.  We are doing this by hand, so it will take some time to complete.  Watch for them over the next week.  We have not forgotten.

In general, another great week in the 'Rain.  Let me know if you have questions or concerns.

Niki