Ervin Kalemi

Not Live yet? :D

Fun fact: In 2023, we were planning to give our customers the option to hire and collaborate with freelancers.

Think of Upwork for social media managers inside Publer.

Luckily, we didn't go past the mockups phase.

With the rise of AI assistants and agents, I doubt there's such a market anymore.

For a moment, I thought I had gone viral 😳

Then I remembered that I had sent out an important email with the link to my Linkie in the footer.

Oh, well. It counts!

Inspired by Jimmy Carr's answer to "Why did you have kids?"

Major respect to founders with newborns/toddlers.

Winning or not, you're playing in the ultimate league!

If you were heavily impacted by the downtime or any issues caused by the migration, please reach out to our support team via the website chat or at support@publer.com, and we will make it right.

Moving forward, I can confidently say that Publer is now faster, stronger, and more reliable than ever 💚

Given the urgency of the situation and the time constraints (the old database was already causing serious latency issues), I should have at least handled point a) better. No excuses.

I know Publer is not a life-or-death service, but 12 hours of downtime, regardless of the day, is unacceptable.

c) While some downtime may have been inevitable due to architecture and database version changes, a different migration strategy (such as replication or a phased cutover) could likely have reduced the impact and shortened the final downtime window.

b) A more fragmented database migration. Instead of blocking all services at once, parts of the system could have been migrated gradually to reduce the overall downtime.

What could/should have gone better:

a) I should have estimated the downtime more accurately. The database size was a known variable, and the uncertainty around when services would be restored understandably frustrated customers.

A big thank you to Claude for preparing the landing page in seconds and being my DevOps VA on a Sunday.

6. Once I confirmed that the new server and the new DB were up and running, as nothing had happened, I disabled the Cloudflare worker, marked the scheduled posts during the downtime as failed to prevent time-sensitive posts, and resumed all background jobs.

5. I turned off the existing servers and assigned their IPs to the new servers to avoid any firewall and DNS configuration changes.

4. With the database now intact, the data was dumped, transferred, and restored to the new DB server. Unfortunately, this step took a long time.

3. On Sunday morning, as announced, I set up a Cloudflare worker to intercept traffic to our platform (web, mobile, and API), and redirected traffic to this landing page, except for my office IP.

2. On Saturday evening, I launched and set up two similar AWS EC2 instances, one for the app and one for the DB. Same configurations, same setup, but with the latest libraries and services (Mongo, Postgres, Ruby etc)

1. A week prior, I added a big notice on the platform and notified all users via email, in-app, and push notifications of the upcoming maintenance window and downtime.

Below, I'll share the migration steps I took and how we'll plan better for the future 👇

That meant we could no longer install modern libraries or deliver the latest features and security updates to our users.

Thank you to all our customers for your patience and understanding while I migrated nearly 1TB of data to the new infrastructure yesterday.

The downtime was inevitable.

After 8 years of running nonstop and serving millions of users worldwide, I just shut down 2 of the 3 servers that powered Publer 😱

And this is exactly what it felt like 🫡

Emotions aside, these servers had reached their end of life.

Update: The potential customer finally responded and had two questions regarding our DPA/AVV.

I confirmed we had received their request and that we would respond within 30 days, as required under GDPR.

It's a two-minute job, but hey — regulations are regulations, and they go both ways.

Fun fact: At Publer, 75% of customer tickets received daily are via chat, followed by email.

Messages through social channels are insignificant at the moment.

For the Kibo MVP, I plan to include the following.

Curious to know which channel is the most important to you.

If not on the list, please let me know in the comments 👇🏻

💬 Website Live Chat

📧 Email

📘 Facebook Messages

🐦 Twitter/X Messagess

New: Use your brand color for buttons and banners! 🎨

Select it through the interactive color picker or paste your hex code, and preview the changes in real time.

Make your link-in-bio page feel truly yours with Linkie!

My favorite email of the month.

Not bad for a short February.

Linkie impressions have doubled!

I'm no artist, but what you can do with linkie.bio is pure art 🎨

Different link-in-bios, different brands, different brand colors (new)

Same dashboard!

European founder working on a weekend.

Is this blasphemy?

Unless you enjoy doing this ...

Tip of the day:

Do not upgrade to macOS Tahoe.

Do not upgrade to macOS Tahoe.

Do not upgrade to macOS Tahoe.

Do not upgrade to macOS Tahoe.

Do not upgrade to macOS Tahoe.

Do not upgrade to macOS Tahoe.

Do not upgrade to macOS Tahoe.

Do not upgrade to macOS Tahoe.

Linktree is becoming the Hootsuite of link-in-bios.

We took care of Hootsuite.

Now we're taking care of Linktree.