By the way...

http://www.dvdprofiler.com now shows the same message as http://www.intervocative.com

I paid my $25 on 10/23/00. Wow, has it been that long ago?

Because one does not have to pay for it. This is called free. Any other stupid questions?

Just to make this clear for others, neither site will appear on Netscape 7.1. That message only appears on Internet Explorer 6.

MediaStorer is what they used to call DVD Profiler - they used to have a version that handled multiple media and then focused on just DVDs. I believe they have claimed to have a new product in development, but development doesn't bring in income.

I guess by EPKJ's rationale, the producers of the #1 rated television show, "Friends" are all poor and living on the street because their product is "free."

As I've said before, DVD Profiler is ad supported (i.e. they get PAID to show ads) and registration to eliminate the ads costs $25 a head.

Claiming that that business model can't work is silly. I'd advise you to check out http://opensource.org - they give the open source movement is all about free software, and most of those companies (i.e. Redhat) have found that giving away their product and offering support and extras (i.e. $25 registration) is a viable business model.

So how is it "self-evident" that they don't make money from DVD Profiler? Are you saying that the Intervocative people are just plain stupid, continuing to support a product that is *costing* them money?

And I'm not calling their official representative a liar. He said it was a hardware failure. I'm taking him at his word. My point is that there is NO HARDWARE FAILURE ON EARTH that could possibly cause a web server to be down for SIX DAYS unless they either:

a) couldn't afford to get new servers set up at another datacenter, or

b) willfully decided to keep the site down, for whatever reason - maintenance, upgrades, they're deciding on whether to keep it down forever and close the business, etc.

As I said, there is no computer hardware problem that can't be solved very quickly with the application of a great deal of money. Intervocative obviously doesn't have enough to get them back up. I say "obviously" because they've been down for six days. There is no possible reason it could take that long other than they chose to be down for that long or they can't afford the new server(s).

Most likely what happened is that they're waiting for their current ISP to fix the hardware, wait for parts to come in (although any major datacenter will have extra hardware on hand - so if this is the case, they went with a cut-rate ISP, which means that, again, they don't have a lot of capital to spend), etc., and are just waiting until their current provider fixes the problem, which obviously they're in no hurry to do (again, it's "obvious" because it's been down for SIX days - most datacenters will refund your month's lease if you're down for more than 12 HOURS - and they don't want to refund customers - so they make damn sure that a failure doesn't keep a customer down that long).

And Intervocative isn't a friend of mine. I'm not going to help them move their sofa. I'm not going to pay $25 for updates that I'm not going to receive because they either can't afford to stay online or decided to take their web server down.

I'd rather give that $25 to DVD Aficianado, who have always been up-front with their customers.

- DVD Profiler is not a enterprise class application, few will die if they cannot update their profile

- Get a life

- Deciding what hardware is required is part of risk management. Lets say that DVD profiler nets Interactive 20K a year. They will not spend 19K in anual support contracts to ensure 100% uptime. I'd rather have the site down for a few days than gone for good. I would rather that the developers spend users money in adding new features versus shelling out 3x retail for hardware just to get it there in 4 hours.

- It seems with every post the length of the outage grows. As far as I can gather, it has been about 2 days since the website went down, not 6 as reported by someone in this thread.

- Building a new server from scratch does take a significant ammount of time. This is especially true if software need to be re-installed and re-configured on multiple servers. Since it is likely that the new hardware has different components than the old, a simple image is not enough.

For the record, DVDProfiler went down sometime on Friday. I personally accessed it last late Thursday PM. I received an email from a friend inquiring about the outage Friday PM. So, let's stop being polticians and embellishing the facts, we will get enough of that crap between now and November.

Skip

So you still claim that DVD-AF is free ? I just went to their website, and I see three ways that they are profiting from their users:

1) Banner ad for amazon
2) Posting hardware for sale using an Amazon affiliate ID
3) Asking for "donations" via PayPal

P.S. I have no affiliation with Intervocative other than using their software.

i can comfirm that the site was down on Tuesday......

Last time I accessed DVDPro was late on Wedesday. I was not home on Thursday, so I don't know what the status was, but it was still down on Friday.

The things people get worked up over. God forbid we can't access our DVD collections. There are only 5 or so other places to catalog your DVDs at if Profiler being down is too much for you to deal with.

I'm just wondering if some of the people in this forum stop bitching about unimportant things like Amazon cancelling orders, DVD Profiler being down and inserts not being included long enough to actually watch their DVDs.

No, it was EPJK who claimed it was free. And I think he was talking about DVD Profiler, not DVD AF at all.

For the record, the site was inaccessible as of last Monday night, the 23rd of February. Today is day six that they've been down.

Others have already posted that the site was down on Tuesday.

It's immaterial whether anyone will die if they're not back up. If you buy something online, and then they don't deliver your product, you won't die either, but I'll bet you'll expect your money back.

If not, e-mail me and I'll give you an address where you can mail a cheque.

Your pointless insult only shows that you can't contribute anything useful to this discussion.

How much business have they lost in this past week?

I have a guaranteed 99.9% uptime SLA with my datacenter. I assure you that I pay much less than $19,000 a year.

Even budget ISPs offer uptime guarantees these days, since server hardware is so much cheaper and more reliable than it used to be.

They've been down since Monday night at least. So let's count the days:

Monday (at least the last 6 hours of the day, EST)
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday (so far)

How many days is that?

If you think it's fewer than two I'll give you the answer: it's six.

Of course. But it doesn't take six days. I've done it myself many times - at most it takes the better part of a day. Then they have to copy over the old data (unless they can attach the old drive to the new box, which is likely unless it is the hard drive itself that failed - then they'd have to copy it over from the backup, which would be a bit slower).

My earlier point, which by this point has been blown out of proportion because I have had to respond to uninformed people, is that if the Intervocative rep is to be believed, then they can't afford or choose not to do what is necesary to get the server(s) back up quickly.

So far the message they've posted on their site is lying - or at least different than the unofficial message posted on another forum. I've been checking back - that message has been up for more than a few minutes.

It was Thursday for me.

It was late Thursday nite for me.

I last accessed the site on Thursday, early afternoon I believe.
I started a thread for it at HTF when I noticed it was down at 5 the same day.
Ken Cole from IVS posted there at 8:14pm on Friday confirming there have been hardware issues and that everyone was working on resolving them.

i think everyone needs to relax a bit around here....

Please tell us what's the difference in message they posted in another forum. From what I gathered from what's posted here and in Home Theater Forum, they posted same message... that they have multiple problems with their hardware and ISP and they are working to resolve them.

As much as I hate to disagree with you Jough, I was later than Monday. I was able to upload / download on 2/25. I am staring at the program screen right now. If you mean they starting experiencing difficulties on Monday night, that's another matter I cannot personally atest too. But I was able to upload to the server and download information to my program on 2/25.

Yes, that's the message they posted on the HTF - that they have had a hardware failure and problems with their ISP and are working to resolve them.

Their website says that the site is just unavailable for a "few minutes" due to "routine maintenance."

That's just spin. Why not just level with your customers?

I figure it's just a generic place marker that the ISP uses when a site is down.....

I'm looking forward to when I can update my collection (just bought Katharine Hepburn and Sam Waterston in _The Glass Menagerie_). Sucks that the site is down. Sucks that there's confusion. But many things suck more than that.

I hope they work it out soon, but mostly I hope that this doesn't affect their future (e.g., that people get so incensed that registrations will ebb, making upgrades more sparse).

For the record, I've been using them since mid 2000 (just registered a few months ago) and this is the first significant problem I've encountered and I'm more than content to live with little snags like this.

Cheers.

For the record, I went to Meijer's late at night on Wed, Feb 25th. I bought "Barbershop" that night, and did not get home until after midnight. When I got home, I added the DVD to my collection on DVD profiler. That was Thursday, Feb 26th.

So no, it has not been 6 days. You may not have been able to access the site for some reason, but it was certainly not down.

Now can we stop bickering about stupid crap like when it went down and what is considered "free"? Jaysis, you people are worse than children.

And people like you who like to bitch about other people bitching.

Anyways.....

DVDProfiler has been down now.....for what we can safely say 1 Business day....and 3 calendar days total.

I think the fact that this problem happend late Thursday night or early Friday morning contributes to the lack of the problem being fixed. Resolving this problem on the weekend may be difficult for the parties involved because they may be out of the office.

I agree with what Jough has said to a point....If you are an online business you need to be open 99.9% of the time....the fact that this problem is taking so long to resolve leaves me a bit miffed.

You would be miffed too if your favorite Starbucks on the way to work stopped serving coffee one day because all their machines broke down....you could forgive the problem one or two days....but going beyond that you start to question who you are giving your money to.

I think we should all relax, getting our undies in a bunch won't make DVDProfler come online any sooner....which is what we all want.