Towards the end of last week, Clear Books had an extended outage. Again. Over the weekend it was compounded by yet another outage that lasted at least 6 hours.
Outages happen but Clear Books is starting to look seriously accident prone. It is the poster child for anything that can go wrong combined with dick brain thinking about how its issues get communicated. I cannot link directly to comments on the Friday outage as Clear Books runs its own retarded form of blog, but I can quote:
I’d take a look at your infrastructure because running an important business tool on what must be a complex system shared with other users probably isn’t a good idea – whilst everyone has issues, if you ran your own system any issues would be smaller and easier to recover from.
To the anonymous poster – they already run their own system via Fubra. It’s bolloxed.
My sense is the company is seriously clueless about the basics of what it takes to run a software as a service business. I have said this before…
See also:
Why Clear Books research fails
Lessons from ClearBooks failure
More insanity at ClearBooks
…but recent events confirm Clear Books business idiocy. The problems go well beyond technical difficulties. Clear Books is utterly clueless about how to communicate its issues. When it does communicate it talks utter rubbish blaming others rather than examining its own shortcomings in contracting with a provider which doesn’t stand the scale out and up tests.. That is a shocking indictment of a business started by a Chartered Accountant who claims PHP programming skills. The problem drew slightly over exaggerated but understandable responses. An example (because yet again, CB is too retarded to offer good linka.)
Why do you try and blame your host when your host is yourself? You work at Fubra (LinkedIn says so), which bought clear books, which also owns catN, right?
Here are the facts:
ClearBooks is 50% owned by its hosting provider. ClearBooks should know what is going on but responds:
With CatN we will now review the cause and measures we need to take to prevent this happening again and provide an update shortly.
Geek speak bollocks. Whatever review they have in mind, the problem re-occurred.
Regardless of Tim Fouracre, CEO Clear Books pedigree as a CA, his company’s understanding of cloud needs and requirements is woefully inadequate, Avoid like the plague.
My burning question – how many more of these major FUs before Clear Books sinks? Please, someone. put them out of their misery….
