Re: Downtime

First off, let me apologize profusely for the recent downtime. Hopefully this post will clear things up a little bit. As you probably know if you are reading this, TwitStamp has been "down" for quite some time.

Initially we started off just serving pre-built stamps that would automatically update to the latest Twitter post of that user. We almost immediately were hit with thousands of users and needed to move off of our shared hosting platform to a more robust virtual-dedicated solution. With our new server platform we were able to bring you lots of new features such as single-tweet stamps, search-result stamps, and the ever-popular "TwitCard".

Our biggest demand, however, was for the ability to custom design stamps to fit any website. Wanting to do this right, we rolled out a whole new site with many new features, including a drag-and-drop interface for customizing TwitStamps. It was an instant hit, one our server wasn't ready for. I hacked away at our server stack, tweaking the Apache web server for optimal performance, tweaking our PHP installation to minimize memory usage, tweaking the site to generate stamps more efficiently and cache longer, eventually even trying to switch the server stack over to an Nginx/CGI-PHP setup. These measures helped, but in the end they couldn't keep up with our user growth.

Finally, we decided to switch to a more powerful server with a faster internet connection, but even this wasn't enough to keep the site up on a regular, stable basis. Finally I made the decision to pull the plug temporarily while we worked out a better alternative for the site.

Here is where our more personal situation comes in. Kyle and I, the developers behind TwitStamp, are both full-time university engineering students and we don't have the time or money to put into the site to distribute it across several high-powered servers which is the next step for ramping up server capacity. We are not a business and do not have the capital to make TwitStamp a scalable web service. We just develop it on the side for Twitter users like us, who want to easily post their status around websites in the form of a sexy image.

Now, in no way is this an excuse for our service being so rocky lately. It is however the best explanation I can give at this time, which is what you all are asking for! And finally, as for what we have decided to do, we are currently reworking TwitStamp a bit to give heavier priority to our registered users (which are the ones who support us and miss the service the most) and less priority to those who are using a default TwitStamp. Although you guys are great too! We just don't have the capacity to serve everyone at the moment so we're choosing to focus on the more exclusive group.

Guys! I love the twitstamp service and I haven't found a replacement since it went down. I am a graphic and web designer that works mostly with music artists. I mostly do myspace layouts (i.e. www.myspace.com/chasingthrill). The option to embed the html twitstamp was great for sites like myspace who block flash and script badges. Please come back!

There's gotta be someone interested in investing! I really haven't found a service like yours (and believe me, I've looked!) I just saw The Social Network and I gotta tell you not to be discouraged to what may seem like a rocky start, when it's really the opposite, fast growth and high demand. Sounds like a dream opportunity.

Best of luck Chris and Kyle!

-Andy Shark
www.andyshark.com

Thanks for the comments! We're working on focusing on our custom stamp users as it is a much smaller group... it's easier for the server to handle and they're the ones supporting us and donating the most towards our server costs.