Then, perhaps, since the service is offered in the website, someone should contract a reliable one instead of leaving it to amateurs. I mean, this gives an extremely poor technological look to the whole project, don't you think? We are talking something very, very, VERY basic here that every other coin, much below the standards of NXT, has been successfully offering for months if not years already.
In response to this, and since I've been in charge for the server migration done today, a few points for you to consider.
MyNXT has been always (and at the moment still is) a third party service. It is not run with Nxt community funds. The original developer, abuelau, decided to leave the project last year and SuperNET went on to fund the hosting so the service would stay up. Because both the block explorer and the online wallet were useful tools for the community, and run interesting tech. The code needed fixes and updates, a Nxt hard fork with API changes was around the corner back in January, and Tosch and myself took development and operation of MyNxt. Since then, and mostly thanks to Tosch's work, a lot of enhancements have happened after the first mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Neither tosch or me (or SuperNET) has made any money so far from running MyNXT.
The wallet had been hosted in a high-range dedicated server in a top company, and working good until three days ago. When a hardware failure like this happens (triggered apparently by a sudden power off in the machine) you rely on support to solve the issue, but the many support messages and hours of hardware checks over a day and a half could not locate the problem. So today we decided to migrate the wallet service to a hosting network where this type of issue is prevented. These things take a few hours, so the service was back online at late afternoon.
The fact the MyNXT wallet has lately gained a lot of attention as an easy way to create a NXT account and operate basic transactions is great. And your message is a sign that MyNXT is becoming an even more useful service, and that is good to see. But with what I just explained maybe you will agree that calling people "amateurs" and telling off the Nxt crew for hardware problems in a third party server is a bit off.
Thank you for the detailed explanation. And for solving the issue. What you seem to miss here is that nobody cares if it is a third party service. Until now, everyone thought, rightfully, that this was a tool offered by NXT and therefore NXT was responsible for its functioning. Similarly, no one cares if you guys make money or not on it (why should you?). The only thing people care about is that such an important tool works flawlessly ALL the time (or if it goes down it does for a minimal period of time). Hundreds of coins offer this same service and it is very rare -I have never seen it before- that a failure of this magnitude happens. It is especially alarming that it happens only days after the snapshot period started, when, logically, many NXT holders would have transferred their coins from the exchanges to MyNXT online wallet --as was advised right here on this thread. Such migration and any complications derived from it should have been foreseen in order to prevent any disruption of the service, if for nothing else, to avoid people getting alarmed. As it is, the faith of the people in the system has been shaken by this incident that reveals amateurism, lack of preparedness and, also, an intended justification of what has happened because "we don't make money on it", which is a very poor kind of attitude in general.
I hope many people will continue using the MyNXT wallet. I for one, will not.
