The back story about AtA being down this past weekend.
Written by Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com on August 5, 2008 – 3:45 pm -If you are a loyal AtA reader you know we were down for most of this weekend. If you read our post on monday you know that the downtime was because of our new host - InspirtNetworks. Once someone out there in internet land created a filter for us to bring our Intense Debate comments over to Word Press we were ready to move to our new home. It was already set up on one of InspiritNetworks servers. It was running fine for several months. I pulled up my console and changed my DNS. We were up on the new host within a few hours.
Everything was good I started tweaking (the site not personally) and writing and modifying. I went to sleep and the site was not there when I got up. My email was down, the site was down and then I saw a message that came through around 2 in the morning.
The jist of it was that Inspirtnetworks was moving datacenters and we could see 24-48 hours of downtime. I saw that and then some. Sandeep over there got a good deal and jumped on it. This is a no no in the networking game. But because of the cheap and competitive prices (not to mention all my eggs being in one basket 24 hours after deploying) I was going to be here for a while. Inspirit is not Google that’s for sure and if Sandeep wasn’t such a nice guy I might have wrote a much nastier article.
But in all actuality he stayed in touch the whole time we were down and kept us updated. Then I got the email that the site was back up. I checked it out. Saw my scheduled posts were published and went back to enjoying my baby’s first words (DaDa if anyone cares :) )
Then my emails came flooding in almost 1400 emails. The last 30 or so were asking me why http://www.askTheAdmin.com was redirecting to a website called http://www.androidGuys.com . I was dumbfounded. Pissed and confussed. I got Sandeep on IM and he sounded shocked as well and took care of it. After another 6 hours or so we were back up and have been since.
It was a fun fun weekend. And what is the morale of the story boys and girls?
You flucking get what you pay for… Bills = next to nothing… Expectations should be next to nothing.
With that being said does anyone know of any reliable cheap hosts?
Posted in General |
20 Responses
to “The back story about AtA being down this past weekend.”
2 Trackback(s)
- Aug 8, 2008: IT’s About Uptime - The StackSafe Blog » Blog Archive » Links List 8.8.08
- Nov 6, 2008: A few words from the Admin… | Unit1
By Mike B on Aug 5, 2008 | Reply
I’ve been with 1and1.com for about a year I think it is now, and so far they’ve been the most reliable, and only cost me like 25 bucks every 6 months. You probably generate a bit more traffic than me, but all their plans are pretty reasonable, and I have yet to have any downtime from them.
By dot45 on Aug 5, 2008 | Reply
I currently use ICDsoft, they have treated me well and have lightning fast response times for issues.
By Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com on Aug 5, 2008 | Reply
What are you paying Chris? 1and1 is sounding pretty sweet right about now. Do they run Cpanel and allow full access?
By DanO on Aug 5, 2008 | Reply
1&1 has CPanel on the Linux packages [IP Deny!] and a similar tool for Windows packages. Exchange Account is $6.99 per Month with a full-version of Outlook® 2007 at no additional cost.
By DanO on Aug 5, 2008 | Reply
I am surprised you aren’t just running ATA out of your house tho’.
By Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com on Aug 5, 2008 | Reply
It used to be a blogger blog, it lived briefly in my data center and needs to find a reliable now that we are expanding. I would like to move away from the servers in my basement thing. very 90’s :)
By dot45 on Aug 6, 2008 | Reply
http://www2.icdsoft.com/hosting.php
there is a link with two of there hosting packages. They use a control panel app, not cpanel but works the same. I believe you can get an account with full shell access, but its not needed.
I’m not sure of the bandwidth the site uses but the 200GB transfer a month for $10 would prolly cover you.
To elaborate on the top notch service. I’ll qoute from there website.
“Is your current host taking days to return your tech support requests? We guarantee a reply to each and every Tech Support Ticket within one hour of its posting.”
“Each tech support ticket thread is reviewed by a Supervisor within 24 hours. If you open up a tech support ticket - not only will you receive a one-hour response, but within 24 hours a Supervisor will make sure that everything was resolved to your complete satisfaction.”
By AussieRodney on Aug 6, 2008 | Reply
http://www.servage.net/?coupon=cust12585
AU$8.35 a month, so slightly less in US$.
By Ull on Aug 6, 2008 | Reply
You never explained why in it was redirecting to androidguys. Who’s fault was that? I did a nslookup for the two address, AtA and android and htey resolved to the same IP, so are they hosted at your host, and a mis configured host header? or what?
Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
August 6th, 2008 at 8:51 am
It was Sandeep misconfiguring DNS. Yes AndroidGuys and us are hosted on the same server. Due to misconfigurations all sites on the box pointed to AndroidGuys…
I hope they enjoyed the traffic bost (while they were up! Good to hear from you ULL!)
By Norcross on Aug 6, 2008 | Reply
Considering your ninja admin skills, I’m really suprised you don’t self-host. I have a blog (albeit small) and a handfull of other sites on a converted Compaq Presario running Windows Server 2003. With the relatively low price of home office service, why go elsewhere?
Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
August 6th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Thanks Norcross but I need to be able to rely on a service and 1and1 is in the lead right now. Pull my attention away from administering the server and put my full attention towards the actual site. As more features are added and more corporate sponsorship pop up these will be more and more important.
Isn’t $5-$15 a month worth piece of mind? I think so! I just got caught up with a good deal and wasn’t thinking straight.
But I am still open to other suggestions!
Norcross Reply:
August 7th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
I can understand that. I guess I just love to tinker, and having my own gives me more reason to.
By jglessner on Aug 6, 2008 | Reply
I use 1 and 1 for my personal hosting (kind of debating about using it for my work hosting), and have had no issues in like 2 years.
I am currently looking at slicehost (slicehost.com) for hosting a remote Nagios machine (and possibly the company website as well). They do hosting a bit differently, and it’s more like you renting a server from a data center. You have COMPLETE control over your ’slice’ and there are many Linux distros to choose from.
By Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com on Aug 7, 2008 | Reply
@Norcross - I love to tinker as well and have a lan running throughou my house and even the fridge is running linux :) But none of that is mission critical like AtA! I can reboot, reformat or retire any of my equipment at will having a production server in your home becomes a big responsibility.
@jglessner I need to check that out - thats very interesting.
By ElvenEyes on Aug 8, 2008 | Reply
I recently signed up with ipowerweb on the recommendation of a friend who has a 4000+ page web site. He said that in the 7 1/2 years he has been with them, they’ve only been down maybe three times, and only for a few hours. Their prices are competitive, and although I’m not familiar with some of the technical aspects you have mentioned, I found their support people to be extremely knowledgeable and friendly. Their phone number is 1-888-511-4678 and their address is http://www.ipower.com/ipower/index.bml . Good luck in finding a site!
By Jeremy L. Gaddis on Aug 12, 2008 | Reply
This is a little bit late as far as responses go, but I can back up the guy who previously mentioned 1and1.com. I’ve used them for probably four or so years now. There have been a few times that I ditched them when I found something cheaper than even the $17 per three months that I currently pay, but every time I have went running back to them.
Downtime has been minimal and always with plenty of notification. Not a single problem here.
HTH.
Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
August 12th, 2008 at 8:09 am
Thanks for your 2 cents Jeremy - what do you get from 1 and 1 for the ~$6 a month?