UPDATE: April 16, 11:30am – See this note from the CEO of my IDX provider. All is returning to normal!
Hey Jay,
Looks like we have everything just about squared away. As you probably know one of our storage servers decided to freak out on Tuesday. Despite the fact that it was a high end storage server with numerous drives that were using RAID 5 for reliability it did fail. Our development team and I worked through the night on Tuesday to do everything we could. We were able to bring it back to life and put it back online yesterday morning but due to some corruption within the RAID it couldn’t handle the traffic put on it and failed again. We then made the decision to redownload every photo for those MLSs affected instead up spending our time resurrecting something that may or may not work ultimately.
Images are now being stored on Amazons S3 storage network and served up through Amazons Cloud Front content delivery network. This increases the reliability and speed in which the photos are being served up. Photos will now be served up to the IDX visitor from the closest of 14 datacenters around the world which 8 of them are in the US. Our tests show it is blazing fast.
Of the 62,556 properties in ARMLS only 2500 are left to still get photos for. This will be done within the next couple hours. Now that we are so close I have decided to enable the new photo location and remove the temporarily unavailable image. Once it is done we will resume our updates every 15 to 30 minutes.
In our five years being in business we have never experienced anything like this before. I personally appreciate your tact, patience and understanding in this situation. If you have any questions please let me know.
Justin LaJoie
President / CEO
Diverse Solutions
I really appreciate the Diverse Solutions team diligence and perseverance working through this little glitch. They’ve got a great product, technical issues happen, and they worked it out.
Ack, sometimes technology isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. . .
For the last 24 hours or so, there have been issues displaying the photos in our home search. The provider of this service is diligently addressing the issue and has a fix in place but it requires them to re-download all the photos for all the Multiple Listing Services they work with across the nation.
That’s a whole lot of photos.
I know this sucks, believe me. And I humbly apologize for the inconvenience. The problem will correct itself over the next few days.
On the bright side, they are putting 14 new servers on-line, which should help both speed and reliability.
No other data has been compromised, so what you see in your searches is accurate, albeit photoless (and yes, that may well be the most important part).
If you’re dying to see photos, email me and I’ll do my best to pull some directly from the MLS.
Thanks to all those that have emailed/called reporting the problem.
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{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
Now you just have to be more descriptive in your comments on the properties. You know such real selling words as cozy, cute, fixer upper, bring your ideas, and the latest one I noticed on our local MLS was “a decent rambler.” I wonder how the home owner feels about that one?!?!
**Kevin Curtis´s last blog post..St. Paul REO Nightmare #2
Funny comment Kevin. I have noticed the same thing up here in Portland. Everyone is just stuffing the description full of cute words that dont actually let me know anything other than the fact that the listing agent is good at rambling. Oh, and don’t call it a “fixer” if its nearly condemned, call it a fixer if it needs a new roof soon or something.
**Portland Real Estate´s last blog post..Helser’s on Alberta
We were experiencing the same problem here in Canada. A client gave me a call on Tuesday and said that there were no photos of her home on REALTOR.ca so I called our board and let them know about the situation. It seems that The Canadian Real Estate Association has been experiencing the same issues with one of their servers and the problem should be fixed today or tomorrow. The pictures are now working for this particular client’s listing but I will have to check on some of the other ones when I get a chance this evening. Cheers!
@Kevin @Portland – reminds me of a post I wrote back in September:
http://www.phoenixrealestateguy.com/real-estate-secret-decoder-ring/1262
@Exit – apparently something in the nexus of the universe is whacked…
You have got to love technology. I mean how funny is it that we as a society are so quick to freak out if I can’t see a picture this instant, I mean seriously… I mean 55,000 listings. . My MLS in salt lake city. WFRMLS, is a joke still. I can’t tell you how it is not he most user friendly system. I am glad to hear your MLS actually works pretty good. And that they have good customer service..
They were still having problems with our MLS system today! The worst part about this is that the clients are placing the blame on us, the agents. I hope they have this fixed before the weekend!
@ Exit Realty Nova Scotia – I think you may be mistaking us with someone else. We don’t handle any MLS’s in Canada. With the exception of a couple MLS’s whose servers are extremely slow we got all off the affected MLS’s back online very quickly.
Justin,
No I was only saying that we were experiencing problems with our MLS photos as well. Our problem was with the servers at CREA. The Canadian Real Estate Association. They seem to have everything going good now though.
@ Exit Realty Nova Scotia – Thats what happens when I text late at night on a Friday i guess – I didn’t reread the follow up posts my bad.
No worries! It sounds like it was quite a busy week. All the best!
I’m glad to hear everything go taken care of so quickly and professionally; Diverse Solutions does have a very good team.
I’m glad to see they were able to quickly fix the problem for you; Diverse Solutions really came through with great team work.
Just browsing and wanted to add a comment. I’ve come to the point where I don’t even like to use the word “fixer” in my real estate descriptions. In my recent real estate experience it seems that the banks get concerned when they see the word. A home may be a “fixer” to one person and perfectly livable to another. Food for thought…
Real Estate sales seem to be increasing in my town. I hope it continues and spreads.
Technology, can’t live with it, can’t live without it
**Brantford Real Estate Dude´s last blog post..Debit Card Scam at Colborne Subway
We can sure all do without these glitches in this real estate market. We need all the up time we can get:)
**Brad´s last blog post..The Weather is Getting Hot!
this one is great .perfectly written. . thanks .keep sharing.
this one is great .perfectly written. . thanks .keep sharing.