Wednesday, July 7, 2021

Site Outages

What has been happening to the Ohanaware website?

Wednesday, July 7, 2021 - Sam Rowlands

Update: july 15th 2021

The update system now seems fully operational again, there are some missing pages that I'll continue to migrate as time goes by.

Update: July 11th 2021

We're almost back up to running properly. The problem has now been resolved and our site is now being managed by Strawberry Software's Lifeboat running on Digital Ocean's hardware.

Our original host has also agreed to refund us for the SSL certificate and remaining time left on our hosting plan. Which I am very grateful that they authorized the refund without a fight.

Now we're back to restoring pages, thank you all for your help and pateince with us as we continue to restore our site.

We're aware that our update system is still non-functional and we're working to correect that.

Update: July 8th 2021

I am overwhelmed by the number of people who were willing to help me to resolve this issue, it was unexpected, people from all the world, wanted to help and it's just been great, truly great.

We have a solution that seems to working at the moment and I'll update with more information on the fix in the coming days.

First of all

Let me, Sam Rowlands, apologize to everyone who's tried to access our website since the 25th of June 2021 and has been met with a security warning.

I'd also like to say Thank You to everyone who's taken their time to report the issue to us via e-mail or social media. We really do appreciate our customers who put in the extra effort to let us know that this fault is containing to persist. We know that your time is just as valuable as ours, and to spend it on us, it is appreciated to say the least.

What happened?

Some how (exact cause remains a mystery to me), customers visiting the Ohanaware website are sometimes issued an expired certificate, we have reports from the UK, Belgium, Germany, Texas, California, Russia and we ourselves haven't been able to access our site at times (we've in Taiwan).

Multiple attempts have been made with the hosting company to correct this issue, multiple examinations have been made by the hosting company, sometimes it works for a period of time after talking to them, on one occasion we were still unable to access the site after.

Multiple customer reports indicate that customers have also tried different browsers to access the site and were (at that time) still blocked. Some tried again later and were able to access the site for a while, only to be blocked again.

The toll

I think I've been through all the emotions and am just left with embarrassment and sadness.
Customers have invested their time, I, my time and the hosting company their time.
App Wrapper 4.3 rollout has been suspended mid-stride as the issue reoccurred during the launch.
The upcoming Ohanaware App Kit release will be delayed
Customers have expressed unease in renewing their products (as they should).
A potential customer has also expressed concern about trying our products during this time, again as they should.
While we may not know the true extent of customers who haven't renewed or purchased because of this issue. We do have an estimate by comparing sales over the years, v.s. completed sales during this time and there is a 36% drop.

What are we doing about it?

We're continuing to work with the hosting company in an attempt to resolve this issue, and have drawn up a backup plan.

Thank you

Thank you for your time and patience with us during this period, I am humbled by the amount of people who've invested their time in trying to assist us with matter, I only hope that we continue to meet your expectations in the future, after this is all resolved and forgotten.