Posts Tagged down
Friday 13th unlucky for Betfair
Posted by Peter Webb in Betdaq, Betfair on January 13th, 2012
Just days after their latest ‘upgrade’, the Betfair site crashed again. How incredibly frustrating! I’ve lost count of how many times the site has been down over the last year and each time the site is upgraded it seem almost certain now that a major crash follows.
If you want to trade today, why not give Betdaq at go. BetDaqAngel is the same Bet Angel platform you are familiar with but it’s compatible with Betdaq. Best of all its 100% free. It includes a link to Excel so you can automate your activity. We gave it a major overhaul last year to bring it up to date, so if you haven’t used it recently, download it and give it a try.
Betfair maintenance this morning
Posted by Peter Webb in Betfair on November 30th, 2011
Please be aware Betfair has site maintenance going on this morning around 7am UK time: -
What to do when Betfair is down
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on September 24th, 2011
Unfortunately Betfair suffered another outage this afternoon. Here is how I am set up to deal with such issues: -
I always have two version of Bet Angel running. One in API mode and one, with the refresh off, in non API mode (Log in via connection mode 1).
This means I can switch quickly between applications and if I am caught on one I can exit on another. We note that a site crash seems to happen in stages and having two bites of the cherry to exit works well. The site often comes back up in stages also, so it works well in either direction. This feature is worth the subscription to Bet Angel on it’s own!
In case the crash is at my end I have a back system, an iPad linked to Bet Angel via a VPS. This covers all bases in case of a catastrophic power or connection failure.
Of course you also have Betdaq that you can trade on. The liquidity on Betdaq is higher than ever at the moment and strategies that I use on one exchange tend to transplant well to the other. So whether you use Betdaq to hedge or trade outright its more viable than ever nowadays.
The connection mode feature on Bet Angel is a really useful feature in moments like today. So make sure you are familiar with it.
http://www.betangel.tv/video/using-bet-angel/setting-up-bet-angel/161-connectionmodes
Betfair down, again!
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on July 16th, 2011
Just two days before Betfair are due to impose massive increases in costs on their users, they face yet another major outage on their site.
You just can’t really believe it’s possible to get much worse PR for Betfair, but somehow they manage to pull another shocker out of the hat. It’s really quite incredible. You think the least they could do was quickly put a message up on their service page.
Jinx week
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on May 9th, 2011
For some reason this week each year is the week where errors creep in, unexpected things happen and bad luck gets called in. I’ve netted some of my most spectacular failure in week 20 for some reason, year after year. I can’t explain why and despite attempts in previous years to be super cautious during this week, something always trips me up. It could be anything, a system crash, broadband failure, Betfair crash, highly unusual event, anything.
So you can understand my nervousness at heading into this week. I had a decent Sunday out at relatives and was fairly buoyant heading into the office this morning. Got on with some work, made a few phone calls and everything was good. Got set up for the first race and then “boom”, a major power outage and the office plunges into darkness. Not a problem as I can re-locate to my home and work from there. Everybody ups sticks and leaves the office. When I get home it seems the outage is a large one as it has affected my home as well. But not a problem as I have a third backup, I can trade from the car. In the boot I have a power inverter and various plugs in case of emergency. I can just go outside and use a 3G connection, the car acts as a backup generator providing endless power. I have a choice of iPad, tablet or normal laptop to use and I have a permanent copy of Bet Angel running as a back up on a VPS. This means I can remote to the server make full use of the low bandwidth over 3G and hit the get out button or switch locations in literally seconds. So…….. I nip into the car log onto Betfair and oh… Betfair is down! Good start to the week!
However, I’m not worried about all the things that happened this morning, they are know unknowns (to quote Donald Rumsfeld). What I am always worried about in the unknown unknowns. I’ll let you know if any happen again this week. As it is, when the day got going it was a reasonable one, so the initial problems of today are firmly parked in the history bucket. I am 1/6 of the way to not repeating history so far in week 20.
What a joke!
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on March 12th, 2011
Just two days before Cheltenham we find ourselves facing another Betfair outage. Not just that, but this is the second day in a row that the site has been offline. This is the worst period for reliability I can remember on Betfair.
Some years ago Betfair used to boast about how many transactions they did per day, but that took a back seat when the focus turned to reducing the load on the system, which no doubt reduced costs also. All high volume users took this on board and adjusted the way they interact with Betfair to help achieve a system that should have been more stable. But we now find ourselves with a system that is clearly struggling to fulfill normal functioning.
Just months after they came to the stock market with a very high valution it must be very embarrasing for Betfair to face such issues. Given the re-appraisal of the market valuation of Betfair, I doubt whether all these recent issues is going to help credibility with new shareholders.
If you want to trade today, it seems the volumes are holding up well on Betdaq so I suggest you head over there if your fingers are itchy, I just had a really good experiance on the feature race at Sandown where the race had matched bet turnover of £1,037,385 at the off.
To download the Betdaq version of Bet Angel visit www.betdaqangel.com
Not again!
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on February 20th, 2011
Got back to my desk on Sunday evening to see that Betfair had been offline again on Sunday afternoon. My commiserations for anybody that was caught out. I had some spreadsheets running but, fortunately, they were not completely caught out; only a minor hit. I am relatively inactive at the moment as the February is a good period to take time out with the family. I work very hard in the Summer, so this time of the year is when I can take time off, forget about emails and the markets and do so without too much impact on the bottom line. I’ll often take some time off this month and prepare for peak season and get ready to kick off some new projects.
I’m surprised to see Betfair down on a quiet Sunday, it is very unexpected. I just wish we had some better explanation of what is going on. Till we can have a week without problems, I’ll need to put a new key on the keyboard.
Down, Down
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on February 5th, 2011
I would like to give you an update as to how February is going, I’ll let you know when I can log into Betfair!
It’s been the worst week for Betfair for some time. If Betfair would like to offer up some more detailed explanation I am sure we can all make a better judgement as to why the site is less stable than ever recently. In the absence of that we will have to speculate why a company that recently floated for over £1.5bn, can’t keep their shop open for business.
Over the last few years we have accepted more general charges, transaction charges, data usage charges, premium charges and variations on terms that we felt were there to support the infrastructure and investment. That this doesn’t seem to be happening, is a little perplexing; perhaps even worrying. But hell, at least I can play on some arcade games or fund some poker promotion.
February is traditionally the time of year that I take a fair bit of time off. When my father passed away I took most of February off and as it’s a quiet time of the year anyhow, I’ve slipped into this modus operandi. It’s good and a worthwhile exercise to do anyhow. You can lay down some plans for the rest of the year and contemplate the last year, while enjoying some hard earn rest. I think it may be well timed this year!
Let’s hope we get a return to the expected status quo soon. Speaking of which (Showing my age): -
More Betfair problems today
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on January 31st, 2010
Last night there was a significant site outage, followed by issues for international customers. At 11am this morning the API went offline again.
It’s been a terrible week for Betfair. I know that due to the measures Betfair have taken in recent years the stress on their servers much be much lower on a like for like basis than in years gone by. So I am not sure why these issues have been occurring on such a frequent basis this year? While possible, it seems unlikely that all these issues occurred in isolation without some fundamental underlying, more general issue? I am aware that Betfair face many technical challenges, but I think it would be good if they came forward with a detailed explanation of what is behind all these problems to help restore confidence.
Just a reminder that you can still use Bet Angel even without the API. A small investment at less than 41p a day to have access if you are not a Bet Angel user already.
Betfair back, but not SP
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on November 26th, 2009
Betfair returned to normal about 1/2 hour after it went offline. Apparently their host lost connectivity which was the cause of the downtime and not any underlying technical issues.
For me, I’m annoyed, as I had an SP bet waiting to be matched before the official off time. Betfair are supposed to manually reconcile these bets when there are problems like this. On this occasion however, it was just cancelled. My log in Bet Angel shows clearly that the bet was submitted before the official off time and that was well before the race actually got underway. It’s only a small amount but it’s the principal that’s the thing. It would be nice to see Betfair reverse this error as a gesture of goodwill.