Subsurface website down?
- Thread starter magste
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Hey, thanks for posting! I was having issues, too. 
dirkhh
Contributor
The joys of trying to provide free services for people... part of the infrastructure is actually running on a server in my home - and we had a massive ice storm take out power yesterday. It came back about 25 minutes ago 
I keep getting asked why I'm not running this "in the cloud". It's a simple question of
On the flip side, the way Subsurface works is that you have local caches of all data, so nothing is ever lost just because the cloud server is down. So even with the most generous point of view, this is not 'critical infrastructure'
Anyway, I hope power stays back on...
I keep getting asked why I'm not running this "in the cloud". It's a simple question of
- I want this to be free for the Subsurface users
- we had a couple of disgruntled users try to run up my cloud bill, one of them very cleverly and sadly very successfully - turns out many TB of ingress/egress at AWS add up quite quickly
On the flip side, the way Subsurface works is that you have local caches of all data, so nothing is ever lost just because the cloud server is down. So even with the most generous point of view, this is not 'critical infrastructure'
Anyway, I hope power stays back on...
Clearly a labor of love Thank you
Belzelbub
Contributor
dirkhh
Contributor
It's kinda interesting what you learn about humans by providing something for free.
I understand people who prefer other dive log options. Our UI is mostly built (I won't claim "designed") by people who are not UI developers. And it shows. We'd love to find UI developers who are divers and motivated to help us make things better... but we are also resource constrained simply with the number of people actively contributing.
Yet, the amount of vitriol and hate and negativity that I get (and I say "I" instead of "we" because I have redirected things so that most of the initial "contact" and "support" emails go to me in order to limit the exposure to all that) is pretty stunning. And I'm not talking about the random 1* reviews in the app stores. Those are just normal, I think. People have an easy to solve problem, never contact us in order to get help and instead post a scathing review. It appears that all app developers experience that. But for some reason Subsurface has attracted a few far more creative and targeted haters. It must be my charming personality
But. And that's a huge BUT.
We have also attracted an amazing community of wonderful people. We get so much positive feedback and encouragement, so many people who seem to genuinely appreciate what we do and who understand the limitations that we have because this isn't a product but instead simply a hobby project that has grown a bit bigger than we ever expected. I still remember how surprised Linus and I were when we noticed by looking at download stats that we apparently had more than a hundred users. And then a thousand. And then ten thousand. And then... yeah, wow.
Humbling.
And at times a bit stressful.
Like when your server goes down and once power is back up you have a few hundred messages that range from curious questions and concern to the predictable "what the F*** is wrong with your service"
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