As many of you are painfully aware, ProtoShare was unavailable for a good chunk of this morning. We sincerely regret any problems this caused you, our valued customers. We are very disappointed with OpSource, our application host. The datacenter that hosts ProtoShare had a network outage due to a corrupt spanning-tree on one of their switches. ProtoShare the application actually continued running, but no one could connect to it. Most importantly from our perspective, no customer data was lost.
Everyone has experienced downtime like this, be it with Google GMail, Amazon Web Services (which backs Basecamp), eBay, or us. What is troubling is how long this outage lasted. We are talking with OpSource to determine how this can be avoided in the future. We are even looking into other hosting options.
We know that for ProtoShare to be a useful tool, it has to be predictably available. That’s what we count on from our hosting provider, and that’s what you count on from us. In the end we let you down. We will make every effort to make sure that doesn’t happen again.