One of the many themes on which I bore the Earwig team in meetings is the fact that we are lucky to work in the special needs environment, which is populated, almost entirely, with people who are kind and considerate.  This has never been more clearly illustrated than over the past week when we suffered an extraordinary server failure, which took us off-air for a while.

This has never happened before, so we steeled ourselves for a tsunami of complaints, expecting each to be more aggravated than the previous one. But in fact, all we received was kind thoughts and hopes that we would soon be back up and running.

So, thank you for that, and it gives me great pleasure to confirm that we are, indeed, back to normal.

Having your whole server array collapse on you for four days is not something that is ever supposed to happen, but it does provide the reassurance that, if we can survive that, we can survive anything.

The recovery implementation has involved moving our servers over to Amazon Web Services, the home of cloud computing.  This was always part of the plan and will mean that…

1              The Earwig media store can continue to expand almost infinitely.

2              We should never again suffer this sort of failure.

3              We can now work on using all the processing might of AWS to try and speed up the site, to make your future Earwig experience smoother.

In all the kerfuffle we passed a milestone recently  –  10 million images are now stored in the Earwig vaults.  That’s a big responsibility, which we take very seriously.

Peter Gelardi
CEO – Earwig