[I’m CEO of Zooomr]
We’ll a lot has been going on with Zooomr in the past few days. And while our blog has had some techinical difficulties, I wanted to write a post here at thomashawk.com acknowledging some of the support that Zooomr has received.
By way of a little background, late Tuesday night Zooomr finally launched our Mark III release that Kristopher Tate, our founder and only developer, has been working hard on for 9 months. Unfortunately within 10 minutes of launching our server crashed.
This was a terribly disappointing thing for Kristopher and I and certainly one of the low points of our experience with Zooomr thus far.
Because we are a small company and don’t have a lot of resources we were in a tight bind when our server crashed. Thankfully the community responded to our situation and is helping to get Zooomr Mark III back online.
To start with, Robert Scoble posted a blog post asking the community to help Zooomr on Wednesday morning. And on Wednesday morning Zoho was the first company to respond. Zoho for those of you who don’t know them are a kick ass online application company. They were one of the first to the online app space, way ahead of Google and others. They are faster than Google and best of all they are free. If you get a chance check out their online applications. They have a whole host of applications including everything from the basics of word processing and spreadsheets to other fun type stuff like polling software for your blog.
Anyways, we spent much of Wednesday with Raju Vegesna from Zoho getting Zooomr moved over into Zoho’s data center and getting a new server that they generously offered to loan to us.
On Thursday we had more good news. Sun Microsystems sent over a loaner as well. A “Thumper,” which is a massive 42 hard drive media storage machine. The Sun guys came over to the data center and delivered it personally.
Also on Thursday Dell flew in parts to fix our failed server and had a tech personally come out and repair it for us.
Which brings us to today. Kristopher spent all night and most of today down at Zoho’s datacenter. He’s there right now with Robert Scoble working on getting Zooomr Mark III back up and running. He’s already restored service to our static images — which means that all of your blog photos are back online.
Right now Krisotpher is beefing up our system in order to best guard against us going down again. He’s adding the new servers and reinforcing our capabilities with the new hardware. Hopefully we will have the site up in the next 48 hours.
All along the way I have been overwhelmed by the positive outpouring of support from you all, the Zooomr community. This more than anything is what keeps us going at this point. Zoho’s support especially has been absolutely instrumental in our efforts to get back online.
I think it’s hard not to be positive. You guys have been so upfront about things and shared all kinds of things with us that we feel like we’re all a part of the same community, the same team. We’re all in this together.
Thank you for giving us that. I think those kinds of things start from the top and spread out through communities. We’re all fortunate to be a part of this.
Thanks for, Zoho, Sun, Dell and who saves the day.
Wind changed its way now, good luck to Zooomrers
Zoho ho ho.
It’s good to hear that things are on the upswing for you guys. I’m sorry that it’s been so rough, but that’s going to make the launch that much sweeter and I’ll be cheering for it.
Good luck getting things up and running. It was fun hanging out on uStream Friday night.
This is what I love about the online community. Sometimes people who don’t spend a lot of time online have a negative image of those who do, but I have always found that people are very willing to step up and help even if it is a complete stranger. And it is nice to know that it applies to big companies as well.
Great to hear Thomas. We are with you and look forward to the launch. Thanks again to Raju, Zoho, Sun, and the ‘unnamed company’ who donated a couple servers yesterday.
Great news, well done t all concerned.
I’m the type of person who gets annoyed with the web sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is a amazing thing. I was there when people on BBS’ would says that in the future you would be able to book your airplane ticket on the web and people would laugh. Sometimes though you see such childish behavior on the internet (e.g., a lot of digg users) because of the anonymity that is just gets frustrating.
Reading this post reminded me what makes the internet so great and that the few bad seeds out there shouldn’t turn people away. It is truly one of the most remarkable inventions of all time.
I’m not a Zooomr user. I have been waiting for Mark III to check it out and I am glad to see such major and even smaller companies step up to the plate to help.
Good luck with the launch and the future of Zooomr. I am looking forward to checking it out!