URLtea Bites It Again
Looks like I had spoken too soon about URLtea being back in it to win it.
An astute commenter on my previous “URLTea Dead” post just tipped me off to the site being dead, again.
Below is the text I got when visting the main site.
Site Temporarily Unavailable
We apologize for the inconvenience. Please contact the webmaster/ tech support immediately to have them rectify this.error id: “bad_httpd_conf”
Of course no word from them using Twitter. Although funnily enough when I went to check their twitter profile to confirm…
Another Twitter outage. Nothing new. Still, at least with the screen (as shown in the image above) I was given upon hitting the site, I was immediately aware of the issue, and was given some kind of assumed reassurance that the Twitter team would be working to repair the issue. URLTea’s “error page”? Not so much.
Once again I wish to invite the URLtea operators to touch base with their users, and let us know about outages, and the future of URLtea. With a growing number of URL-shortening services out there, it becomes less and less apparent why I or anyone else should use URLtea. If you guys are interested in building a service, or a company, which people feel comfortable sticking with and recommending, it is in your best interests to communicate once in a while.
Twitter is notorious for outages at this point, but they’re discussing it publicly and making it clear that they are working to fix these issues. Dreamhost has issues regularly, which they report to customers via RSS and other direct-to-customer methods (i.e. not just posting it up on the site and assuming people will go there to read). Rackspace has blown up a couple times, too, and they sent out a slew of direct-to-customer emails. The reason these companies still get the attention that they do is because they respond to these incidents.
So what’s the scoop, URLtea?
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Benjamin said,
June 17, 2008 @ 3:23 pm
Thanks for posting all this info on urlTea.com. I went to use the service today, and found they were no more. Very sad. I checked the whois, and there’s nothing but DreamHost proxy info and DH name servers. Having used DH, it’s likely they got squashed for traffic overage or CPU usage or something.
The “Site Temporary Unavailable” screenshot you posted is DH’s default “site doesn’t exist” presentation. So it seems someone has dumped the account.
Thanks for keeping on top of this. I hope they turn back up. It was a great site…and will be missed.
Benjamin said,
June 17, 2008 @ 3:25 pm
For what it’s worth, I just added an issue report to their Google Code page:
http://code.google.com/p/urltea/issues/detail?id=1
Giania said,
June 17, 2008 @ 3:32 pm
An excellent idea and a very well-put error report. Thank you!