The Bejamble Sales Monitor (BSM) system has ran into problems during a server move. Creator and website owner Cory Hancroft decided to move servers to cut expenses in order to preserve the system, the move will save USD$70 a month in fees but still comes in at a whopping USD$250 a month.
The move of course won’t impress inworld business owners who have experienced problems during the move, problems that were today still reportedly ongoing. The website is working fine but it appears that the new DNS records have not fully propogated and until they do, problems will exist.
Dans Belgar the Inedit owner has decided to end his relationship with BSM and is urging affiliates to use Hippo Vendors. Inedit currently use both sytems, Dans has set a deadline of January 1st for people to switch over. Personally I like the Bejamble system but I can undertand Dans frustrations and having to deal with the fallout of this move.
The system is user friendly, allows you to update or change items for sale very quickly and is not too script resource heavy, it ticks a lot of the right boxes so I hope it sticks around for a while yet.
The issues of hosting services and databases is something close to my heart because I want Linden Lab to offer these services, if there were a competitive hosting system via Linden Lab, a lot of the issues involved in the BSM move would have been avoided, although at the end of the day this is a financial as well as a technical issue.
The very nature of Second Life means that sometimes, creators will need to call on external resources to make systems work. External resources of course mean that you have to rely on external services and as we can see in this case, there can be some bumps in the road when external services are used.
Everything should be working fine very shortly, so hopefully people will stick with this product but I can understand the frustrations of people who rely on such resources for mission critical services.