Website/Hosting

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.

I have always had GBMINI set up so that posts & comments are listed “most recent first” – but it seems that everyone else has the comments listed “most recent last”.
That order makes more sense when you want to scroll down through the page and read the comments in order – generally comments have been limited and it did not make much difference but with the discussions recently it is awkward to scroll down to the end (oldest comment) then scroll back up to read the comments in order.

So I have switched the ordering of comments to match everyone else – oldest comment now appears first with the rest following in order below.

I also looked into integrating the comment entry onto the page, but I have not got there yet without ruining the page layout – so for now comment entry remains “pop-up” …

Thank you for your comments 😉

So I recently wrote all about how this website is maintained, and sang the praises of 1and1 (masses of storage, 10 times more bandwidth than I need, and all the features I am ever likely to need).
So of course they immediately respond by failing a total of three times in January for many hours at a time! Down enough that at least two people (apart from me) noticed and commented on it.

1and1 has no support/status page – you can send an email if you wish; each time I did that I got a reply (typically the next day) saying “all is well now”. No explanation of what was wrong …
You can also phone their support line (a recent innovation for them); the last time I did that I was on hold for more than half an hour and when I finally got through, my web site had just recovered so I got the same “all is well” response. I ranted, and was told something about a raid failure – but that was the same excuse used a week earlier to cover a six+ hour failure.

So I won’t put up with it any more. After some research, I am switching to PowWeb (the same hosting company used by Gabe Bridgers MotoringFile); this company makes a feature of their technology which ensures your website will experience virtually no downtime ….
There is also a PowWeb forum where issues can be discussed – apparently there is no censoring by PowWeb; indeed there are announcements of issues and ongoing maintenance & improvements.

Of course (refer to the subject of this post), last night when I was testing everything I started to get lots of “500 Internal Server Error” messages on php web pages – but I realised it was not my own mistake when I saw the same on MotoringFile and on another PowWeb hosted site … a quick use of their online chat confirmed that PowWeb had a problem, but were working on it (all is well again today).

So it seems that I will never find a reliable web hosting company – but I prefer one that admits problems to one that cannot be contacted.