

Why I hate tumblr. - anujkk

I created my tumblr account on Sep 1, 2011. I was using it for my personal blog - http://blog.anujkumar.com . That link won't work because my tumblr blog is down as always. During this 6 month period tumblr gave me an unmatched uptime of less than 10%. Most of the time it was down. I was forced to mail their customer service again and again to get my blog up. They responed but again after a week or two my blog was unavailable. I'm unable to access my blog, my dashboard and even tumblr home page. All I get is this message on their home page -<p>"Our servers are over capacity and certain pages may be temporarily unavailable. We're working quickly to resolve the issue."<p>I'm fed up of their service and due to them I have lost my faith in all hosted blogging service providers. What's the use of all fancy features when it is always down? Now, I will just go and use custom wordpress install on my own VPS hosting and that is what I will recommend to everyone.<p>In my last attempt to get my blog up (so that I can retrieve my old blog posts) I have sent them this mail -<p>Anuj Kumar, Mar 04 23:01 (EST):<p>Hi, my blog http://blog.anujkumar.com is down since months. In fact, it is
down most of the time. I'm also unable to access tumblr website as it
always says - "We're sorry. Our servers are over capacity and certain pages
may be temporarily unavailable. We're working quickly to resolve the issue."<p>May I know whats the problem and let me know how can I access my blog again?<p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------<p>Tumblr response on Mar 05 05:12 (EST):<p>Hi<p>Thanks for taking the time to contact us about your concern, and we're sorry for the inconvenience.<p>We try to resolve any problem with Tumblr quickly, but some problems (like this one) take time to resolve.<p>We've shared the details of this problem with our engineering team and they'll fix it as soon as they possibly can. Due to our large number of users and the fast growth of our service, we don't have a specific time estimate for when this problem will be fixed.
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cd34
Not sure if you've removed the DNS entries, but:

$ host blog.anujkumar.com. ns1.webfaction.com Using domain server: Name:
ns1.webfaction.com Address: 50.56.93.59#53 Aliases:

Host blog.anujkumar.com. not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

I don't even see a tumblr IP address being handed back for your hostname. I
checked each of four authoritative servers, but, I don't see that any of them
have published the IP.

I'm not sure if you're forcing the IP address through /etc/hosts or an
equivalent, but, from where it stands right now, the rest of the world cannot
see the site, but, that is due to DNS, not due to tumblr.

~~~
anujkk
DNS entries are same from start. They have never been changed. Even if the
issue is related to DNS, that doesn't explain why I am unable to access my
tumblr dashboard or tumblr home page?

When I try to open tumblr.com in my firefox, it returns a file of mime-type
application/octet-stream to download.

~~~
chc
Does that still happen if you try in a browser where you haven't logged in?
Because Tumblr works fine for everyone I know, so unless it's tied to your
account, it's hard to imagine what could be the problem.

~~~
anujkk
Yes. I tried it in chrome, firefox , IE, Safari from both my home and office
pc.

In firefox tumblr.com is returning a file with mime-type : application/octet-
stream while in others it is displaying this message -

We're sorry Our servers are over capacity and certain pages may be temporarily
unavailable. We're working quickly to resolve the issue.

I'm from India. Is there any possibility that they use different servers for
customers from India?

------
anujkk
Ok. My blog is up again. Thanks to cd34 and dangrossman to bring the DNS issue
to my notice.

When I first created my blog I was asked to point my domain's A-record to
their IP address but now the cached version of their help page(as I am unable
to access any live page) is saying that if I am using subdomain, I need to
point the CNAME record to domains.tumblr.com. I did that and my blog is up
again.

Still I am unable to access any page of tumblr.com other than signup page. :)

~~~
cd34
Are you behind a proxy server?

In Chrome, do you have the Developer toolbar, if so, Toolbar, Information,
View Response Headers, what is the Content-type? Firefox has similar tools,
HeaderSpy will also do it. If the content type is wrong as you suggested in an
earlier post, it would indicate a problem between you and tumblr.com. If the
response is valid, it would suggest a problem, perhaps with an extension
(though, if it happens across multiple browsers, that is unlikely).

curl -I <https://www.tumblr.com/> (or some url that has just given you
problems) - Is the content type correct on that?

Do you have anything in your hosts file that might be overriding their IPs?

Disable gzip compression in your browser, try again. I know that some versions
of Firefox and Chrome had issues with gzip - preferring deflate and tumblr
appears to be sending gzip. Though, those issues were fixed in recent (last
few months) versions of both.

Also, what IP address or addresses does your machine believe belong to
www.tumblr.com?

------
newman314
I had my tumblr Cloudflare-enabled, when without warning it got dropped as
non-valid.

This had the effect of dropping the url of tumblr.mydomain.com right off of
Google's index.

After some WTH moments, I ended up having to use the regular IP provided by
Tumblr to get things back to normal.

I was not happy with things changing without warning but it's a free service
so I guess it's YMMV.

------
moadeel
the customer service response could have been better crafted. Right now it
screams "that's what you get when you are part of a website that has so many
customers. Your request is not priority enough to fix in the large pool of our
customer base"

Is it just me who is hearing this.

