Here at mite, we’re migrating to the new European payment standard SEPA, too. Although this affects you only a little bit, we have to and want to let you know about all upcoming adjustments that will become effective on February 1st, 2014.

If you pay user fees per direct debit from a German bank account, we will start SEPA direct debiting your bank account as of February 1st. Your account number and the bank code will become IBAN and BIC. We already converted your bank information for you. Nevertheless, please have a look at the tab »Account => Payment« and double-check. You can find your IBAN and BIC on your bank statement.

For now, paying user fees for mite via direct debit continues to be available for German bank accounts only. As soon as our payment partners will implement direct debit for other SEPA countries, we’ll consider this enhancement too, yes of course.

Due to SEPA, we also updated our Terms of Service. We only adjusted §6 Payment/Invoice. The term »direct debit« now reads »SEPA direct debit«. And we added a single phrase: »The pre-notification period of a SEPA direct debit is shortened to 1 day.«.

Our updated ToS will become effective on February 1st, 2014. Please find them right here. If you do not object within six weeks in textual form (e.g. via e-mail), you accept our updated ToS. Should you object, we’re entitled to terminate and end our contract on February 1st, 2014.

Thanks for your attention. Now back to more important things!

Julia in Inside out, Tech talk

mite will end official support of the Internet Explorer 7 on September 12th. We won’t optimize and fix for this browser version anymore.

If you’re still using IE7, please update soon—on version 8 at least, or, better, on the current version 10. A free update is available directly from Microsoft. Or, switch to a current version of Mozilla’s Firefox browser, or Google’s Chrome.

Internet Explorer 7 was released in October 2006. Seven years ago, aka 42 cat or Internet years. In the meantime, browsers improved big time. They got faster and more secure. We have to work around the constraints of IE7 during every single update. Sometimes, we even developed special slimmed-down versions of a feature. We’d like to put this time to a better use, so all users benefit. Better browsers are available, and, luckily, ~99,3% of all mite.users do run them. Dear 0,3%: Please update now. Other sites will be grateful for that, too, and will show their gratitude with a smoother behavior. Thanks!

Julia in Tech talk

Tonight, our servers will need some maintenance. mite won’t be available twice for ~five minutes each. The first unavailability will start at ~3:30am CEST, the second one will occur between 5:30 and 7:30am CEST (what time is that for me?).

Tonight’s maintenance originates from a production error in our IBM database servers. The error, which also lead to July’s hiccups, will be fixed by a firmware update, which unfortunately cannot be installed during normal operation. We ask for your understanding.

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Update: Maintenance went as planned. mite was unavailable a total of 5 minutes.

Julia in Tech talk

Today, Friday evening, maintenance will take place starting at 9pm CEST (what time is that for me?). mite won’t be available for 30 to 45 minutes.

This maintenance is the consequence of this morning’s interruption. Our database server went down. To get mite back up asap during working day hours, we switched to our failover database server. This evening, our database will move to its former home, the more powerful main database server. The maintenance downtime is inevitable to avoid data corruption with 100% safety.

Again, and hopefully for the last time for a long long future: We ask for your understanding.

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Update: Maintenance went as planned. mite was unavailable for 21 minutes.

Julia in Tech talk

Since 10:37 CEST, mite is not available continuously due to server problems. We’re terribly sorry, please, excuse us! We’ll do everything to get mite up and running again as soon as possible. Please visit Twitter to get the newest information on this issue, we’ll update continuously.

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Update: Since 11:49 CEST, mite is available again after moving servers to another node. We’re continuing to watch super-closely. Details will follow. Again: so sorry for this interruption!

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Update II: In the meantime, we collaborated with our hoster and found the source of the problem: A server of another customer running on our hardware node went wild and “stole” essential ressources from our database server. First, our hoster should have taken measures against this. Second, we too should have identified this troublemaker earlier and safeguarded mite. Our apologies. This interruption was an avoidable one.

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Update III, July 27th, 10:15 CEST: Again, we’re having server problems—all bad things seem to come in pairs. Our database server is not running smoothly since 9:52 CEST. We’re so sorry for this rough ride. Please bear with us.

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Update IV, July 27th, 11:26 CEST: mite is stable again for now. We switched our database to a redundant failover server. Please visit Twitter to get the newest updates.

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Update V, July 27th, 17:01 CEST: To prevent another hiccup, maintenance will take place tonight.

Julia in Tech talk

On Saturday, June 16th, maintenance will take place in our primary data center between 5:30am and 7:30am CEST (what time is that for me?). During this time frame, mite won’t be available for some very few minutes.

Tomorrow’s maintenance is the consequence of the last interruption. Our hoster will replace hardware (switches) with a model by a different manufacturer to ensure future stability. We ask for your understanding.

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Update: Maintenance went as planned. mite was unavailable for no more than three minutes.

Julia in Tech talk

Between 2:04pm and 2:33pm CEST, mite was down for all users due to a hardware failure in our primary data center. Redundant systems did not take over as planned. We’re so sorry for this interruption!

Collaborating with our hosting partner SysEleven, we’re analyzing this problem to prevent it from happening again, this goes without saying. Of course, your data was totally safe throughout this downtime.

This said, we’d like to take a moment to thank SysEleven and their technical team for their fast response—they were hands on within minutes. Also, we’d love to say thank you to the numerous users who got in touch via Twitter, mail, and chat. Your understanding means a lot to us. Although we cannot guarantee 100% uptime, you can count on us doing everything we can to reach that number. We won’t disappoint you.

Julia in Tech talk

Between 15:29 and 15:50 CEST, mite was not available for most users due to server problems on our side. We’re so sorry for this interruption!

You can bet on it: we’re not taking this lightly. We’re already investigating the root of the downtime to prevent this from happening again. mite should and will be stable again.

Julia in Tech talk

Thumbs up: the busiest mite.account has created more than 100,000 time entries by now. But even if we put this spike aside, we’re seeing more and more accounts with five-digit data. Which is absolutely great—besides one fact: those huge figures brought the Excel/CSV export feature (which can be found under the tab »Reports => Time Entries«) down to their knees.

Time for a rebuild! Thanks to today’s update, even huge data sets can now be exported reliably. Furthermore, we were able to significantly accelerate the export. It is now up to three times faster. Ready, set, go, to your next 100,000 time entries!

Julia in Tech talk, New features

Monday, January 23th, mite won’t be available between 0:15 am and ~0:45 am CET (what time is that for me?). We’ll move the service to new, more powerful servers. We ask for your understanding.

Update, January 23th: Maintenance went as planned.

Julia in Tech talk