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DDOS attacks slowing down site

We’re sorry if you have had trouble accessing UPCZilla over the last few days. We’ve had huge problems over the last few days with bad bots scraping our site and effectively DDOSing us. We think we’ve finally got the better of them (for now), but unfortunately this is a common problem for sites like ours …

All eBay products removed from UPCZilla until further notice

Regrettably, eBay products will no longer be displayed for comparison (or any other) purposes on UPCZilla until further notice. eBay’s “Partner Network” has seen fit to terminate our account with them, supposedly for reasons relating to geographical location. This makes little sense as UPCZilla displays products from eBay.com – i.e. US eBay – and geography …

Major downtime lately

UPCZilla has had several instances of major downtime in recent weeks. We know what the problem is (it’s related to DNS servers) and we have implemented certain fixes now which ought to resolve the problem in the medium term. However we will be looking in the longer term for a more robust solution. It seems …

Reinstated missing retailers

For a few days UPCZilla was only showing results from a limited number of retailers – basically eBay and Amazon. Although to be honest that pretty much accounts for most of the online retail market, we still like to show a broader range of retailers when we are comparing prices. So now there are once …

Contact form working again

Apologies if you tried contacting us recently and you never got a reply. We weren’t being rude, we try to respond to all emails but it seems our contact form stopped working at some point (we’re not sure how long ago though, to be honest). It’s now running again here: https://www.upczilla.com/contact/ – we welcome any …

Site fully functional again

We were a bit short-staffed over summer and as a result some server maintenance didn’t get done properly and UPCZilla was struggling to run properly. OK, we’ll just come clean, our server ran out of space, a problem we can normally easily resolve, but with no-one around to monitor these things, the server has been …

UPCZilla hits 4 million

We’ve hit another milestone – we now definitely have four million unique UPCs/products in our database. The number has been fluctuating a bit because, as we have mentioned before, determining the exact number can be oddly inexact, and also we have to clean out invalid items etc. every now and then so it takes a …

MAJOR downtime experienced

Apologies to everyone who couldn’t access UPCZilla.com and our UPC database yesterday. We experienced some major and unexpected downtime – I think the longest period of downtime we have ever had. Actually it was not the site that was down, that was working fine, it was some problem with the DNS servers (we are still …

UPCZilla servers upgraded

After some brief downtime this morning we got our servers upgraded. Over the last year or two we have tried to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of UPCZilla, but the increasing popularity of the site has meant that we had to finally give in and upgrade, as everything was constantly maxed out. Our …

Brief downtime expected

Just a heads-up to let you know that we will be experiencing brief downtime hopefully lasting 15 minutes at most, sometime between 6 and 7am EST. This is to upgrade our server to a faster setup – hopefully most people will be in bed and won’t notice.