Category Archives: Behind the scenes

As we’re growing, we’re looking for a new team member to help with Member support, initially for a couple of hours per day. The job is done remotely and offered as a freelance contract.

Interested in joining the PhotoDeck innovation train ? We’re looking for a hands-on person who:

- can readily identify with PhotoDeck basic values: fairness, honesty, love to get the job done and well done (aka “good-guys” and “no-bullshit” values) ;

- loves helping people, day-in day-out ;

- is a native English speaker, located in Europe or on the US/Canada East Coast ;

- can work independently and is willing to learn ;

- is self-reliant also technically and comfortable with software in general ;

- has some hands-on experience with creating websites.

All boxes ticked? The following qualities are not mandatory but can make a difference:

- already created and customised a website on PhotoDeck (huge plus) ;

- familiarity with the practise of photography or video, and its business ;

- deeper technical understanding: DNS setup, HTML/CSS, access to multiple OSes…

Email jobs @ photodeck and tell us about you!

Summer downtime? What summer downtime? (*)

You’d think it would be normal to assume that a web service just works, all the time. Unfortunately software, computers and networks do break, so it is common for complex web applications to face downtime (ask Twitter or Facebook about it ;)

And the higher the service avaibility, the more difficult it is to improve. But we have high ambitions in that respect too.

A few months back, I wrote that we had enjoyed 99.95% availability for the previous year (members’ websites and PhotoDeck admin space are counted together). That’s about 20min downtime per month. I also wrote that although this was already an excellent figure for such a complex platform, we were working hard to improve it.

That project was completed in June. The results are in:

Boring flat graph = good news

Our uptime for July was 100%. As was August’s, too.

That’s right, not a single minute of downtime in over 2 months. And during that timeframe, we kept upgrading frequently the service, we had hardware outages, and we served over a million web requests (hits) per day.

We’re proud of this achievement, but we’re also touching wood. Downtime does ultimately happen, you never know what Murphy has in store ;)

(*) The platform didn’t get any vacation and was never left unattended, but the PhotoDeck team did enjoy some personal downtime this summer in between project work… The weeks ahead are bound to be very exciting, more on that very soon…

Things have been quiet on the “new feature” front for the past few weeks, but we’ve kept ourselves busy as always. A major ongoing project of ours is about improvements in the server infrastructure that supports the PhotoDeck service.

Not that we’d have any server crisis going on, mind you:

The service availability for April was 99.98% (yeah, even though we deployed some pretty significant infrastucture changes). For the past 12 months, it was 99.95% — still a number to be really proud of.

Still, it has happened a couple of times that we had to wake up in the middle of the night to attend a server. And like everybody else, we don’t like being woken up in the middle of the night. There’s been a couple of hardware failure we can mitigate but not prevent. There’s been a network outage at our infrastructure provider, also unpreventable. But we’ve also discovered that we could make some parts of the PhotoDeck architecture more robust still.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing – some heavy lifting on the infrastructure for even more robustness, and to accomodate our growth.

The most complex part of the project is behind us (well, for this round, as this is also about continous improvement). We still have a few bits and pieces to take care of, and we’ll soon also upgrade (again) the servers hardware, so that’ll keep us busy for a couple of weeks still…

Oh, I almost forgot:

We’re also playing with a great new feature in our lab, one that will be of interest to most of our members… It shouln’t be very long until it makes its way to the live service!