As blogged last night a fair few number of people have posted in the Baby’s Days support group or messaged me directly to say they are experiencing technical issues using mainly the Risk Assessment section, The 2 year check and also the SEF section of Baby’s Days.
What seems to be happening is mid way through using these sections the device just freezes so the work is lost or a little grey pop up says, “this web page needed to reload”. Obviously many people are frustrated that this is happening and they don’t feel they can open a support ticket for fear of being made to feel like an idiot or even worse for fear of losing all their work by “annoying” Baby’s Days.
Mark Kahl director of Baby’s Days has said this issue is because the Baby’s Days system is,
“NOT a website, it is a SaaS application that is very ram and system resource hungry”.
Tonights blog post is going to clarify exactly what Mark Kahl means by this and as with most other things in this blog I’ll hope you’ll see why this statement is very misleading.
Firstly what is a SaaS application?
Mark Kahl is right in that Baby’s Days isn’t a website. I agree with him there, first time for everything I guess.
SaaS stands for Software as a Service. Software is usually defined as the programs and other operating information used by a computer. So on a typical laptop you might find software like Microsoft Word or Norton Anti Virus. This software is run and stored on your laptop.
SaaS is a different type of software that isn’t actually “run” directly from laptop, it’s usually run through a web browser and stored on a server. So it’s still software, but it’s not “hard” software in the sense that most people might be more used to; it’s not a disc you can pick up for example it’s virtual software.
A website isn’t a programme at all, it’s just a document if you like stored on the internet. That’s the easiest way to explain it although if you want to be a purist it’s not 100% accurate, but it’s good enough for the purposes of this blog post.
Does SaaS require a load of RAM?
There is absolutely nothing in the Geek Bible that says a “SaaS” is or should be inherently more resource heavy than any other aspect of web browsing. My understanding is that the whole point of a SaaS is to remove the resource heavy part of the software off of the persons computer and on a server in the cloud. So it then seem ludicrous to say the reason the system is crashing is because SaaS applications are more resource heavy!
Does my device have enough RAM to do what most would expect from a typical SaaS application?
If you can watch a video on YouTune then in my opinion your device has plenty of RAM to operate a SaaS application like Baby’s Days. Closing apps that may be “on” in the background (as frequently advised by support) wont stop Baby’s Days crashing. If you can load Youtube on your device then chances are that RAM isn’t the issue and if it is the issue you need to question what exactly BDs is loading up that’s bigger than your average Youtube video?
So what’s the conclusion?
As ever I believe Mark Kahl and the support staff are using Geek talk to mystify people rather than dealing with actual issues present in the Baby’s Days software.
If people have facebook open (not a SaaS App but an awesome platform that updates in real time, plays videos automatically, loads constant photos etc) but babysdays crashes then it’s pretty obvious where a big chunk of the issue is. Do not be fooled by the smoke screen of “awww poor love it’s because it’s SaaS, don’t worry you wont understand it, just believe me”.
It may be that some people have low ram machines, but then you have to ask the question what is Babys Day’s trying to load into memory that is so large that it makes things fall over?
If they’ve potentially coded a site bad enough that it’s crashing people’s browsers or devices, the problem is in their coding, not in the site being “resource hungry”. SaaS or website, there’s no reason to ever use enough ram or CPU to crash anything; despite what Mark Kahl says Baby’s Days and any system like it uses a fraction of what sites like Youtube or similar high quality media SaaS sites do, and they can manage it without crashing anything.
I hope this post helps those feeling really frustrated with the system at the moment have the courage to open a ticket with support and get the issue sorted. Just becasue you do not have an IT degree it does not mean the issue “must be your end”. You pay a lot of money for this service, the least it could do is actually work.
Make sure you pop back tomorrow when I’ll be blogging about the changes in Baby’s Days customer service over the years and the recent server downtime that many customers may not be aware of.