Juried Art Services

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An Updated Message from JAS President Paul Fisher
January 26, 2009

On January 12th Juried Art Services experienced a server crash. All systems have been restored but some data was lost. We have taken the necessary actions to prevent this kind of occurrence in the future.

In greater detail, here’s what happened: We had been replicating data to a second hard drive to provide both backup and disaster recovery abilities. The data loss occurred when the data on the first drive became corrupted, and due to a hardware failure, this condition was then replicated to the second drive. We immediately had the servers couriered to one of the nations leading data recovery firms (used by Dunn & Bradstreet and NASA.) They were unsuccessful and all data entered after Dec 24th was lost. Because this was a hardware failure, not a system crash, all software and functions remained fully intact.

We have now brought a new server system online to ensure future security. We have switched hosting companies, upgraded our services, added load balancing services to address both traffic fluctuations and hardware failures and now have an offsite backup server in place.

Applications, new accounts and images uploaded between December 24th and January 12th had to be re-created. All applicants who had paid their applications were notified quickly by JAS and/or the respective shows to alert them to check if their application was affected and information had to be re-entered. After going “off air” on January 12th the site was back up on the 17th with a prominent notice on the home page of our web site explaining what happened and what action needed to be taken. We then took three days to re-check and thoroughly de-bug the system and on January 20th notified everybody in our system and placed notices on Internet forums and art show web sites. We extended all customer services so that we could quickly respond by phone or email to everyone. To make the process easier we implemented a new e-mail address for artists to send us their images, which we then resized and upload for them.

JAS is totally committed to providing the best application and jurying process in the world. We have made a substantial investment in our infrastructure and staffing and we are very excited about the upcoming release of great new features and innovations later this year. Together we will provide every possible advantage to our artists and shows to help them prosper and grow. And as of today, all shows have nearly met or exceeded the number of applications from before the incident.