We need to carry out a minor update to the Harvard Reference generator so we will need to take the website off line today (Friday 26, 2010)  at 4:00 PM GTM/UTC. Yes it’s a a bit of a short notice but the downtime will be less than 10 minutes.

We regret to inform our users that deadlinedue.com will be offline from 09:00 GMT on the 1st of February 2010 to 10:00 GMT. Yes, it’s a bit of a short notice and we apologize for any inconvinience faced. We need to upgrade the server and fix an urgent bug. Both these steps are needed to provide you with a better service and to reduce the likely hood of unplanned outages in the future.

Deadlinedue suffered an unscheduled site outage earlier today due to a problem with the database.  The service has now been restored and the database has been repaired. We made use of the downtime to roll out an update to the code to resolve a bug in Amazon Search Module. Our reasoning was that the code update might result in downtime so why not do it while the site is offline anyway?

The website will be taken offline at 0:00 GMT on the 12th of July in order to carry out scheduled maintenance work. We expect to be offline for approximately 30 minutes.

When you generate a reference for a web page, our HTTP client needs to go out and fetch that web page so that we can gather required information such as the title of the page and the name of the authors. We found a minor bug in this HTTP client which resulted in it taking an unduly long time to fetch a small percentage of web pages. A smaller number of pages couldn’t be retrieved at all. In the first instance the output wasn’t effected (it just took upto a minute to produce the output). Unfortunately in the latter case, the generated reference did not contain the title of the webpage. This bug has now been fixed and all cached records have been purged.

The citation generator was taken offline at 8:11 GMT to carry out the scheduled maintenance tasks as announced earlier. The service was restored at 9:08 GMT after successful completion of the server migration and updates.

Deadlinedue.com is now hosted on an running instance of an Amazon Machine Image. We have embraced cloud computing and we believe that we will now be in a position to serve you better. The system is better able to cope with traffic spikes and provides us with plenty of room to grow. We look forward to releasing the next new feature  – the ability to generate references for web pages by next week.

On Wednesday the 20th of May, we will be performing scheduled maintenance on deadlinedue.com . Part of that maintenance is to switch the server on which the site is presently hosted on. We have a new feature planned for release but our server at present does not have the required capacity to cope with the increased demand on processor, memory, storage and bandwidth.
Thus as 4:00 am GMT on the 19th, we will be switching over to a new server that is ‘part of the cloud’. We expect the site to be offline for approximately 1 hour during the migration but hope to bring it back up sooner.