Sorry everyone.
Site5 hosting has been poor over the last week or so – I noticed last week that my sites were down every morning for an hour or two; Site5 eventually claimed that it was a motherboard issue which they claimed to replace – but the hosting kept failing.
A week ago they sent this long message, promising all sorts of updates to sort issues:
Step 1: Our upcoming mail server software upgrade will result in a overall load average decrease and a nice bump up for server stability and website performance. Moiras is set to be upgraded tonight so you should be seeing results as early as tomorrow. This conversion has already happened on a handful of other servers for testing purposes and we have been very impressed with results thus far. Servers that were towards the top of our list for outage incidents have now stabilized and are running very smoothly.
Step 2: We will be upgrading our servers to MySQL 5 in early October which will result in yet another performance boost for the Moiras server and all the others. This upgrade will correct several bugs that remain unfixed in the MySQL 4.1 tree. The upgrade to MySQL 5 will show speed improvements due to a newly built engine as well as increased reliability and stability. MySQL 5 can also allow us to track usage much more easily and be able to alert intensive users as issues arise.
Step 3: At the end of these software upgrades we will then decide on which servers, if any, need to be moved to a SCSI/RAID 5 hardware setup to get their overall uptime/performance levels to where we all want them to be.
I’ve no idea if they did any of this – the hosting was actually OK for two days but got worse again.
Now, Site5 no longer respond to technical support requests – they just ignore them. And today, my hosting (on their “moiras” server) was down for more than 8 hours. They claim that a hard drive failed and it apparently took them that long to “copy data” and get everything working again (see this report).
Clearly there’s no such thing as mirrored backups 😦
So finally this evening my websites are back – but changes done by Site5 have broken them in ways I can’t fully diagnose yet.
Firstly, new comments don’t appear! They are emailed to me as normal, but they don’t get posted to the website. I can edit posts and comments successfully so it’s not a database issue.
Secondly, they’ve apparently omitted the graphics engine ImageMagick so that Gallery is broken – it can’t make thumbnail images any more.
Probably there are other issues too; these are just what I’ve found in the last hour.
Site5 seem to be turning into a poorer quality higher priced company – they used to offer a good package at a good price, with an “uptime guarantee”; they no longer have that guarantee, they don’t respond to technical support, they’ve put their prices up …
You can bet that I will NOT be recommending them 😦
UPDATE:
I still can’t post comments 😦
But I just got this message from Site5: “I am installing this now it should be done within 5 minutes” so maybe there’s some hope …
… and now I can again post pictures.
Funny thing – someone sent me a comment upset about the terrible language I used; shame they didn’t bother to read and notice that comments aren’t working any more!
M&I / GBMINI 
UPDATE #2:
It seems I can post comments again. I haven’t heard that Site5 changed anything … I think there might have been some sort of SQL corruption maybe caused by the drive failure on the server.
I was able to post comments again after doing some “editing” of the database …
I’ve been with Site 5 for just over a year now and service is getting worse. They are strange in that their systems are not RAID to start with. Also it seems service is different from server to server they serve which is sad.
I know that they have just performed some upgrades over the last week. Mail systems, PHP, and MySQL were all affected. I still am not having any issues with Site5… but I am in a stale reseller account that does not get upgraded to the new platforms they are using.
Site5 has gone steeply downhill in 06. I had several issues with my server, often hitting 100% usage and not responsive, several times a day for weeks. I had several tickets open with them. Instead of investigating the cause of a problem, they just wait till it goes away or shows itself completely, and finally respond “it’s working now.”
The support forums used to be very useful and constructive, but they’ve switched to a nazi mentality and delete any post having to do with support or server issues. I’ve actually taken screenshots as proof, sometimes of responses before it disappears.
I wrote a long letter to management that supports encouraged and promised would get a response. No response after several months (but that ticket still exists as open in their system!).
Not exactly the 10 minute response time they advertised when I signed up.
Site5 presents a specific threat to the mini community, as yours, mine, bungle, minisontop, gomotoring, a handful of other sites are on it…I hope motoringfile at least has switched but maybe gabe still is too! And you see all these sites go down from time to time.
I’ll stop now…I could go on and on 😦
I’ve finally been able to access the SQL database; I did a “check” on it and saw messages including:
gbminine_blog.mt_comment
warning : Table is marked as crashed
warning : 121 clients are using or haven’t closed the table properly
error : Record at pos: 3749280 is not remove-marked
error : record delete-link-chain corrupted
error : Corrupt
Doesn’t sound good and probably explains why comments are broken … so I did a “repair” and it said:
gbminine_blog.mt_comment
warning : Number of rows changed from 3762 to 3763
status : OK
Let’s see if this comment works … Oh Goody, it did! Maybe all is well for a while …
Ian,
You could check out http://midphase.com… I host with them as well as Site5.
I also use site5.com. Service is getting worse by the minute. They also gave me the ‘hard drive’ story for my MUSES server. Do you expect me to believe that these servers do not have redundancy and hot-swappable drivers??
I just don’t believe their excuses. It looks more and more like a mickey mouse company.
I understand your frustration Ian. I am already looking elsewhere.
but I only went to site5 because all you guys did! I have to admit that their customer service is sucking these days but recently the site has kept up with my humble demands.
so where are we all moving to next?
Sorry Paul 😉
I looked around today for hosting companies that use RAID (mirrored drives) and such reliability features – basically you pay $8-$15/month but get almost zero storage (1GB max), or pay $50/month … so Site5 wins on the cost/features and we’ve got to hope they do improve.
Interestingly, GoMotoring is also on Site5, but I use Marks site to confirm when mine is down (if it’s gone from Marks RSS feeds, it’s not just a problem local to me) … and I’ve not seen Marks site down at any time!
Apparently some Site5 servers are much more reliable than others.
I don’t want to shout this in case it jeopardises things, but since this Site5 chaos, they’ve been working well … who knows, maybe they fixed everything finally.
Also, another MINI owner just switched from a (different) bad company – see here for more details