About the Recent Outage
Hi everyone,
As many of you have noticed, CertifiedOnDemand.com was unreachable for several days this past week. I’ve been flooded with all forms of communication asking why and when it will be available again. I tried to respond to as many of you as possible, and wanted to take a moment to explain what happened and what is being done to correct the problem.
Before I get into the specifics of the outage, I would like to first apologize. Particularly for those who had an exam scheduled during the outage, the site being unavailable can be extremely frustrating. I get it, I do. And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.
Why did CertifiedOnDemand.com go down?
The short answer: the hosting company dropped the ball. I’m not normally one to point the finger, but in this case, that is simply the reality. CertifiedOnDemand.com is built on WordPress and is currently hosted by Pressable, which specializes in hosting and optimizing WordPress sites. My experience with Pressable has largely been positive until recently. I’ve noticed that the site has gradually slowed over time, and within the month leading up to the outage last week there were a brief minor outages.
Then, CertifiedOnDemand.com went down for an extended period (roughly 48 hours), beginning 1/21/2015. The root cause for the outage is still under investigation by Pressable.
What is being done to prevent a future outage?
There are essentially two choices at this juncture: migrate to a new web host, or stick with Pressable.
The obvious choice would be to migrate web hosts. That was my initial reaction as well, and may well be the end result. However, there are some things that Pressable does that other hosts do not (e.g. built in CDN, ability to easily replicate sites for testing). Before I pull the trigger on a full migration (which is a fairly involved process), I would like them to give them a chance to provide evidence that this problem has been permanently resolved. If they can do that and increase the speed of the site, then I may give them a second chance. Otherwise, I will almost certainly be migrating web hosts in the days to come.
Thanks for your patience and support,
John
Hi John,
sales cloud quiz is not appearing ?
Are you logged in with a paid account? Seems to work for me…
I really appreciate you keeping us in the loop. I emailed a few times and you replied every time so thanks.
Hi John,
Just letting you know the quizzes appear to be down again… 🙁
Just tried to take the Company Profile quiz.
-kp
John, I’m glad to see this issue addressed. First of all, I wanted to say thank you so much for all the good material you have up on Certified On Demand.com. I have learned so much and I am really happy that you have made it available to the public for such an affordable price!
The outages have been frustrating however. There have been at least 5 or 6 times in the last month that I’ve attempted to access the site and gotten an error. I’m a single mom who works full time and has a lengthy commute. I only have an hour or at most, two per night to do the *many* things I need to do between the time my daughter goes to bed and the time when I need to crash so I can get up at 5 am and start all over again. It’s very frustrating to make the time to study only to see the site is down. I’m starting to wish I’d put my money towards a different learning tool that was a little more reliable.
When the site is up, the material is *great*. It has been a fantastic resource for me as a new Salesforce admin and I’m sure it’s also preparing me well for the exam which I hope to take next month. But I really wish I could be sure that I would be able to access the material when I needed it. It would be nice if there was an offline version or even a pdf version of the material available.
Hi Kara,
Thanks for the note, and I completely understand the frustration. I launched the site with the vision to be able to maintain the materials in one location, that I could ensure that updates were done periodically as needed. I have intentionally not launched an offline version as would not really fit with the original vision for the site. That said, it is something that I am considering with the recent issues.
Cheers,
John
I’m taking the exam in late March 2015 and I’m looking forward to using this site to help me study. Before I pay though, I’d like to get through some of the free sections to see how I like it (vs just using SF H&T resources). Will you email users when things are up and running properly? I’m ready to take a practice exam but it’s still not available…
Also, I took the SF ADM201 course in Spring 2013 but kept putting off the exam (doh!). I’m really nervous about it but I’m hoping CoD and my SF course resources plus my hands-on admin experience will help get the job done the first time around. Do you think 2 months is enough time to prepare?!
Hi Kristina,
Yes I will be sending out an email once I have a game plan together – the site is currently operational but I may end up migrating providers today. I’m in the process of evaluating that and don’t wont to notify everyone pre-maturely.
2 moths with some background experience sounds like a reasonable goal to me – learning is of course an individual thing, but I’ve heard of much more aggressive timelines being successful.
Good luck! Cheers,
John
John — Thanks for the update. I have an exam coming up and I was starting to get concerned that I wasn’t going to be able to depend on CoD anymore. Best of luck resolving the web hosting issue; I certainly hope CoD doesn’t go down when I need it most.
Update: it appears that the quizzes on the website are currently unavailable. Investigating.
Quizzes restored. All site functions are now restored. Please post or email if you find otherwise.
Root cause discovered at Pressable: http://status.pressable.com/2015/01/24/all-systems-operational/
I was migrated off of the “Bode” cluster, and the quizzes were lost as part of that migration. I manually migrated the quizzes once that was discovered.