Frequent Evernote maintenance downtime is the reason I have switched to Plus

[Nathan W 1]

Hello,

 I am a frequent Evernote user and it supports many of my life and work information needs, on computer and mobile. I do appreciate the continued hard work of Evernote staff to maintain such a high quality product. Just based on such a great benefit which Evernote provides me I should be glad to pay the extra few dollars a month for a Plus or Premium account. My complaint has to do with the reason I'm almost forced to go to plus. Lately (Fall 2015) there has been frequent site downtime for maintenance. During this time, syncing does not work. The prolonged syncing prevents me from accessing my grocery lists for example. I wasn't traveling to the mountains out of internet range, but simply going around the block to the grocery store. But my mobile phone would not be able to access Evernote during site outage (for maintenance). Therefore I am paying for Plus membership with offline storage, not to compensate for lack of Internet coverage, but rather because Evernote is down frequently for maintenance and inaccessible for update. I'm just disappointed about being coerced in such a manner into paying for a Plus account.

Nathan W

[gazumped 11,652]

Hi.  Evernote maintenance downtime is publicly shared in advance,  and unless your grocery shopping schedule co-incides exactly,  it is unlikely to be responsible for the errors you perceive.  Neither are sync drop-outs/ delays an Evernote marketing incentive to upgrade.  Whatever level of membership you have,  you should experience the same service.  The Server Status page says that weekly maintenance is usually on Wednesday at 6pm PT,  and it seems to last about 30 minutes.  http://status.evernote.com/

 

If you're relying on a mobile connection,  it is quite possible there are signal drop-outs that will prevent your device syncing,  or your store may be in a poor signal location.  If that's the case,  you might be better off with an app like Swipes or TickTick which will work offline.  Paying for Evernote purely for offline access seems a bit extreme,  and they do have a policy that they never want you to have a subscription level that you don't actually need

[Metrodon 2,184]

https://twitter.com/evernotestatus

 

Maintenance seems pretty regular and short to me

[Sugeeth Krish 473]

Am premium.. Even Rarely, I mean very rarely, i have experienced not syncing as well..

 

I am not much sure about this topic, but emails in advance making syncing issues and maintenance issues will help, i guess.. 

[Nathan W 1]

Thanks so much for your suggestions. I found another post which comments on the downtime. Yes there is a twitter feed and Evernote page announcing downtimes and time service is restored. Over the past few months I get a sense that these services are much more frequent and longer than they used to be. One particular time I wanted to go to the grocery store, and I had to hand copy a grocery list from my computer Evernote because my iPhone could not sync to Evernote for at least 30 minutes, and this was around Noon Pacific Time on a Saturday.

 

I am not the only person who has noticed the frequent and long downtimes.

 

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/87510-wednesdays-and-negative-9s-uptime/

 

Does Evernote publish an uptime percentage: "one 9" 99.9% uptime? two 9's: 99.99% uptime? Also, is there a (third party) time-series visualization or raw data of downtime periods, so I could get a sense of the trends?

[gazumped 11,652]

Hi.  We're going to have a serious case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing here (and that's me rather than you) because I simply don't know whether the availability of Evernote to sync with your devices is in any way related to the uptime (or otherwise) of their website.  I would assume it is - if the website is 'down',  you wouldn't expect the rest of their service to plug on regardless;  and the converse may not be true - even if the website is working,  syncing to Evernote may not be possible because of some issue on their side.  I may be wrong.

 

This website (https://currentlydown.com/evernote.com) though says -

 

We tracked Evernote since April 20, 2014. During last 30 days, it hasn't been working 2 times - on October 31, 2015 and October 24, 2015. The average response time is 0.106 sec which is very good. Note that response time may vary depending on how far you are from the Evernote.com server located in United States.

 

They have other stats which may help to reassure you.  Evernote is not offline for long periods,  or very frequently,  apart from their regular once-weekly maintenance.

 

However I can't emphasise enough that your sync issues are probably nothing to do with Evernote being offline.  Mobile devices have 'variable' connections to the internet,  and to achieve a proper sync,  Evernote will need some seconds,  or minutes of a steady solid connection to send information across and receive any responses.  If you find that a server-based service isn't working for you,  it may be that you're using the wrong kind of service!

 

The other single person who has noticed problems got the same answer I gave you initially - routine offlines are every Wednesday,  for about 30 minutes,  6pm PST.  Unscheduled downtime does occur very infrequently - twice that I can recall in the past few years - but that can be checked via Twitter.

[Stuhrer 252]

Hi,

 

I recently experienced a very slow response of the Evernote Web App (so no sync issue) while my internet connection was fast. This was in both cases a few hours after a maintenance phase published via the Evernote Status page. I suspect that sometimes when there is a maintenance phase the "All systems are running smoothly" message is published too early. But I am only guessing here and just two cases in a few months is not too bad I think.

[Nathan W 1]

In response to gazumped, thanks for posting the link to currentlydown.com downtime stats. I do see that there was 48 minutes of downtime in the early afternoon on Saturday October 24 outage (when I had to write down my grocery list by hand!). That was the moment that I lost my confidence in access to my notes offline and led me to subscribe to Plus. At the time I thought that such outages would be "the new normal" and prepared to pay the small price for reliable access to my information. I concede that there may be other factors such as my iPhone 5 or AT&T network service which could also be responsible for syncing problems. Anyway I'm glad to see that the downtime events are not as frequent or as long as I imagined. Now I am on Plus so I don't have to worry about it anymore.