AustDomains down for 9.5 hrs, sorry.
Unfortunately today techAU had its longest outage since launching. After around 9 long hours, the site is finally back up and running. Obviously having the site offline for any length of time is incredibly frustrating and frankly unnacceptable. I want to make this clear, today’s downtime was due to issues with the current host AustDomains, not with techAU. I’ve decided to call them out in an effort to get them to share more information on the issue.
Despite having various social networks available to them, AustDomains left customers in the dark, with no response to emails, phone calls and worst of all no ETA. During the outage many other AustDomains customers began discussing the outage online, without a whisper from AustDomains. This is a major failing in customer service and I sincerely hope they use today’s outage as an example of how not to handle a disaster.
At 8:10pm customers received an email from AustDomains giving a vague explanation of what occurred today.
Dear Customers,
Customer Outage – Resolved, 22 June 2010
Unfortunately we have been experiencing some packet loss of both our primary and secondary data links. This affected most of the network, client websites/services, including our support phone and email systems. This outage meant we could not provide a prompt notice, either directly or via our website.
This issue has since been resolved and safe guards been put in place to prevent future reoccurrence.
We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience this would have caused.
techAU is investigating alternate solutions to ensure this doesn’t happen ever again. Once again, I’d like to apologise to our readers.
Merry Christmas from techAU
Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas. It’s been another fantastic year for techAU. With continued growth, new sponsorships, lots of new friends and best of all, there’s more Australian tech coverage than ever.
I had planned on getting another episode of the podcast out before xmas, unfortunately it seems the podcast has been too successful. With around 10,000 downloads of the last few episodes, we’re reaching the 2TB per month bandwidth limit at our host box.net quite quickly. It’s a great problem to have, but realise it sucks for you guys. I’m working on a solution as quickly as I can so this doesn’t happen again.
Pleased to announce the site is getting around 350,000 hits per month, with around 17,000 uniques. I’m very excited to see this growth and hope to see more sponsors come on board in 2010 so I can bring even better Australian tech coverage to you.
I hope Santa is kind to all of you, have a fantastic Christmas !
Unboxing – new audio setup (Heil PR40)
There comes a time in every podcasts journey when things need to be upgraded. That time has arrived. I’m investing in the podcast with some serious new audio gear.
New items include:
- Heil PR40 Microphone
- Heil PL2T Mic Stand
- Heil SM-2B Shock mount
- Vinsheild pop filter
Check out the video below to see the unboxing and setup of the new audio equipment.
Update
The new audio setup is now complete. I’ve recorded some audio, check out, see what you think.
techAU now available on iPhone
You can now access techAU from the iPhone or iPod touch using a specially formatted site.
The new formatting happens automatically just by visiting http://techAU.tv and comes with all the AJAXy goodness you’d expect, as well as access to any additional pages you have on the site, like your about page. There’s also a search option so users can find posts quickly.
Those of you running a WordPress blog can also achieve the same clean, simple formatting of your blog by installing the WPtouch. The current version is 1.2, it’s easy to install and customize.
Thank to Chris from http://techtwistblog.com for pointing me to this one.
More @ http://bravenewcode.com/wptouch
Further investment in techAU
This week I’m holidaying in Melbourne, but while I’m here I’ll be picking up a new piece of hardware, a high definition capture card called the Intensity Pro. Created by Black Magic, the card allows for digital capture via HDMI, or analog using component.
After purchasing Camtasia Studio earlier in the year, screen recording of video walk-throughs, reviews, tips is now all possible. Capturing video from sources other than the PC is a little more challenging, made even more difficult when trying to keep the quality all in HD, so inclusion in the HD version of the podcast is possible.
The Intensity Pro will allow for high quality video to be captured from a variety of sources including gaming consoles, video cameras, or pretty much any video source available.
Further investments in the development of techAU is made possible thanks to sponsorship. Thanks to Shoutoo for their continual support of techAU.
So look out for many more reviews in the future.
More @ BlackMagic
techAU welcomes Shoutoo as sponsor
I’m very happy to announce and welcome http://shoutoo.com as a sponsor of techAU for the next 12 months. Shoutoo is a great Australian-based service that lets you communicate with your friends, whilst allowing you to not only send short messages, but images, videos, links and even post to a number of other social networks.
Over the past few months I’ve seen the service develop quickly, I’ve also been able to get a sneak peak of some of the great new features they have on the way.
I couldn’t be happier to have the guys on board and look forward to watching the service expand.
Please head over to http://shoutoo.com/techAU, check out the service and friend me up.
