Sorry for the server downtime last night.

The server is hosted with 1and1 and was down for about 8 hours last night, even though I contacted their support almost immediately.

I have been trying to move the site to a more reliable host, but at the moment I am having some issues and so have been unable to move it.


The site will probably be moved to a new server in the next few weeks and so there could be some downtime as 1and1 lock domain names and so moving to another server is not as easy as it was last time.

_________________
DIY | Donnas dream house

8 hours for downtime is VERY poor service from the supplier

out of curiosity, do you have this on a corporate box?

what do you mean by corporate box?

_________________
DIY | Donnas dream house

are you using a public service type of box or a business service one?

some companies that provide boxes offer two types of service. the business one gets priority over something like a gaming server box with the same provider.

same as if you have a business telephone line with BT. if there's a fault they sort it instantly, if you are a domestic line it gets sorted when they have time.

It's a business, dedicated, managed server.

I have looked at hundreds of hosting companies and many of them I will not go near with a barge pole as I could be moving from bad to worse.

Hosts that I will not go near are

1and1
Lycos
123 reg
webfusion ( owned by same company that owns 123 reg)
Donhost ( owned by same company that owns 123 reg)
supanames ( owned by same company that owns 123 reg)



I am currently considering

www.infrenion.com (.org is hosted with infrenion)

http://www.unitedhosting.co.uk/dedicated.php

_________________
DIY | Donnas dream house

i wouldn't think you could go far wrong putting them on the same SS. if they can handle your video's being on there using high bandwidth reliably, surely they can handle a forum.

Stay away from fasthosts as well - just in case you are tempted. Reliability is ok with them, but they have put one of these capatca type things in which you have to match the letters everytime you log on and it takes me about 10 minutes to come up with a combination that they says matches the graphic - such a p***take I am looking to move some sites from there

_________________
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?"
She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

I for one am grateful for the outage.

Having had a ten hour day, several pints and Mrs A wanting to watch some cobblers on TV, I resorted to t'internet (minus UHM).

My ethanol-fuelled rants, though not offending anyone, has left numerous readers around the country stunned, confused, depressed - or all three. At least the good folk on UHM were spared!

A cautionary tale - the above recipe is not conducive to coherent posting!

It amazes me just how many webhosting companies are totally rubbish at what they do


The really annoying thing is that they all have loads of Awards for their service. These awards must be given out just for a web host existing.

Many of these companies also claim to be the number one

_________________
DIY | Donnas dream house

I'm saddened to hear you are having troubles with 1and1, is this a recent occurrence? I ask because I recommend 1and1 to all my clients (and I use them myself) and I've never had a serious amount of down time that has gone unexplained and they've always come through with a timely fix - I'm generally Mr Rottweiler from the outset though and demand my sites are placed on servers with a low contention ratio of other users.

You can use this tool to establish how many sites are being hosted from the same ip address as yours (some ISP's use technologies that may misrepresent this figure but I do not believe 1and1 are one of them) http://www.domaintools.com/reverse-ip/, but don't forget it is possible to have many IP addresses hosted from the same physical server. Running your IP through this shows only 3 sites are on that IP, and they are all yours, and they are all zippy, I suspect the problem with your site yesterday evening was down to the server hosting the MySQL database which is a problem you will encounter with any host unless you have your own db server or have a server on which you can install your own database engine. (both Onar-cafe.com and Keephouse.biz appeared to be working even though UHM was out of order)

I suspect this may be out of budget but RackSpace.co.uk are typically used by clients where mission critical up time and failover is a necessity and they offer packages where you can co-locate your own server within their secure data centre(s) or rent servers as 1and1, their customer service used to be second to none as well, receiving surprise gifts such as a pair of woolly socks along with a complimentary slip saying 'remember us the next time you have cold feet'.. top class.

Hope things improve for you, Nick

Nick - interesting link.

Just checked a couple of sites I have on fasthosts ...

my own site (classed as a Home site) says "There are 1,014 domains hosted on this IP address"

another site which is classed as a Business Site with Exchange, SQL, etc says "There are 59 domains hosted on this IP address"

This seems well over the odds

_________________
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?"
She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

Both of those figures aren't at all surprising, they probably use a minimum of quad core processors on each with lots of RAM and have probably load balanced each server with particular users or business sites based upon the weekly statistics of hits each site receives - this is how they remain in business when they charge a pittance per month - it is certainly a case of you get what you pay for!

The reason linux hosted virtual servers are always far cheaper than MS hosted ones is that Linux is so much smaller in terms of operating system requirements on RAM and CPU, they can often fit thousands of virtual sites onto a server where MS hosted sites would only hold a quarter of the number of sites (example for this post.. I don't have any specific figures to back this up, I'm sure you could google for some :) )

Thanks Nick


At first 1and1 were ok as I had moved to them from shared hosting and so the dedicated server was great. But over the last few months I have had planty of problems with them.

The website has been down several times, the first time I complained and got a months hosting back off them

The next few times it went offline and was offline for over 4 hours and now when I email complaints they don't even reply to my emails.

I leased another server from them for the .org domain and £70 per month and installed phpmotion on the server. The server did not like php motion and crashed within a few days. I tried to log into my control panel to restart the server and could not. I contacted support and they fixed it, but then the phpmotion would not work I told them that it was not working and their reply was "tuff- you are not on a managed server", despite them causing the problem in the first place! I cancelled the contract, but as I signed up for 12 months they are still taking the £70 per month for the server. I emailed them and said this was unfair because the server or support staff were not suitable and that I would pay the initial set up fee of £70 and then cancel the contract (which is what would of happened if I had signed up on a monthly basis)


Several emails have been sent and I get noe reply from them.

A few weeks back I get an email from them saying that the server platform is to be upgraded and that the site may go offline for 15 mins on a set date. The site goes down and then a few days later it emerges that the arcade no longer works I phone 1and1 and speak to a guy that tells me that a directory is missing, ontop of this he denies that a platform upgrade was ever carried out! I ask him if he can fix it, he says he can fix it by doing a system restore to an earlier date! I tell him that if they do that I might loose dynamically generated content in the mysql databases- he says he can perform a system restore

I leave it and then ring back a few days later, I speak to someone else that says that they can restore all files, but this will not effect the mysql databases. Result I tell them to restore it to a day before they did the platform upgrade. They can't and tell me that they can restore to two days previous to the day, which means that the restore is after the platform upgrade

I ask how long it will take for the restore- they said it will be done in the next 48 hours In the end I asked the guy that installed the arcade and he tells me how to fix it.

A few days later the directory, arcade and forum stop working and are showing 404 errors. I call support and only thought that the forum was down at this point. I tell the guy the error and he tells me that it is a problem with phpbb. I go to phpbb.com and read some posts in their forum which points to it being a server issue. I then think to try the directory and the arcade- all of which are not working. I call 1and1 and they eventually sort it out.

Then I am told that the directory is showing 404 errors I ring 1and1 and tell them and they say I must of changed some of the files- I tell them that I have not and a few hours later they fix the problem that they caused. A few days later someone else complains that some pages in the directory are showing 404's and so I got a guy from the phpdirectory forum to sort it as I have lost all hope with 1and1.

When I check my phone bill it shows that I have called 1and1 support 7 times in March, not sure how many times in April but it will be a similar amount.

Also I have problems with emails as 1and1 do not send out emails from my dedicated server, they send them out from their own mail server and so my emails get bounced by many of the isps and email providers and my emails are often regarded as spam. The email I lease for the .org site sends mail through the .org server and so there is not a problem with them.

I have recommended 1and1 in the past but now they are really not a good firm to deal with and I'll not recommend them to anyone ever again.

The sooner I move away from 1and1 the better.

_________________
DIY | Donnas dream house

I think it is also because Linux is open source and lots of linux software is open source and is Free. For microsoft software you have to pay for it!

_________________
DIY | Donnas dream house

The IP address tool is interesting as I also have two more websites on that server, which are on a different IP address. There was a couple more, but I tried moving the domain names to 123 reg and now the domain names have been stuck in cyberspace for 8 weeks as 123reg do not answer my emails and do not seem to care

_________________
DIY | Donnas dream house