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One of our Year End Wrap-up Blogs. Others include 2022 Year in Review, RunSignup 2022 Product Recap and RunSignup 2023 Product Plan. Also, here is our 2023 Roadmap Webinar. We are bringing back our old Availability and Infrastructure Yearly Report after being distracted by the pandemic. We continue to post blogs about important issues that […]
Like much of the web, RunSignup and GiveSignup host our infrastructure on Amazon AWS. Unfortunately, they had a pretty major outage on Wednesday before Thanksgiving in one of their data centers. It took down major websites like 1Password, Acorns, Adobe Spark, Anchor, Autodesk, Capital Gazette, Coinbase, DataCamp, Getaround, Glassdoor, Flickr, iRobot, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pocket, RadioLab, Roku, RSS Podcasting, Tampa Bay Times, Vonage, The Washington Post, and WNYC. Apparently this was caused by their rush […]
Knock on wood, but this is our 4th year in a row with 100% uptime. As we have covered in the past, we view the core of our company is building reliable transaction processing that allows races and nonprofits to collect money. This year we will process $270 Million – allowing participants, attendees and donors […]
Knock on wood, but it was the third year in a row with 100% uptime – zero downtime. We actually just completed a migration to the newest version of PHP that as you can see from the graph below saved about 15-20 milliseconds: We had several highlights from the year on the positive side: Major […]
Knock on wood, but it has been another great year for RunSignUp availability, hitting a perfect 100% for the second year in a row! As we covered in February when a major outage for many sites on the Internet like Slack, Trello and Venmo, RunSignUp’s advanced infrastructure was able to weather the storm. And having […]
There are a number of processes that run on a scheduled basis in a big system like RunSignUp – these are called Chronjobs. They are typically run on one server in most environments, and that is how we did things until today. As part of our infrastructure upgrade, we have added the ability for these […]
Perhaps tempting fate writing this 2 weeks before the end of the year… We had 8 minutes of total down time in 2015. That is 99.998% uptime. The good news is that all 8 minutes were planned downtime for required system upgrades and we were able to notify users and not miss transactions: 2 Minutes […]
We did a database upgrade this morning, and some users may have received an error message during the approximately 1 minute the database was down. If they re-submitted their page everything would continue to process as normal. We upgraded from MySQL 5.5 to 5.6 on our main database, our read replica and our shard servers. […]
For the first 6 months of 2015 we had 99.998 availability, with NO unplanned outages (knock on wood). We have had 1,590 releases of our site this year thru August 3, with only 2 requiring us to take the site down (2 minutes once and 5 minutes once). The two planned outages in the first […]
At around 2:00 AM on July 31 our Cloud provider, Amazon AWS, had trouble with three of the services that we use (SQS, SNS, and SES) simultaneously. The outage lasted until about 3:40 AM. This impacted about 50 transactions. We have been able to recover all but 3 of those transactions, and have contacted those […]
We have been asked by a customer to document our disaster recovery plan, and we figured that it might be useful to document this for other customers as well as provide an example to other websites who might want to use a modern approach to these topics. As with most modern apps, most of our […]
In 2014 we had outages totaling 16-21 minutes (depending on how you count an outage) for an availability of 99.996%. This is down from 99.998% in 2013. As usual, we do a year end (well, almost – there are still 7 days to go as this is written) report on our availability for the year. […]
Our site was down from 6:31 PM Eastern for about 8 minutes. This was due to a deployment we did, which ironically enough was to help prevent issues if the Amazon Content Delivery Network was unavailable, we would be able to quickly recover from that. We have since deployed the change successfully with no interruption.
We had a 5 minute outage early this morning for 5 minutes at 12:53AM Eastern time. We were doing a deployment and it triggered errors. That error was corrected as quickly as possible. We apologize for the outage. This deployment we did was part of investigating a tricky bug that is causing 1 error per […]
We had a partial problem that affected about 1/8 of our users on Thursday at 3:24PM until 3:28 PM. It disrupted one person who was in the process of signing up for a race – meaning they were redirected back to the starting page to sign up again. Other users may have seen a need […]
As always, we report any availability issues in the spirit of transparency. We did a database migration early this morning to better support International customers. The migration took 3 minutes and 29 seconds to complete. During this time, the site functioned fully with two caveats. If someone was trying to check out at that time, […]
We had about 2 minutes at 7:25 AM Eastern this morning where about half of requests were not being serviced properly. No transactions were lost, but users would have had to click refresh on their browsers. There was an unusual bug on one of our http servers where requests were not properly rerouted to the […]
Our 2013 Availability was 99.9981% for the year. We screwed up twice, and had one planned outage for a total “downtime” of less than 7 minutes for the year and partial registration impact affecting about 15% of customers for about 115 minutes. This is an improvement from the 14 hours and 36 minutes, or 99.933% […]
One of the Amazon servers went into a hang mode yesterday (always on a Sunday ;-). As we have written before, all of our servers are set up in a redundant fashion, but there are always “gotchas” that you can only learn from experience. We did not have down time, but the site was slow […]
As we have committed to, we do a bi-annual report on Availability of the RunSignUp Service. As previously reported, we put a lot of effort in during 2012 to create a multi-faceted approach to high availability for our customers. During the first half of 2013 we only screwed up badly once. This was due […]
Knock on wood. Our availability improvements in 2012 have proven to keep us on track. Even with a massive upgrade with Clubs earlier this week we have zero downtime in 2013. I hope we didn’t just jinx ourselves 😉
Today we made a nice update to our Discount/Membership capabilities to better support Triathlons by giving Race Directors and Triathletes a very simple way to add USAT Insurance. To accomplish this, we needed to update some pages for race directors as well as participants. More importantly, we had to update the database structure to not […]
We’ve done a lot of work this year on improving the availability of our Service. Over the past several months we have moved to completion of that in parallel with our scalability project and have reached a point of stability and the highest level of service we can think of in our architecture. This means […]
One of the things we want to do at RunSignUp is be pretty transparent about how we operate. It helps us understand what is good and what we can improve upon in a direct fashion. As you may know, we run on the Amazon Cloud. This gives us a large number of advantages in terms […]
One of our Year End Wrap-up Blogs. Others include 2022 Year in Review, 2022 Availability Report, Company Strategy, TicketSignup 2022 Product Recap, RunSignup 2022 Product Recap, and TicketSignup Product Roadmap. Taking time to reflect on the past year while also planning out the year ahead? We are too! Bob and Allison sit down to discuss company progress and placement for RunSignup, […]
One of our Year End Wrap-up Blogs. Others include 2022 Year in Review, 2022 Availability Report, Company Strategy, TicketSignup 2022 Product Recap, RunSignup 2022 Product Recap, and TicketSignup Product Roadmap. Also, here is our 2023 Roadmap Webinar. We are very excited about the coming year of advancements we have planned for our endurance customers using […]
One of our Year End Wrap-up Blogs. Others include 2022 Year in Review, 2022 Availability Report, Company Strategy, TicketSignup 2022 Product Recap, RunSignup 2023 Product Plan, and TicketSignup Product Roadmap. Also, here is our 2023 Roadmap Webinar. One of the things we pride ourselves on is the concept of Continuous Improvement. Since the fundamental thing […]
One of our Year End Wrap-up Blogs. Others include 2022 Availability Report, RunSignup 2022 Product Recap, TicketSignup 2022 Product Recap, RunSignup 2023 Product Roadmap, and TicketSignup Product Roadmap. Also, here is our 2023 Roadmap Webinar. RunSignup helped our customers process $400 Million for their events in 2022. We have continued our growth in our core RunSignup endurance […]
Note from Dec. 15 2022 – We have deployed an upgraded layer of software that controls our session management that is adaptive to high demand and removes the problem with the Apache Webserver cache mechanism that caused some slow performance on Thanksgiving morning. We had over 750,000 people sign up for 730 Turkey Trots who […]
On this Thanksgiving Eve, we wanted to take a little time to say our thanks as a team! Here are 20 things we’re thankful about this year. 1. Thanks to Our Customers (that’s YOU!) First and foremost, we are SO THANKFUL for our customers. Our business only exists because of your business, and we’re thankful […]
Q3 2022 saw several trends in our business: We share our high level numbers and thoughts on the market and technology advances on a quarterly and yearly basis – 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, Q1 2022, Q2 2022. RunSignup Quarterly Numbers We had a record quarter as we continue to benefit from strong word of mouth about our technology platform […]
Events are the best way for breweries to increase foot traffic, drive sales, engage with existing customers, and get new people to your brewery. While the beer industry grew just 1% in 2021, the craft brewer industry continues to experience higher growth rates, expanding by 8% in 2021 according to the 2021 Annual Craft Brewing Production Report. […]
We are planning to do an upgrade to Amazon AWS Aurora MySQL 2 sometime in the next week and a half. We expect less than 5 minutes of potential system impact. Another blog will be posted the day before we do the upgrades. Planned Impact There should be minimal impact with the whole upgrade process […]
We have been doing the race registration market analysis every 6 months for many years. We include a ton of analytical data, and also include our analysis of happenings and directions in the market (of course that analysis is done from our perspective and is sometimes biting to competitors but tries to be honest). Here […]
Part of Bob’s continued ramblings. One of the things that a lot of companies do is “chase the deal”. They close on sales tactics and quite often “special” pricing. I’ve been at lots of companies like this, and one of my goals at RunSignup was to avoid this spiral. Create a good product for a good […]
Q2 2022 saw several trends: Races are down about 20% from their 2019 numbers, and 25% of races over 500 participants in 2019 are not back and likely not returning RunSignup has seen continued market share growth Registration vendors are getting very aggressive given the shrinkage in the market RunSignup / GiveSignup Peer to Peer […]
Today’s topic on Founders Corner is about having an Open strategy to technology and business. Like other topics, this is one of the foundational elements of our strategy at RunSignup. In fact, one of the reasons I wanted to create the company was the closed business and technology approach registration vendors were taking – and […]
Rowan University Students Create Mobile Timer App RunSignup continues its partnership with Rowan University by working with its talented computer science students through the university’s Computer Field Experience course. As part of this program we sponsored two 6-student scrum teams that were tasked with planning, designing, and implementing a solution based on RunSignup’s project specifications […]
As we enter a new year, we are producing multiple blogs that give a full 2021 Product Recap, 2021 RaceDay Recap, Product Roadmap for 2022, our Vision for 2022 and Beyond, and this one – which will review 2021 from a business perspective. 2021 was a year of “kind of” returning to normal. Our business recovered more than […]
A major set of problems at Amazon Web Services East Region started around 10:30 AM on December 7. Fortunately, GiveSignup | RunSignup continued to process transactions and serve our customer’s tens of thousands of websites during the entire time. Here is the post mortem description from AWS. The impact was very widespread: Ticketmaster had to […]
While Q2 was about returning to 2019 levels, Q3 saw us return to growth mode with transaction volume increasing 32% over Q3 2019. In 2021 we are comparing our numbers to 2019 – the last year of normalcy. The quick way to see how our community has recovered is to compare the total transaction volume […]
Join us in welcoming Kristian Decker, the newest addition to the development organization taking on a technical leadership role in DevOps. Regular followers of our blog have seen all of the great engineering talent that has joined the company this year. Kristian’s role in DevOps will enable our team to reach their maximize efficiency while […]
We release an annual RaceTrends Report each winter to provide a thorough assessment of the state of the endurance and fundraising events industry. This year, as event organizers adapt to new conditions, we are pulling a few key metrics mid-year to provide a real-time look at what we are seeing. Just want the highlights? You […]
Q2 marks the quarter where our business and our customer’s business returned to growth. Vaccination rates going up, cases, hospitalizations and deaths going down dramatically caused states to open up. As we had been expecting, that is great news for live events. The cover photo above is from the Scott Coffee Run. We wrote about […]
Unfortunately, our 5 year, 9 month and 1 day of 100% uptime with zero time down even for maintenance of the GiveSignup | RunSignup system came to an end at 4:16 Eastern time on June 28, 2021. It lasted for 4 minutes before we were fully operational again. The last time the system was unavailable […]
It seemed like the whole country went from 60 mph to 0 in March, 2020 for our endurance and nonprofit customers putting on events. Here we are in early June, 2021 and it feels like we are going from 0 back to 60! One of the simple charts we have is showing the total $ […]
UPDATE: The new USAT API is now live and we are processing all requests with the new system around noon Thursday June 3, 2021. USATriathlon will be going live with a new membership validation, selling and waiver system on June 2, 2021. USAT has a FAQ posted here. The good news is that there is […]
Q1 2021 marks the turning point for our business. Looking back on the quarter, the year started slowly with many customers and supporters consumed with very high COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths, concerns about vaccine distribution, and the tumultuous passing of power in our government. By March, things had started to turn back closer to […]
TLDR; January – February – Customers are happy, our business is up 29% and life is good! March – OMG-OMG-OMG! We have paid over $75 Million to races that have not happened! Will we survive? Employees take a 50% cut in pay. Everyone stays and works twice as hard. April – PPP! Virtual Races! Employees […]
We usually do our Year in Review in a single blog post. This year has been much too big to put it all in one place, so we are breaking it up a bit. We already published our 2020 Development Recap. This one will cover our product roadmap for 2021. First, we will continue our investment in […]
