Please use the new URL blog.clustrmaps.com December 18, 2009

New posts from now on will appear only at our new blog/news URL: http://blog.clustrmaps.com. Many thanks for reading!

[FINISHED] Disk maintenance affecting www4 maps only September 22, 2009

[UPDATE 20:15 GMT / 21:15 London – all is now restored, within a few minutes of our predicted time]

We had a scheduled maintenance on one of our disk array that we had to undertake earlier than expected, so we have not been able to provide advance warning. This will only affect users with HTML code that contains a ‘www4’ within it. The downtime should extend from approximately 16:00 GMT (17:00 London time) on 22 September 2009 until 20:00 GMT, i.e. a four-hour outage while the maintenance is undertaken. During the outage, thumbnail maps for www4 users do not get served, meaning there will be a small ‘counting gap’. As you know, we have always kept such gaps to a negligible proportion of our long-standing uptime over the years, and our forthcoming architecture revision will eliminate these gaps entirely with a better load-balancing and redundant server regime.

Many thanks for your patience.

6 Billion served… September 14, 2009

Coolio – we’ve now surpassed 6,000,000,000 (six billion) thumbnail maps served.

We’ve got some healthy competition, some serving even more widgets than us. But no one else has our massive scalability: namely, the ability to show millions of past visitor locations on a single, compact, and fast-loading map image. So we’re proud of maintaining our position as the fastest, most scalable, and simplest ‘quick gestalt overview’ hit counter map widget / visitor tracker, and one that still gives you public bragging rights directly in your home page or sidebar. Thanks once again to all our loyal users!

[FIXED] Server down-time affecting ‘www3’ maps only August 22, 2009

[UPDATE 20:10 UK time 23-Aug-2009: All is now fixed – apologies for the outage – details and the impact on your totals will follow in due course.]

[UPDATE 22:46 UK time 22-Aug-2009: there was a disk failure, affecting ONLY ‘www3’-based maps, for which we are now undergoing a major overnight recovery process. All maps, dots, data records, etc, are properly backed up, but in the worst case one day of ‘visitor processing’, i.e. the data for today, may be affected… please stay tuned for updates tomorrow when the restoration has been completed.]

As of the morning of Saturday 22nd August 2009 (UK time), we are experiencing an outage on one of our servers: ‘www3’. This means that if the HTML for your thumbnail map has a ‘www3’ in it, there will be no hits counted and no map displayed during this outage, and of course we are urgently investigating the situation. The vast majority of our users, who reside on our other servers, remain unaffected.

Many thanks for your patience!

Terms of service minor edit August 13, 2009

We made a minor wording correction to make the table on our Terms of Service page (describing cookie usage) match more precisely with the detailed wording that is already beneath it. This is to correctly represent our own need to collect more statistical information from our own pages, with no personally identifiable information involved:

13th August 2009: Table 1, Cell A2: “First-party cookies may be used, but only for clustrmaps.com affiliate reward schemes (see below).” –> “First-party cookies may be used, for example, for clustrmaps.com affiliate reward schemes (see below).”

13 de agosto de 2009: Tabla 1, celda A2: “Cookies de origen pueden ser usados, pero solo para esquemas de recompensa a afiliados a clustrmaps.com (ver abajo).” –> “Cookies de origen pueden ser usados, por ejemplo, para esquemas de recompensa a afiliados a clustrmaps.com (ver abajo).”

13 августа 2009: Табл. 1, ячейка А2: «Могут использоваться собственные файлы cookie, но только для реализации схем вознаграждения партнеров clustrmaps.com (см ниже).» –> «Могут использоваться собственные файлы cookie, например, для реализации схем вознаграждения партнеров clustrmaps.com (см ниже).»

DDOS/DNS: Hosting provider Denial Of Service Attack! July 28, 2009

We understand that our hosting provider, one of the most robust providers in the business, was hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack, which knocked out its Domain Name Servers (DNS). We also understand that they are ‘on the case’, although it takes a while for the ‘fix’ to propagate around the Internet. We are taking independent action to provide a fallback DNS service in the next few hours, so this will also alleviate the temporary bottleneck.

It looks like a large number of services were affected by this, e.g. TechMeme itself, where you might normally look to find out some news!

In any event, we will report more fully as soon as we have more information – many thanks for bearing with us!