System Maintenance: Keeping AWeber Running Strong

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Posted by Justin Premick

Many of our customers come to AWeber for fast, reliable service and powerful email marketing features like the enhancements made to our Blog Broadcaster in recent weeks.

The flipside of making AWeber do more for you — and faster — as we grow is the need to perform upgrades and system maintenance from time to time.

We did some maintenance a month ago, and to help us keep AWeber running fast and strong, we’re going to do some more this weekend:

Saturday, March 1st 11:00PM EST - Sunday, March 2nd 11:00AM EST

As in the past, anything you don’t have to login to get to will be accessible, but you won’t be able to access the Control Panel. Your forms will collect subscribers and then add them to your list once the maintenance session is done.

For more on why we’re doing this, read on.

Why We Planned 2 Maintenance Sessions

We’ve always taken a proactive approach to making AWeber run fast and reliably, and supporting more users and the features you want.

Performing this maintenance is critical to that. Avoiding or delaying it would basically be like sticking our heads in the proverbial sand and waiting until we had to react to something going wrong.

We were faced with a choice: perform 2 relatively short maintenance sessions at the times when the fewest of you are accessing your accounts and sending emails, or perform one longer maintenance session that would cut into times when more of you tend to access your accounts.

We chose what we feel is the least inconvenient option. Hopefully you agree.

Thanks For Understanding… And Look Out For Exciting New Features

You’re going to see some awesome new features from us this year, thanks in part to the work our Dev Team does in the middle of the night at our data center.

Thanks again for your patience as we perform this maintenance, and for using AWeber!

UPDATE: Maintenance was completed without incident at 10AM Sunday.

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9 Responses

Glenn Grundberg
March 1st, 2008 at 11:15 pm

Wow- I was right in the middle of building a mission-critical web form that I desperately needed TONIGHT for a client when this f**king system logged me out and destroyed 30 minutes worth of work.

Why wasn’t I emailed about this in advance? Like, an hour or two warning?

That shouldn’t be too hard, right? I mean this IS a freaking AR service, right? Am I supposed to check this f**king BLOG everyday?

This isn’t the first time this system has glitched on me and cost me seriously, either. For all the good things AWeber does, shit like this really chaps my ass…
Dylan Loh
March 2nd, 2008 at 5:09 am

It isn’t nice being not able to login but us Aweber users are a patient bunch
T.M. Harris
March 2nd, 2008 at 8:09 am

In all honesty, I understand your company’s position on this situation. But it seems as if every month you guys have one or two system updates and locks me out of the system.

The way it seems, I think I was better off with freeautobot. They used to do the same thing, but at least it wasn’t running me for $20 a month.

But it really seems like every month somethings getting updated, as if your system was not 100% correct when you initially introduced it. I dunno. Maybe I’m a skeptic, but when I’m spending money on something, I want access to it ALL THE TIME, or else, I’d want to be duly compensated for time in which I cannot do my email marketing and research, because you guys are ALWAYS maintaining something on the site.
Justin Premick
March 3rd, 2008 at 8:58 am

Glenn and T.M.,

Thanks for your frank criticisms. It’s good to see these maintenance sessions from all points of view.

Glenn, I’m sorry about your web form; however, this blog is not the only tool we used to tell users about the maintenance.

Starting on Thursday the 28th, all users logging into AWeber were shown a notice about the maintenance session prior to being redirected to the control panel. Unless you were logged in continuously from Wednesday through Saturday you should have been shown that message. If you did login sometime on or after Thursday and believe you weren’t shown that message, please get in touch with us so we can investigate.

T.M., maintenance doesn’t have to do with something not being “correct” when we introduced AWeber nine and a half years ago. Suggesting that is kind of like saying that reshingling my roof, or adding a deck, means that my house wasn’t built “correct” originally. Like any web application, as we service more users and add more functionality, we have to set aside time now and then to update software, or move servers.

Trust me, nobody here at AWeber likes making the control panel inaccessible for any length of time. But occasionally we have to do things that necessitate that, and we try to make those times as pain-free as possible for users. I’m sorry this session wasn’t pain-free for you.

We do try to keep occurrences of system maintenance to a minimum, and there have only been six (6) such sessions scheduled since Thanksgiving 2006. I’m sorry about two of those coming so close together, but we felt two sessions were better in this case than one longer one.

Thanks again to both of you for being honest and letting us know how you feel about our maintenance practices.

Dylan,

I know you are and on behalf of everyone here, thank you much. We really appreciate it.
Marian
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:44 am

Very well stated answers. The best way to handle customer service, be frank and honest. Thanks for improving the service! We LOVE knowing you’re on top of all possible upgrades! Saturday night seems like a wise choice on your part!
Carol Bentley
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:27 pm

I do understand how frustrating it is when you’re trying to get something out within a tight timescale and suddenly find the system you expected to be able to use is absent for a short period.

I suppose that’s where longer term planning helps. Just a thought Justin - don’t you normally send a notification email about these downtimes as well? I didn’t see one but that’s because I’ve been away for a while due to a close family bereavement.

One thing I would say - because I think Justin and his team are too polite to refer to it… I personally do not think there is any need for the offensive words that were used in the first comment - surely your ‘anger’ can be expressed without resorting to gutter language?
Michael
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:56 pm

This was a big hindrance - next time I think we’d all appreciate it
if we were given warning in advance via email for planned downtime.
I`m still unsure about where to find the exciting new features
or what they are.

Maybe you can also make a blog post to inform us of these features?
Marc Kline
March 3rd, 2008 at 5:15 pm

Michael,

I’m sorry for any inconvenience. This maintenance set up infrastructure that will allow us to roll our features we’re currently working on. As with any new features, you’ll find these announced on this very blog when they are released.

Thanks again for your understanding.
Bob Hager
March 7th, 2008 at 5:42 pm

Folks:
I want any company I subscribe to to constantly improve their service. I know of no other way to do it except by inconveniencing some of us occasionally. I think you are doing an outstanding job and I rate your company the number one in a business.
Thanks