Oh well.
Switching from 1and1 to PowWeb did not prevent outages on GBMINI 😦
Today GBMINI was down for at least an hour – but so was most of PowWeb, including MotoringFile and even PowWebs own site.
From the PowWeb site:
Take advantage of our new technology and avoid embarrassing downtime! There are multiple paths for your client to hit your website at every given point through our “Zero Downtime Hosting” platform. PowWeb is one of the few companies that offer this technology!
At least PowWeb does tell you what is going on – from the PowWeb forum tonight:
We had some http service interruptions caused by a DOS attack earlier this morning. The attack was targeting one of the sites we host on a specific cluster. It also maxed out our load balancer limits which cause problems on all clusters. The problem has been resolved and we apologize for the inconvenience. Please note that email service was not interrupted. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
I recently set up a free monitor on WebSitePulse … it sent me an email alert when GBMINI vanished, and also told me when it came back; the free service only checks every hour so I don’t know exactly how long it was down – I guess for a business paying for the more frequent monitoring would be very worthwhile.
M&I / GBMINI 
You might want to try webhost4life.com. I’ve been with them for over a year now and there has been a total of maybe 15 minutes of downtime. It’s more than the real 99.999% downtime people, but you can’t beat the price.
The downside of the new trend of load balancing is that DoS attacks to others affect everyone.
Thanks for the link to WebSitePulse I will try them out for the free two weeks so I can get some hard numbers on my own providers.
But unless you are a big site, especially one that is a business, an hour downtime every once in a while is no big deal. Especially when you’re only paying $5-10 a month for hosting.
Seems like Powweb has just gone downhill since you joined 😉
Nothing can be more frustrating that a crappy host! I just spent all of last week moving our club’s entire presence to vizaweb because our last host was blacklisted by every email server west of the Mississippi! That, and when they went down, it was usually for 2 or 3 days, not just an hour. In fact, the last week with them, the site was only available 2 or the 7 days.
I was hosting with Doreo and they were good but I needed more features and control so I switched to Site5 and setup a reseller account. So far I have no complaints.
Gabe I was having issues getting on your site at the same time as Ian’s. Are you with the same people?
RB,
Yes – Gabes MotoringFile is also hosted on PowWeb – one of the reasons I chose them to switch to was the general reliability of MotoringFile.
God I need to read my comments before posting… anyway Powweb has had quite a few issues as of late and I’m wondering how much of it has to do with the new load balancing scheme.
Sure makes the idea of a dedicated server more interesting 🙂
I’m still looking into getting a server for our sites. I don’t yet have enough people interested to make each person’s share of the cost small enough, though.