Why I hate tumblr. | Hacker News Reader

Why I hate tumblr.

4 pointsanujkk9 comments

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 -

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

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.

In my last attempt to get my blog up (so that I can retrieve my old blog posts) I have sent them this mail -

Anuj Kumar, Mar 04 23:01 (EST):

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."

May I know whats the problem and let me know how can I access my blog again?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tumblr response on Mar 05 05:12 (EST):

Hi

Thanks for taking the time to contact us about your concern, and we're sorry for the inconvenience.

We try to resolve any problem with Tumblr quickly, but some problems (like this one) take time to resolve.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

The over capacity issue is one thing, but the DNS doesn't seem to be related to Tumblr at all. Those aren't Tumblr DNS servers and those DNS servers don't have records for your domain... Tumblr can't do anything about hosting a site that isn't pointed at their servers.

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. :)

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?

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.

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.

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