Thank you for your patience while we tidy up the engine room. It’s all in service of a better Radio Paradise. We promise.

I really appreciate you taking the time to write this — truly. It’s obvious you care about Radio Paradise, and we don’t take that lightly.

First, I want to be clear: there was no plan to “go offline.” This wasn’t a scheduled maintenance window where we knowingly shut down the stream. It was backend work intended to strengthen the infrastructure, and unfortunately it triggered unexpected failures. That’s on us — but it wasn’t a deliberate decision to allow dead air and there was no way to plan for something we had no idea would trigger such issues. 
You’re absolutely right that dead air is painful. William knows that better than anyone. We all do. The stream itself is sacred to us. The moment something goes down, it becomes all-hands-on-deck until it’s restored.

One thing that might not be visible from the outside is how lean we actually are. While there are people who contribute in various roles, our core technical infrastructure is maintained by essentially two engineers and one of those engineers is also the boss and main DJ. They are supporting a global, 24/7, streaming service that operates across web, mobile apps, CarPlay, Android Auto, smart speakers, and multiple audio formats — all without corporate backing, venture capital, or a broadcast network behind us. 

We really are a mom-and-pop operation serving a massive worldwide audience. That’s part of the beauty  â€” and part of the fragility.

The house analogy wasn’t meant to imply neglect or known instability. It was meant to acknowledge that after 26 years of continuous evolution, systems accumulate complexity. Modernizing that complexity is necessary to keep RP viable long-term. Sometimes that means carefully touching foundational pieces. And sometimes, despite testing, something behaves differently in the wild than it does in staging. 

Could we build more redundancy? Of course. We are actively working toward greater resilience. But that takes time and resources, and we grow those carefully and deliberately.

There were no ignored red flags. There was no cavalier decision-making. There was careful long hours of work that had unintended consequences — and a team that responded as quickly as possible. 

As for revenue impact — yes, outages matter. We’re fully aware of that. No one here treats this casually. This station is our livelihood and our life’s work. 

We’re constantly balancing:

• Stability

• Innovation

• Limited staffing

• Financial sustainability

• And a global audience that expects perfection

It’s not corporate radio. It’s not iHeart. It’s not Spotify. It’s a small, fiercely committed team trying to keep human-curated radio alive in a very automated world.
Your feedback is heard. And your expectations come from a place of wanting RP to thrive — which we share.
We’re not perfect. But we are deeply committed.

And we’re still here.

Knock it off Randy.  Alanna very thoughtfully responded to his thoughts and they had a wonderful exchange of information.  Then you inject yourself where you are not needed.  You are the dead horse.  Just go away.

Anal, much? Be happy the music is back and just let it go. No need to beat a dead horse.

Thank you for understanding the spirit in which I wrote my comments, and for responding to the concerns about the outage.  I also wish to express regret for my initial characterization of the maintenance as cavalier or careless, and I owe you and William an apology.

It  sounds like RP didn't really expect things to go sideways.  Shit happens.  We all get it.  Especially those of us who have full time careers in IT, operations, software development, etc.  

In that context, I think it would be terrific and truly enlightening if William and Jarred compiled an "incident post-mortem" report.  

There are many examples of post-mortems published by larger institutions like Reddit, Facebook, Microsoft, or Cloudflare.  

In brief, they are a chronological narrative that begin with a summary the planned changes, and go on to include: highlights of work-in-progress and completed tasks; the moment when the system broke down in an unplanned or unexpected way; what work was done to restore service; how long it took to restore service; and performance & reliability data as the system started to come back online.  Incident post-mortems often conclude with a "root cause analysis" that narrows down and explains the exact reason for the unexpected outage.  

 As always, "Thanks for Listening."

I really appreciate you taking the time to write this — truly. It’s obvious you care about Radio Paradise, and we don’t take that lightly.

First, I want to be clear: there was no plan to “go offline.” This wasn’t a scheduled maintenance window where we knowingly shut down the stream. It was backend work intended to strengthen the infrastructure, and unfortunately it triggered unexpected failures. That’s on us — but it wasn’t a deliberate decision to allow dead air and there was no way to plan for something we had no idea would trigger such issues. 
You’re absolutely right that dead air is painful. William knows that better than anyone. We all do. The stream itself is sacred to us. The moment something goes down, it becomes all-hands-on-deck until it’s restored.

One thing that might not be visible from the outside is how lean we actually are. While there are people who contribute in various roles, our core technical infrastructure is maintained by essentially two engineers and one of those engineers is also the boss and main DJ. They are supporting a global, 24/7, streaming service that operates across web, mobile apps, CarPlay, Android Auto, smart speakers, and multiple audio formats — all without corporate backing, venture capital, or a broadcast network behind us. 

We really are a mom-and-pop operation serving a massive worldwide audience. That’s part of the beauty  â€” and part of the fragility.

The house analogy wasn’t meant to imply neglect or known instability. It was meant to acknowledge that after 26 years of continuous evolution, systems accumulate complexity. Modernizing that complexity is necessary to keep RP viable long-term. Sometimes that means carefully touching foundational pieces. And sometimes, despite testing, something behaves differently in the wild than it does in staging. 

Could we build more redundancy? Of course. We are actively working toward greater resilience. But that takes time and resources, and we grow those carefully and deliberately.

There were no ignored red flags. There was no cavalier decision-making. There was careful long hours of work that had unintended consequences — and a team that responded as quickly as possible. 

As for revenue impact — yes, outages matter. We’re fully aware of that. No one here treats this casually. This station is our livelihood and our life’s work. 

We’re constantly balancing:

• Stability

• Innovation

• Limited staffing

• Financial sustainability

• And a global audience that expects perfection

It’s not corporate radio. It’s not iHeart. It’s not Spotify. It’s a small, fiercely committed team trying to keep human-curated radio alive in a very automated world.
Your feedback is heard. And your expectations come from a place of wanting RP to thrive — which we share.
We’re not perfect. But we are deeply committed.

And we’re still here.

I really appreciate you taking the time to write this — truly. It’s obvious you care about Radio Paradise, and we don’t take that lightly.

First, I want to be clear: there was no plan to “go offline.” This wasn’t a scheduled maintenance window where we knowingly shut down the stream. It was backend work intended to strengthen the infrastructure, and unfortunately it triggered unexpected failures. That’s on us — but it wasn’t a deliberate decision to allow dead air and there was no way to plan for something we had no idea would trigger such issues. 
You’re absolutely right that dead air is painful. William knows that better than anyone. We all do. The stream itself is sacred to us. The moment something goes down, it becomes all-hands-on-deck until it’s restored.

One thing that might not be visible from the outside is how lean we actually are. While there are people who contribute in various roles, our core technical infrastructure is maintained by essentially two engineers and one of those engineers is also the boss and main DJ. They are supporting a global, 24/7, streaming service that operates across web, mobile apps, CarPlay, Android Auto, smart speakers, and multiple audio formats — all without corporate backing, venture capital, or a broadcast network behind us. 

We really are a mom-and-pop operation serving a massive worldwide audience. That’s part of the beauty  â€” and part of the fragility.

The house analogy wasn’t meant to imply neglect or known instability. It was meant to acknowledge that after 26 years of continuous evolution, systems accumulate complexity. Modernizing that complexity is necessary to keep RP viable long-term. Sometimes that means carefully touching foundational pieces. And sometimes, despite testing, something behaves differently in the wild than it does in staging. 

Could we build more redundancy? Of course. We are actively working toward greater resilience. But that takes time and resources, and we grow those carefully and deliberately.

There were no ignored red flags. There was no cavalier decision-making. There was careful long hours of work that had unintended consequences — and a team that responded as quickly as possible. 

As for revenue impact — yes, outages matter. We’re fully aware of that. No one here treats this casually. This station is our livelihood and our life’s work. 

We’re constantly balancing:

• Stability

• Innovation

• Limited staffing

• Financial sustainability

• And a global audience that expects perfection

It’s not corporate radio. It’s not iHeart. It’s not Spotify. It’s a small, fiercely committed team trying to keep human-curated radio alive in a very automated world.
Your feedback is heard. And your expectations come from a place of wanting RP to thrive — which we share.
We’re not perfect. But we are deeply committed.

And we’re still here.

Here's the thing though: William is a former radio DJ. He knows exactly how bad "dead air" is. You get a massive drop off in listeners, and it takes a while to recover.   That translates into lost revenue.

When a commercial radio stations had to do planned maintenance to backend infrastructure, such as repairing or replacing a rack of audio equipment, they plan ahead with an alternate broadcast to avoid complete radio silence during the actual maintenance window going on behind the scenes.  typically this would entail playing a long tape with pre-recorded music.

Alanna is framing this outage as cleaning up a house that's been lived in for 26 years. This definitely implies that the problems were known, and that some kind of maintenance window could've been created.. Jarred could have altered the API to play the same music on a loop for 24 hours along with a recurring announcement recorded by William or Alanna or Josh that certain functions would be unavailable (downloads, comments, voting, etc).  

That none of these contingencies were planned or prepared, and that the maintenance went ahead means that there is a critical lack of planning and redundancy happening at Radio Paradise. 

I'm a career IT professional; if I made a change like this without announcing it, I'd be seriously reprimanded.  Possibly fired. 

William is playing a bumper on the main mix where he touts that donations from loyal listeners have been able to find employment for 12 staff members who never have to look for another "real job" because working at Radio Paradise is amazing.  

I know it's easy for me to critique the station from here... but I've actually been to the station at Eureka.  On the surface, it looks to be a very well-oiled machine and a squeaky-clean operation.  And it is abundantly clear that all the staff love the station and want it to keep going forever.  Yet... out of those 12 people, did anyone raise ANY alarms or red flags?  

This organization is too mature to be making "aw shucks" mistakes.  The day long dead-air could translate into lost donation revenue.

RP is not a non profit organization.  It is a listener supported for profit operation funded by voluntary contributions.  People seem to have taken RP for granted based upon many of the comments I have been reading over the past weeks.  That it has survived for as long as it has is a tribute to William's vision, skills and dedication to undertake and succeed in a way never before accomplished in "radio" history.  

Be grateful, patient and understanding when dealing with your personal inconveniences.  These disruptions are in no way planned or desired by anyone that I know of.  There is no model for this operation.  It is the prototype and hopefully always will be.  Having been here all this time I could not even imagined where we would be looking back 25 years ago when I first tuned in on my Windows Me computer listening on winmx.  And then wondering how long it would last.  Fortunately Alanna has risen to the occasion to carry the torch forward.

Pioneers risk everything to undertake their journey.  Just think where internet radio would be without B & R's vision, dedication and perserverence.  These are growing pains so be grateful that RP is still growing and not rotting on the vine resting on its laurels.  I am.
.

People who donate to nonprofit organizations expect them to be good stewards with their funds and do everything they can to keep the organization healthy and strong.

Here's the thing though: William is a former radio DJ. He knows exactly how bad "dead air" is. You get a massive drop off in listeners, and it takes a while to recover.   That translates into lost revenue.

When a commercial radio stations had to do planned maintenance to backend infrastructure, such as repairing or replacing a rack of audio equipment, they plan ahead with an alternate broadcast to avoid complete radio silence during the actual maintenance window going on behind the scenes.  typically this would entail playing a long tape with pre-recorded music.

Alanna is framing this outage as cleaning up a house that's been lived in for 26 years. This definitely implies that the problems were known, and that some kind of maintenance window could've been created.. Jarred could have altered the API to play the same music on a loop for 24 hours along with a recurring announcement recorded by William or Alanna or Josh that certain functions would be unavailable (downloads, comments, voting, etc).  

That none of these contingencies were planned or prepared, and that the maintenance went ahead means that there is a critical lack of planning and redundancy happening at Radio Paradise. 

I'm a career IT professional; if I made a change like this without announcing it, I'd be seriously reprimanded.  Possibly fired. 

William is playing a bumper on the main mix where he touts that donations from loyal listeners have been able to find employment for 12 staff members who never have to look for another "real job" because working at Radio Paradise is amazing.  

I know it's easy for me to critique the station from here... but I've actually been to the station at Eureka.  On the surface, it looks to be a very well-oiled machine and a squeaky-clean operation.  And it is abundantly clear that all the staff love the station and want it to keep going forever.  Yet... out of those 12 people, did anyone raise ANY alarms or red flags?  

This organization is too mature to be making "aw shucks" mistakes.  The day long dead-air could translate into lost donation revenue.

I'm glad to hear that this was a planned outage. I suffered a bit for a day but almost everything seems to be back to normal today (website, Mac OS App, and IOS App) with one major exception. On the IOS App, the download still produced the following error when attempting to play the downloaded file - "Failed to start local playback. Please try again." Multiple retries does not help unfortunately. Any ideas why this is happening or when it will be fixed?

I'm glad to hear that this was a planned outage. I suffered a bit for a day but almost everything seems to be back to normal today (website, Mac OS App, and IOS App) with one major exception. On the IOS App, the download still produced the following error when attempting to play the downloaded file - "Failed to start local playback. Please try again." Multiple retries does not help unfortunately. Any ideas why this is happening or when it will be fixed?

What you're missing:

This is a software system set up by an IT self educated DJ
without a necessary implementation of any of the industry-standards you mention.

Plus unexpected growth.

Plus ...

Be nice!

Be thankful!

Here's the thing though: William is a former radio DJ. He knows exactly how bad "dead air" is. You get a massive drop off in listeners, and it takes a while to recover.   That translates into lost revenue.

When a commercial radio stations had to do planned maintenance to backend infrastructure, such as repairing or replacing a rack of audio equipment, they plan ahead with an alternate broadcast to avoid complete radio silence during the actual maintenance window going on behind the scenes.  typically this would entail playing a long tape with pre-recorded music.

Alanna is framing this outage as cleaning up a house that's been lived in for 26 years. This definitely implies that the problems were known, and that some kind of maintenance window could've been created.. Jarred could have altered the API to play the same music on a loop for 24 hours along with a recurring announcement recorded by William or Alanna or Josh that certain functions would be unavailable (downloads, comments, voting, etc).  

That none of these contingencies were planned or prepared, and that the maintenance went ahead means that there is a critical lack of planning and redundancy happening at Radio Paradise. 

William is playing a bumper on the main mix where he touts that donations from loyal listeners have been able to find employment for 12 staff members who never have to look for another "real job" because working at Radio Paradise is amazing.  

I know it's easy for me to critique the station from here... but I've actually been to the station at Eureka.  On the surface, it looks to be a very well-oiled machine and a squeaky-clean operation.  And it is abundantly clear that all the staff love the station and want it to keep going forever.  Yet... out of those 12 people, did anyone raise ANY alarms or red flags?  

This organization is too mature to be making "aw shucks" mistakes.  The day long dead-air could translate into lost donation revenue.