Hey Folks,

For the last 48h some of you may encountered ugly speed problems from part of our infrastructure. We fight with this all day, and we won. Our ISP had to switch whole our infrastructure on the backup router. Sorry for inconvienience.

Ps. Please make sure that you bomb us with the sh*tload of support tickets when such situation happens again!!

Hey Folks,

We owe You some information about any issues with our website You might have encountered lately. We talk about the following:

- slow speeds on some of the servers

- long waiting time for the download to begin after the download button is clicked

- missing links after the upload process

All of this was an effect of a policy change on our hosters side. The changes prevented us from upgrading our infrastructure as we had to check for other offers. As we couldn’t add hardware for some time the load on our currenet servers peaked.

Good news is that we were able to get a good agreement for some decent new hardware from another hoster. We got the first batch just 2 days ago and started the migration of a few of the most loaded and failure prone servers. If everything goes as planned Zippyshare will be back to its usual top performance by the end of the month.

Keep You fingers crossed and give us some time to get the job done.

Edit 14.10.2012: www7/8/9  - data migration process started - ETR: 96h or more

Edit 15.10.2012: www10/11/12 - data migration process started - ETR: 96h

Edit 16.10.2012: www21/22/23/24 - data migration process started - ETR: 96h

Edit 16.10.2012: www17/18/19/20 - 107 inodes to go - 1100 already checked - ETR: 24-48h + time needed to data migration (we will not risk losing any more data by putting the server online when we don’t know what caused data corruption in the first place - everything in megaCLI looks ok)

Edit 17.10.2012: An update about 7/8/9, 21/22/23/24 - the DNS entries have been altered to point to the new machines. Not all of the data has been migrated till now. This means that some of the data on the servers will be not accessible for some time. No we are not completly crazy I can assure You. The old servers where overloaed and where down for about 50% of the time so we decided to move some data to a new machine, redirect the traffic and move the rest “in background”. For the next 48h You might encounter files which after download have 0kb size. Don’t worry the file hasn’t been migrated from the old server. Just try again in a few hours time. We do our best to keep it as comfortable for You guys as we can. It will still be a bumpy ride unfortunately.

Edit 18/19.10.2012: 17/18/19/20 - up! 7/8/9, 10/11/12, 21/22/23/24 - has been successfully migrated. We got the second batch of new servers.

Edit 20.10.2012: We just started moving data from 1/2/3, 4/5/6, 13/14/15/16, 17/18/19/20, 25/26/27/28.

Edit 21.10.2012: 17/18/19/20 - has been successfully migrated.

Edit 25.10.2012: 13/14/15/16, 25/26/27/28 - has been successfully migrated.

Edit 28.10.2012: 1/2, 5/6 - has been successfully migrated.

Edit 29.10.2012: 3/4 - has been successfully migrated.

Edit 01.11.2012: Some users reported problems with file downloads (incomplete downloads, connections drop, timeouts etc.)… we have reconfigured our servers a bit, please report us any issues You might encounter

Edit 7.11.2012: www3/4… still fsck (it’s not a bug it’s a feature) :-/

Edit 10.11.2012: We got the third (last one) batch of new servers. We just started moving data from:
www29/30/31/32, 33/34/35/36, 37/28/39/40, 41/42/43/44, 63/64 - only data migration - ETR: 96h
www65/66 - the DNS entries have been altered to point to the new machines. For the next 48h You might encounter files which after download have 0kb size. Don’t worry the file hasn’t been migrated from the old server. Just try again in a few hours time.

Edit 12.11.2012: 65/66 - has been successfully migrated.

Edit 13.11.2012: www45/46/47/48/49/50/51/52 - has been successfully migrated.

Edit 14.11.2012: www29/30/31/32, 33/34/35/36, 37/28/39/40, 41/42/43/44, 63/64 - has been successfully migrated.

Edit 15.11.2012: Holly shit, reCaptcha everywhere… sorry folks, we are testing a theory about file downloads by some “automatic software” which cause very high load on our servers. We hope that the reCaptcha will be only a temporary solution.

Edit 20.11.2012: www3/4 - It’s Alive! No data lost, but it was a bit humiliating downtime for us. :/

Edit 30.11.2012: We just added another 10gbps to one of our aggregation switches to prevent congestion in peak hours. What this means for you? Better download speeds of course.

Edit 1.12.2012: www53/54/55/56/57 - has been successfully migrated.

Edit 9.12.2012: New servers added into load balancer, now, please give a warm welcome to www67/68/69/70/71/72/73/74… more to come.

Edit 26.01.2013: New server added into load balancer, please give a warm welcome to www75/76

Due to the fact that the company which we send our email through has lately had some serious problems with the email delivery to some email providers (eg. hotmail) we have decided to make the account activation feature optional.

From now on the account activation is not required in order to use a zippyshare account. Nevertheless we strongly encourage You to verify Your accounts. Verified accounts have access to some additional features like password recovery.

We have also deleted all accounts which where not activated. If You have experienced problems with Your account activation feel free to sign up again.

We are really sorry for this inconvenience.

As You all might have already noticed we were busy working on our audio player lately. We have introduced a new player with waveform preview (that’s those silly little images which show whats going on in your audio file). We wanted them to be far more accurate then on other sites with a clean seperation of left/right channel (right on the top, left on the bottom as it should be).

We were able to introduce this player in the following locations:

1. Public folders: a new audio preview view has been introduced. It can be set by the folder owner (the owner sets the default folder view) and it can be changed by the users viewing the folder via a combobox at the top.

2. Facebook embed

3. Custom embed (this feature is not entirely introduced at the moment) with a fully customizable size, color scheme, behavior etc.

4. Mobile download page

We have also introduced a HD preview option with a higher bitrate (better high frequencies replication) while still preserving a relatively small file size.

Additionally we have fixed an issue due to which mobile clients could not download file from our website. It should work fine now. If You own an Iphone or an Android device please check if everything is working fine on Your device. In case You encounter any problems please let us know via comments or our support pages (please provide Your device name and operating system version).

Please let us know what You think.

PS: We have to send a big thank you to Broly who kindly pointed out some bugs on our website.

We have send about 400 invites to our users who wanted to take part in our new functionality beta tests. We get quite a lot of response (sugestions, some questions, some bug reports). We read and try to analyze them all.

The next few days, weeks and maybe months will be quite busy for us as we plan to tune the existing functions and add some new exciting ones. I’m sure You will be pleased with what You will get. We don’t want to get into much detail but stay tuned.

In about 2-4 weeks registration will be open to the general public.

If You want to discuss the ongoing changes then please head to link expired. It’s not an official support side but w will keep an eye on the discusion going on there (Thank You Smitty for the help)

Thats all for today. We are getting back to work…

Our Support Team might become affected by a serious nervous breakdown when they have to read more questions like “Where is the Registration link?” or “How can I create an Account?”. For the sake of their mental health we are forced to reveal a little sneak peak of what we are currently working on:

We are currently on the finish straight and expect to release the new and polished features pretty soon. People who comment on this blog post will be given the chance to betatest the new features (and grab the most appealing usernames of course ) so let us know what You think. New feature request are of course also welcome. We can’t promise they will be added for the initial release but we do tend to listen to our users will.

Hello,

Todays update ads a function which enables You to embed files hosted on Zippyshare.com into Your Facebook wall (just click the “Like” button). From now on audio and image files should have a preview on Your facebook site.
We are also working on adding this feature for video files but first we have to improve the quality of our transcoded video/audio. This can tak some time so stay tuned.

In the mean time let us know what You think about the just added feature in the comments.

Best regards,
Zippyshare Team

We kindly ask You to assist us with some tests of our new server. Please let us know in the comments which download speeds You get, from which location and what is Your network connections bandwidth.

Test file: Link Removed

Thank You!

Edit (24.03.2011):
241 comments are more then we needed and a lot more then we have expected. Thanks to all of You who invested time trying to help us out testing our new server.

Conslusions from the test?
Most of the speed are satisfactory but there are times (1-3h during week days and some more during weekends) when the performance of our ISP drops quite significantly. We will be monitoring the sittuation and if the problems won’t be resolved in the near future we will be on the lookout for another provider.

Hey,

For those of You who follow our blog it is no surprise but for the rest of You it might be. We have decided to change the layout of Zippyshare.com…

The website should be significantly more readable both for our old users and people new to our site. Everything important is now placed in the top half of the site with a huge DOWNLOAD NOW button standing out. No more searching for the download link, unnecessary scrolling, finding the way through tons of ads, entering captchas, waiting for strange timers to elapse, waiting for download slots to open, expensive premium accounts or other such crap. We leave it to our competition to use such sh*t. Additionally we have changed the amount of pop up ads. From now on there is a limit of two popups per user per 24h. We will have an eye on our income and try to fine tune the ammount of ads to an absolute minimum. The goal is to limit the popup ads to a degree where it is bearable for our users but still we have enough money to keep up our infrastructure.

The upload site has also been redesigned. We have introduced a new flash uploader (kudos to the hard working people from Uploadify.com). It is now possible to select multiple files at a time. Fast and easy…

We encourage You all to test our newly redesigned site. In case You find any bugs please let us know in the comments or through or support sites.

Zippyshare.com dev team.

*EDIT*
We got information from our users (Chuckie & Depositum - thanks guys) that some audio ads are constantly appearing on the audio preview/download website. We got in touch with our ad providers but they didn’t respond so far so we have decided to disable flash ads alltogether on the audio preview/download website.