Wow, can you believe it? I was just checking on a couple of my opt-in pages and wanted to login to Aweber to make a change or two and got an error when I hit their index page. I thought, hmpf, that’s odd, and tried their other pages and same thing. “But that’s impossible!”, I thought . . . so I googled a few well-known marketers who I know use Aweber and, yup, their opt-in forms were toast. Wow, I’ve never once seen them unavailable; I’ve never seen that happen.
I still have no idea what’s going on, but I’m sure we’ll all find out shortly. Could be a denial of service or just a hardware failure, or anything else . . . but wow, I’m still fairly astounded that it’s offline. I had been checking out iContact recently, but I just can’t stomach the price (even though it’s fairly good and the interface is better than Aweber, in my opinion). I plan to stick with Aweber, but I’m seriously watching how long this outage lasts. If it’s down hard for too long, it may be time to “diversify my portfolio” when it comes to my lists.
What list managers are you using and if you had to go with an Aweber alternative, what would you (do you) pick?
UPDATE: 12:08 am EST – So far I can ping them and do a traceroute, no problem, but the site still seems to be down. Checked it with friends on the east coast, the west coast and Hawaii and no one seems to be able to pull it up still. If anyone has any news, please post a comment.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
February 4th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Damn, thats a pain – its down right now and i need to subscribe to a list to access my products that i bought from henry gold!! grr….
BTW, i’ve found http://www.mailflow.info/ is pretty good – has a free account and provides a similar service to aweber, its not as polished but it works and i think they improve all the time.
Dave Goldmaker’s last blog post..Top 40 ways of driving traffic to your website, Increase it now!
February 7th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Wow, Dave, so that’s interesting to hear they were down again and apparently there are some intermittent issues. . . thanks for commenting. To be fair, the iContact site was down for at least a couple days probably a week after I posted this so it really shows that services at this price point are probably going to have their limitations.
I will stick with Aweber and continue to recommend them for small business as they are still the best you can get at this price. Of course I’ll keep looking though.
Thanks for the alternate service suggestion too.
August 18th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
They’re down again! Arggghh!!
September 10th, 2008 at 10:17 am
And now Aweber’s down again! I wonder if anyone’s tracking the uptime of the top 10 autoresponder services. hmm, maybe I’ll have to do that
January 16th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
yeah i was in aweber at the time changing one of my broadcasts A LONG ONE didnt save it yet…
now its gone… any idea what happend???
January 16th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
oh wait…
THERE HAVING AN ISSUE RIGHT NOW 12:00 pm 1/16/09is today like RIGHT NOW!!!!!
January 16th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Ok its back up!!!! just a little BELCHH!!!!
January 16th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
NOPE Down AGAIN!!!!!!!!!
Saved my content though….
January 16th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Yep, I just sent a promo out yesterday to a bunch of people and it uses link tracking. Consequently, the links don't work. Grr, I'll have to think twice about using link tracking, since it renders my emails unusable.
March 13th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
3-13-2009 down again today. Just when I was to renew my registration on my site. can't even get an authoration code to choose a new registar. I moved my host to get respnse a month ago and looks like I am going to move my registar. I was on phone for almost 1 1/2 hours this morning trying to find out what is wrong – said it wold be up in about 1/2 hour LOL it is 1:19 pm central time now
December 2nd, 2009 at 10:21 am
There down December 2nd – 10:20 AM – you would think that an Aweber rep would have commented here by now.
I was in the proccess of integrating a weber into my whole operation – now I am unsure if I will do it.
December 3rd, 2009 at 8:37 am
12-3-2009 – Down again! Was down yesterday too! They call this “unscheduled maintence”…I call this BULLSHIT!
December 3rd, 2009 at 8:43 am
AWeber selected Ecelerity to manage all outbound email communications generated on behalf of its customers. Immediately upon implementation, AWeber was able to boost its outbound email delivery capability to two million messages per hour and eliminate seven redundant servers.
MAYBE THEY SHOULDN”T REMOVE THEIR SERVERS!!! Now they have no high availability! iCONTACT IT IS!!!!
December 3rd, 2009 at 10:33 am
Yikes! I have to send out my newsletter today!!
it’s 10:32am here in Toronto and it seems likes its still down…
Never seen this happen before…