I guess nothing is perfect 😦
Last year I switched to Westhost to avoid the horrendous poor quality of Site5; I accepted paying much more per month to get quality – to quote from the website:
At WestHost we pride ourselves in maintaining not only a fast but RELIABLE connection
– Multiple redundant telecommunications paths and carriers
– Numerous secondary power solutions in case of emergencies
– RAID mirroring
– 24/7 monitoring, backups and security updates
24 hours a day, 7 days a week via toll free phone, instant live chat and rapid response e-mail
And typically they’ve been pretty good. They’re not particularly fast at serving WordPress pages – even though I have a VPS plan set up for re-sellers, and allocate the resources to only my few websites. But they do normally respond fast if there is an issue, and give me confidence.
Well last night, my websites went down. Visiting the support pages I found a message saying there had been a power outage and some sites might be affected. A power outage?! Isn’t that one of the things that any hosting company should be able to guard against?
After a while all my sites came back up, except GBMINI – I couldn’t access the management page either so I was stuck. I sent a support email, got a boiler plate response, but no more (generally within ten minutes any issue I email about is sorted).
A couple hours later GBMINI was still down; I tried online chat which gave a real person response, but they said “we’re busy, please wait” and seeing it was bed time, I didn’t.
Now of course, we’re up once more – although websitepulse says we were down more than six hours. I guess that’s not so bad if it doesn’t happen for another year …
UPDATE:
Turns out the Gallery v2 SQL database was trashed as well!
Thankfully I have backups, and had to re-post only one picture …
M&I / GBMINI 
Life’s little curve balls keep on coming at one.
Received this email from Westhost:
Yesterday, at approximately 2:00 p.m. MDT, we experienced a utility power failure at our Data center. As a result our UPS systems kicked in as they are supposed to. However, there was a power transfer failure with our second generator that did not automatically occur. At 2:37 p.m. UPS battery power ran out before we could get two generators properly brought online. By approx 3:15 p.m. we manually had both generators running and at full power. Total time without power was about 40 minutes. We are currently still running on generator power and will continue to do so until later this afternoon when UPS system batteries are fully charged and ready for us to complete a conversion back to utility power. Utility power was restored yesterday at 6:45 p.m. We have fuel on-site for our generators to run for several days so doing this is not a risk.
Once power was restored at approx 3:15 p.m. many of our systems were able to come online shortly after. However, there were a handful of systems that needed our attention to get them running again due to the abrupt power loss.
As you are probably aware this is the second power incident we have experienced in a short period. Given that it’s only the second power incident in the history of our current Data center I can’t emphasize enough the importance that is being placed on ensuring this doesn’t happen again. Our Data center was designed with 100% uptime in mind and prior to these last incidents we have delivered on that.
I appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to resolve this. I appreciate the dedication of my team. They have put in a lot of extra time and effort to make sure clients are taken care of as quickly as possible.
I never have any trouble with .mac, soon to be “Mobile Me”, ugh!, or “me.com”, as .mac will be called, yucky, stupid name, and Bluehost. I think they only deal with linux or whatever it’s called.
Sorry to hear but it’s not like you’re the Pentagon. 😉
It’s alright in my book if they send a detailed explanation like that.
I guess it’s the season for network trouble, I came home to find no network, no ethernet connection (!)… Looks like the old UPS that runs my network hardware in the basement bit the bullet, and bypassing it everything is fine.
You can have all the UPSes and transfer switch hardware you want, but they have to actually work right.