I see a multitude of sites promoting slashmysearch amongst the blogging community and they range from a quiet recommendation through to singing its praises. Why are’nt people complaining more about this incredibly unrealible site? Im not exactly an old hand in this community but I worked in the IT Industry long enough to know a thing or two about the importance of stability and the effect the lack of it can have on users and site visitors - you anger them & you lose them. Ninety percent of the time I have tried to access slashmysearch.com it has been unavailable or so slow it was unuseable.I dont believe most people believe in this site and instead are just upselling it in order to get referrals and make money from them. Probably most affiliates signed wont actually use the site as their regular search, especially if they have others income from others using it.

Ok, its a new service, its still in beta and startups usually have some problems but they are going about everything the wrong way. If something is so unstable then you shouldnt have a full open public beta because if things go wrong, as they have constantly as far as I can tell, you will damage your image irrepairably. People remember  problems alot more than stability. Its the bain of IT professionals - when things go well nobody notices, when things go wrong everyone complains. I used to run a large corporate network &  I remember one user complaining to me that he had received 2 spam emails that day, and was pretty rude about it, until I pointed out we had stopped over 200,000 spam mails that week. People dont see (or care usuallly) what happens in the background they just want things to work. Anyway, im digressing, my point is that slashmysearch are doing a whole load of damage to their name by having such a flaky system in conjuntion with an army of bloggers trying to promote slashmysearch in order to gain some referral earnings. Having all these affiliates singing their praises and pointing people towards signups where they then find a system as stable as a house of cards is both damaging to slashmysearch and the bloggers reputation.

One of the few bloggers Ive seen actually giving updates on the service is Alex over on Blog About Money Online where he points out "SMS is in deep crisis for the time being, but I’m sure that its rainy days will eventually end and it will open its doors to making money once again, so my only advice to the current and future SMS members is to be patient and not loose faith in SMS!". I agree with the comment regarding it being in deep crisis but to be patient and not lose faith, Im not so sure it isnt already beyond that.

Looking through the forum on the slashsearch site there are so many reported issues and complaints over sustained period of time which is to be expected but the replies from tech support undermine confidence even further. On March 8th one post states "Things are looking great. Upgrade is done. Are all the services working quick for everyone? Also, one more upgrade in a day or two and we should be set for a while. You should not see any more downtime even during an upgrade." a further post the next day even proclaims "we will see almost 100% uptime".There are many more posts along these lines over a longer period of time. I think, with the history of the system, tech support should be a little more cautious with these statements - another good idea in IT is to never promise anything and to make your statements a little ambigous - dont promise what you cant provide.

Having problems in a beta phase is to be expected to some degree and this isnt exactly the end of the world. My main concern would be that many people will have lost faith in the team that is running slashsearch. They dont seem to be able to effectively manage the problems arising and build a stable system. When the problem is stated to be ‘the server is down’ anyone with a little knowledge about running servers or web based systems is going to think ‘then why not just use the backup server(s)?’ More to the point, why isnt there an instant failover setup so there is virtually no downtime in the event of a server failure?. If the problem is down to a software upgrade or tweak thats understandable but why not just roll back to the previous version whilst the bug is fixed? Days of downtime and consistently slow performance when the servers are actually working are just not exceptable and, this is my main gripe, totally avoidable. Its not like its high tech radical thinking to use systems with failovers and to have rollout back to a previous version when things go wrong - it is standard practice. They might get past these problems and get everything running fine and dandy one day, but what happens when a new problems arises in the future? Unless they put failover systems in place, implement procedures for upgrade rollout/rollback and, to put simply - get themselves organised, they will never have a product that will meet the grade and the current users will eventully abandon them.

I truly hope they get past this and address the issues as the idea is sound one. It could be a successful venture for both slashmysearch and its users, especially those users with many referrals. If it doesnt stablise soon though I believe it will fall behind other companies following the same path and the faithful will jump ship. I will be watching that space (the blank one below the slashmysearch url in my browser) to see what happens.If they get their systems stable, improve search speed and produce a product that is actually useable I will join those affiliates already promoting the site - for now I dont want to promote something I dont believe in. Fingers crossed for slashmysearch (I’d rather do that than hold my breath)