Site5.com hosting is poor

Posted on by Ian C.

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!

West to East, now South to North?

Posted on by Ian C.

I had so much fun doing MINI Takes The States – and loads of other people did too … so much so, that there is a plan for a Florida to Maine drive next year: The Great Ice Cream Run, and I’m very tempted 🙂
How about a seven day trip from Florida up to Maine including stops at some of the best ice cream shops you’ll ever visit? Homemade ice cream!
And for the real enthusiast, how about topping off the whole trip with MINIs on Top 2007?

Check out the Great Ice Cream Run website for more info – and “watch that space” …

And for loads of fun, check out the Great Ice Cream Run movie!

Rain, Apples, and Sundaes

Posted on by Ian C.

Today was wet – but it didn’t stop 10 MINIs getting together to drive, pick apples and eat ice cream, including Brian, recently from Indianapolis, joined us, showing off stripes from Todd Pearson. The wet roads and sometimes heavy rain slowed down the drive, but with the trees starting to turn it was still pretty!

Arriving at George’s Hill Orchard, we met Peter who had driven up from New York, and had the choice of buying or picking apples, and having lunch:

 

After lunch, more driving, partly through roads with no surface(!) and our final destination of the day, to Colonial Candies – with candies, and penguins!

 

Many thanks to Sheena for organizing this event (see this MINI2 thread) – also thanks to Ivan for putting together a great music selection (and he asked me to say “I didn’t skip any tracks!”)