This coming Saturday, October 10th, at 11:00pm EST, we will be moving Wufoo to a new home with Rackspace. During this move we are expecting all services to be unavailable for 30 minutes.

If you’re up or interested, you can follow our progress during the downtime on our Tumblr Status Blog and/or Twitter feed.

First and foremost, we would like to emphasize that this move is not an emergency move. We have been planning the move with Bitpusher, who currently hosts and administrates Wufoo, since July, and we will continue working with them as administrators after the move. The idea to move came about during the summer when we felt we were stretched too thin. Rapid growth led to scaling problems that, even though we were able to solve them, left us feeling unprepared. We felt that if we could find a company to take care of the hardware, networking and redundancy side of things, we would be able to start focusing on rolling out new features. Rackspace provides us with a best class infrastructure supported by an army of engineers, which gives us the confidence we are leaving nothing to chance.

The immediate benefits of the move are not readily apparent, but they are significant. In a sentence — more eyes leads to more reliability. More eyes will be watching backups to make sure they ran. More eyes will be watching our server usage to see if any thresholds have been passed. More eyes will be looking for any potential problem that could affect our service. We take pride in the responsibility you place in us, and we’re excited to be doing our part by adding more resources as we grow.

Hey everyone, we just wanted to let you know that we will be performing maintenance on Wufoo’s infrastructure this coming Saturday, which will require us to take down the form processing servers. The scheduled outage is to happen on :

This will actually be the first phase of a two part upgrade we’re doing to improve the backend of Wufoo to better handle our current rate of growth and to anticipate future scaling needs. The second phase should take place some time in the next few weeks. During the downtime this Saturday, we’ll be adding some additional hardware that will improve our backup system and make it more robust. We’ll also be putting our new file system online which will improve our database access speeds.

Please note that while the system is unavailable, all Wufoo pages will show a maintenance screen, and public forms and reports will show a text message (black text on white background) explaining that the form is undergoing maintenance. Also, our mail servers will still be working and so you will be able to get a hold of us at support@wufoo.com.

Please prepare your sites appropriately and thanks again for bearing with us as we continue to grow.

Update : Many of you are asking about the length of the downtime. The honest answer is : it depends. The servers will be down for at least 10 minutes for the basic updates and config changes. After that, we will be trying something new and experimental. Basically, we plan to update each account one at a time, which will allow all other accounts to remain functional while one is being worked on. If this plan succeeds (and our testing so far shows that it will) then each account will only be down for about 30 seconds after that original 10 minutes. However, if our plan doesn’t work, all of Wufoo could be down from anywhere between 3 and 15 hours while we have to update everyone all at once. Our support line will be open, and we will get the blog up as soon as possible, so we will do or best to keep you updated on Saturday as soon as we know more.

This post is to inform you that we will be performing maintenance on Wufoo this coming Saturday. The scheduled outage is:

Saturday, March 1st, 2008
7:00pm EST - 8:00pm EST
View All Timezones

While the scheduled time slot is one hour, we do want to alert you to the potential of delays. Wufoo is unique in the way that each account is isolated for security, which can cause unexpected behavior when performing updates. If this setup interferes with the work we will be performing Saturday, a full transfer to the new hardware must be done. This transfer would take approximately 5 hours. Our initial testing shows that we should be able to avoid this, but we want to give you the heads up to make you aware of everything going on.

The downtime is for the addition of hardware that will improve performance, stability and add enhancements to our backup procedures. While the system is unavailable, all Wufoo pages will show a maintenance screen and public forms and reports will show a text message (black text on white background) explaining that the form is undergoing maintenance. Please prepare your sites appropriately. Thanks for bearing with us as we continue to grow.

Hey everyone,

Sunday at midnight, we had scheduled some downtime for Wufoo to transfer our current setup to some new servers in another facility. We, unfortunately, ran into some unexpected problems and the downtime spilled over into this Monday morning. For that, we offer the most sincere apologies. The purpose of this message is to let you know that all accounts are now up and functioning properly, and that we are a bit embarrassed at the level of service we provided this morning.

For those of you interested in the technical details, here’s what happened. Wufoo is unique in that each form created is essentially it’s own database setup. Because of this, we have some complicated and non-traditional procedures that need to be followed when we make changes like we did today to our servers. When we moved the accounts to the new servers, the actual estimated transfer time was about 55 minutes. The first transfer completed on time, but due to our setup, certain configuration files were corrupted in the process. After that first transfer, it took us 3 additional transfers plus some digging time to isolate and fix the problem.

We’ll be the first to tell you that we have no excuses to justify all the things that went wrong today, and we have learned quite a few things from the experience. In the future, we will be running maintenance on Friday / Saturday night to prevent any chance of the work week being affected, and we will always test as much as we can ahead of time given our resources. Additionally, we’re working on a way for you to be better notified in these situations. We have to present proper error messages on your sites to keep not just you, but your users informed as well — there will be no cryptic database messages in the future from Wufoo.

Thanks to everyone who was patient and understanding while we worked on this. You guys were great. We, obviously, have a lot of work to do now, but we assure you that this isn’t a common thing for us. For our recent crop of users and customers, we hope you don’t judge us by these hiccups.

Again, we can’t thank you enough for your understanding.

We will be performing maintenance tonight, 5/13/2007, at 12 EST (midnight). The upgrade should take approximately 1 hour. The servers are coming down because we are moving to a faster, more flexible, and more reliable data center. Thanks for your understanding.

Hey everyone. We were just informed by BitPusher that our servers have to come down for a bit tonight. It appears that our location has to do work on the power supplies. All of our equipment is on redundant power feeds to two separate Power Distribution Units, but unfortunately they will be bringing down both PDUs that we are connected to. The details are below — if anything changes, we’ll be sure to let you know.

Estimated START Time: 11/03/2006 21:00 PST

Estimated END Time: 11/04/2006 01:00:00 PST

UPDATE : And we’re back up. Thanks everyone for your patience.

As expected, launch was both exciting and rough. With thousands of signups and an Alexa ranking of around 2000, we experienced a few server crashes and headaches. Yesterday afternoon, we switched over our primary server to a brand new box, and began to see some progress. We’ve been working around the clock with BitPusher to examine different scenarios and minimize downtime. While we are going through these growing pains, we thank you for your patience and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.

On a happier note, when we weren’t stressing over server issues, we did manage to get some heavily requested code fixes/features implemented. For now, I’ll post them here, but in the future we will have a change log for this sort of documentation.

Entries Page

• When you add and remove field columns from the grid, the fields are now ordered by their position on the form instead of the order they were created in.

• Datagrid settings are now stored in cookies. So, when you add and remove columns they will be remembered for the next time you come back to the page. Expect page number and sorting history to come soon, as well as all of this functionality to the reports section.

• Deleting an entry now properly deletes all files associated with that entry.

Admin Only Fields

• Name, Address, and Checkboxes now save properly when flagged as admin only.

• When submissions are emailed to you, they are now correctly formatted when admin only fields are involved.

Form Builder

• When using a free account, you should now be able to edit fields even when you have reached your max limit of 10.

Thanks to all of you Wufooers out there — keep the bug reports and suggestions coming in!