Server status

General (non-technical) Testing Forum for Moderators / Admins
#1

Just creating this thread to keep people in the loop regarding our sites current issues.

We are currently experiencing ‘500 server errors’ due to a global problem with our webhost.

After a lengthy 1 hour wait, they confirmed that this issue isn’t localized to our site, and is in fact a global issue with their data centers.

They are working on fixing this issue as a high level priority, but couldn’t give us an ETA. 

We hope that due to this being a high priority and global issue, that this will be resolved asap.

Our host has been extremely reliable in the 3 years we have used them, and this is actually the first time we have had any issues with them in this 3 year period.

Naturally it has come at an incredibly bad time, with us just releasing a new plugin. All we can say is that we are the most frustrated party here, and will keep you all up to date.

We are extremely sorry for any inconvenience caused.

#2

Update: We have been informed that our host has fixed their server issues.

We have been monitoring our site and it appears that this issue has indeed been fixed.

We will be keeping a close eye on the situation. Please let us know if you experience any problems.

Thank you.

#3

Thanks for keeping us posted

#4

Update: We have been informed that our host has fixed their server issues.

We have been monitoring our site and it appears that this issue has indeed been fixed.

We will be keeping a close eye on the situation. Please let us know if you experience any problems.

Thank you.

#5

Thanks for keeping us posted

#6

@Gremlin, 

Just purchased the Chartboost plugin and that was one of my concerns, because you are checking the license at startup if your server is down it is going to report back with a networkError when there really isn’t one.

Any chance you guys might add in some caching for the license ie: it only validates every other day or something of that nature?

Nice plugin work though :slight_smile:

Christopher

#7

Yeah, we got the bulk of that work done on iOS, and some on Android… However, we haven’t found the time to finish it off just yet.

It is still on our todo list though.
Thanks for the feedback.

#8

I suggest only one validation is needed per device. You can save an encrypted files that contains the validation with the device id. When the app starts up next time, check the local encrypted file first to see if everything & the device id matches. If not, check the license server again. There is really no need to check every time via network requests with your license server. This will ease a lot of overhead and minimise possible faults. 

On the other hand, as I suggested in the earlier supporting system, to find out a better way for the license validation. I know you have tried different methods. I just think it is really unnecessary to do this kind of checking when the license model is per developer based. So I hope you will keep this issue in mind and will make it a wise solution one day.

#9

joe528 brings up very good points. This license checking model is not scalable. A popular game could lose thousands of dollars if you experience a server issue.

#10

@Joe, as we said previously, we appreciate the suggestions, but your thought process is nothing different than ours. We know about this and share the same view. Repeating it can’t help us do it, time is the only thing that can.

We would love to do x/y, but it all involves time, time of which is in short supply for anything other than plugin work. We have invested $15k dollars of man hours into these plugins (and lost this much money in the process of making them), and made a $300 return.

Just to add: We have listened to your customer requests, in a big way. We got rid of the two teir pricing (year+app limit), got rid of the app limit, reduced the price by over half, etc. So we have done our best to satisfy, you the customer to the best of our ability and resources, based on an extremely low return on our investment.

Until those figures start changing, we can’t afford to loose more money on something that isn’t making money. Changing the licensing system isn’t going to make us more money. We need to recoup that huge loss before engaging in other time consuming activities. 

PS: Our servers have both fallback and load-balancing mechanisms in place. 

PPS: If someone wants to contribute the cross platform code that would be needed to implement these suggested changes, then we would gladly look it over.

#11

Just my two cents,

Applications and Games should never have any one point of failure so in this example if in the “off chance” that  the plugin could not reach the license server then your app/game should be smart enough to fall back to something like adMob or another ad network.

@dfox, if you have a game that is that popular then you need to upgrade to enterprise anyway and in which case you can just download the actual Chart Boost SDK and recompile or simply fall back to another ad network if the license fails.

Everything above you should be doing anyway because take the license check out of the equation for a second and you still have the same problem, and from what little experience I have with Chart Boost I can tell you that I would be more concerned about Chart Boost going up and down than I would be about Gremlins plugin but that is just in my experience.

I actually just started building my own ad network not a money earning, or pay to advertise model but a simple for every ad you show yours gets shown etc. already built the back end and have been using it for about 3 weeks with about 4-5 k impressions per day just on my own stuff testing was just going to put it online and make it free so new games could get a boost in installs/ratings to help all the indies out :slight_smile:

In any case I use Amazon S3 so when the app first loads I pull down a json file that actually tells the game “by id” what ads it should be running so for example if it gets a 3 that means run chartboost, admob and my network on a round robin type rotation, if it gets a 4 it means just run Chart Boost but fall back to admob, so on and so forth I have a ton of different values for this.

Then at any given time I can update the json file push it up to my S3 and everyone of my games switch ad networks on the fly without any new updates etc.

Any way just my two cents. :slight_smile:

@Gremlin, you guys are doing a great job :slight_smile:

#12

I can understand your investment/return concern. I don’t know how big the market is for Corona+Chartboost, maybe you already did some research before committing to do the plugins. So if it’s big enough for you to make money from research, maybe there is some marketing work or word-of-mouth needed in order for your plugins to be known/purchased by more developers. Besides, for plugin business, I think it’s more long-term & smaller but steady income instead of a quick jump in revenue. For example, if you can make $500 a month after more marketing & enhanced quality, you will make your money back after 30 months and you will continue make money for the life time of the plugin, maybe another 5-10 years. Hence, you may want to find the balance between further investment, marketing and returns.

I think it needs some time before your plugin can take off. For example, after I tried your plugin and Chartboost, I really like your plugin and I also like the return of Chartboost. So I will mention about it here and there and people will start to know Chartboost is actually a good service provider and your plugin is actually a good work. You just don’t have enough people saying about it “yet”.

#13

Thanks :slight_smile:

Just a note to any enterprise customers. Our plugins are also available for you. Links to grab the binaries are on our plugin documentation pages.

Thanks Joe, it probably is marketing. Either that or the market isn’t big enough… who knows. :>

#14

@Gremlin, 

Just purchased the Chartboost plugin and that was one of my concerns, because you are checking the license at startup if your server is down it is going to report back with a networkError when there really isn’t one.

Any chance you guys might add in some caching for the license ie: it only validates every other day or something of that nature?

Nice plugin work though :slight_smile:

Christopher

#15

Yeah, we got the bulk of that work done on iOS, and some on Android… However, we haven’t found the time to finish it off just yet.

It is still on our todo list though.
Thanks for the feedback.

#16

I suggest only one validation is needed per device. You can save an encrypted files that contains the validation with the device id. When the app starts up next time, check the local encrypted file first to see if everything & the device id matches. If not, check the license server again. There is really no need to check every time via network requests with your license server. This will ease a lot of overhead and minimise possible faults. 

On the other hand, as I suggested in the earlier supporting system, to find out a better way for the license validation. I know you have tried different methods. I just think it is really unnecessary to do this kind of checking when the license model is per developer based. So I hope you will keep this issue in mind and will make it a wise solution one day.

#17

joe528 brings up very good points. This license checking model is not scalable. A popular game could lose thousands of dollars if you experience a server issue.

#18

@Joe, as we said previously, we appreciate the suggestions, but your thought process is nothing different than ours. We know about this and share the same view. Repeating it can’t help us do it, time is the only thing that can.

We would love to do x/y, but it all involves time, time of which is in short supply for anything other than plugin work. We have invested $15k dollars of man hours into these plugins (and lost this much money in the process of making them), and made a $300 return.

Just to add: We have listened to your customer requests, in a big way. We got rid of the two teir pricing (year+app limit), got rid of the app limit, reduced the price by over half, etc. So we have done our best to satisfy, you the customer to the best of our ability and resources, based on an extremely low return on our investment.

Until those figures start changing, we can’t afford to loose more money on something that isn’t making money. Changing the licensing system isn’t going to make us more money. We need to recoup that huge loss before engaging in other time consuming activities. 

PS: Our servers have both fallback and load-balancing mechanisms in place. 

PPS: If someone wants to contribute the cross platform code that would be needed to implement these suggested changes, then we would gladly look it over.

#19

Just my two cents,

Applications and Games should never have any one point of failure so in this example if in the “off chance” that  the plugin could not reach the license server then your app/game should be smart enough to fall back to something like adMob or another ad network.

@dfox, if you have a game that is that popular then you need to upgrade to enterprise anyway and in which case you can just download the actual Chart Boost SDK and recompile or simply fall back to another ad network if the license fails.

Everything above you should be doing anyway because take the license check out of the equation for a second and you still have the same problem, and from what little experience I have with Chart Boost I can tell you that I would be more concerned about Chart Boost going up and down than I would be about Gremlins plugin but that is just in my experience.

I actually just started building my own ad network not a money earning, or pay to advertise model but a simple for every ad you show yours gets shown etc. already built the back end and have been using it for about 3 weeks with about 4-5 k impressions per day just on my own stuff testing was just going to put it online and make it free so new games could get a boost in installs/ratings to help all the indies out :slight_smile:

In any case I use Amazon S3 so when the app first loads I pull down a json file that actually tells the game “by id” what ads it should be running so for example if it gets a 3 that means run chartboost, admob and my network on a round robin type rotation, if it gets a 4 it means just run Chart Boost but fall back to admob, so on and so forth I have a ton of different values for this.

Then at any given time I can update the json file push it up to my S3 and everyone of my games switch ad networks on the fly without any new updates etc.

Any way just my two cents. :slight_smile:

@Gremlin, you guys are doing a great job :slight_smile:

#20

I can understand your investment/return concern. I don’t know how big the market is for Corona+Chartboost, maybe you already did some research before committing to do the plugins. So if it’s big enough for you to make money from research, maybe there is some marketing work or word-of-mouth needed in order for your plugins to be known/purchased by more developers. Besides, for plugin business, I think it’s more long-term & smaller but steady income instead of a quick jump in revenue. For example, if you can make $500 a month after more marketing & enhanced quality, you will make your money back after 30 months and you will continue make money for the life time of the plugin, maybe another 5-10 years. Hence, you may want to find the balance between further investment, marketing and returns.

I think it needs some time before your plugin can take off. For example, after I tried your plugin and Chartboost, I really like your plugin and I also like the return of Chartboost. So I will mention about it here and there and people will start to know Chartboost is actually a good service provider and your plugin is actually a good work. You just don’t have enough people saying about it “yet”.