Re: Would you move your site after this?
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- Cubfan
- Sr. Rocketeer
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I've got to ask you guys... if you just had this happen, would you consider moving your site? Got this email last night (part has been edited). Note all the smiley's which I suppose are supposed to make me feel really comfy.
Wow, what a day! If you are a racing fan, you know the Daytona 500 wrapped up minutes ago in spectacular fashion. It feels sort of like regular life is a vacuum from the energy of Speedweeks and especially today's race.
But the day chugs on, and we have some big news we want to make sure you are aware of.
SCHEDULED NETWORK MAINTENANCE TONIGHT, 10 PM - 6 AM CENTRAL
The server move which was postponed from last Monday, 02/12/07 has been moved to tonight, starting shortly after 10 PM Central. This is a scheduled maintenance window imposed on us by our upstream provider in XXXX. Our upstream provider is moving to their own, new data center, located in the XXXX building in downtown XXXX.
The new data center offers a lot of room to grow (some 4000 sq. ft.), improved backbone connectivity, and facilities designed and built expressly for running servers. Our upstream provider was "land-locked" by their previous provider who would not guarantee space to grow over the coming months. Our upstream has been growing and a steady and strong rate, so they knew that they were going to have to either get that option for space, or be somewhere else where there WAS more room, within 6 months. Once the handwriting was on the wall with the old data center, they signed a long-term lease on the new location. They've completely refurbished the space from floor to ceiling, all systems being upgraded or installed new, and server moves are the final step in the facility migration. Our server move is on the last wave of moves. Once this final move is finished tonight, everything is complete and it is smooth sailing from here forward.
There are hundreds of other servers already running at the new facility and everything is reported to be running at 100%.
Previous nights' moves have been successful. Servers are taken down starting about 10 PM, moved to the new building (about a 30 minute drive) and then carefully re-racked and powered up. Last night, all servers were back online by 4:45 AM Central Time. Many servers were up well before that. So we are optimistic that even though an 8 hour window has been blocked out for the move (and to be fair, we ask all customers to please plan on the 8 hour window being the case) the outage may be quite a bit shorter than that.
CONTACTING US: Our helpdesk will be online and our technicians will be on-duty throughout the night at www.XXXXX
We will also be posting updates as applicable at www.XXXX.com Please realize that "no news is good news," our upstream provider will not be updating us unless something goes wrong. They are busy moving very valuable equipment and we don't want to distract them.
We will be happy to provide updates throughout the night, but wish to reassure you that no news definitely IS good news.
Everything will be back online no later than 6 AM Central Time. Everything will be normal by sunrise.
Well, this email came to me at 8:33pm, an hour and a half before an 8-hour outage. No time to react, and I didn't see it until the server was actually down. No way to put up warning messages or anything.
And the move actually took 9 hours, not the promised 8 hours... cutting into prime-time morning hours.
The above would probably be enough for most of you, but I had days of work after this host "lost a server hard drive" and had a day and a half of downtime, and when they rebuilt their server, my Joomla site had several errors that they could not fix. Weeks later, they were still reconfiguring settings that were in place before the outage. The host said, "hardware failures aren't our fault," but ONE hard drive taking down entire sites for days? Come on.
Oh, and they have no phone support. No phone number listed. They "say" that their support service on their website is more reliable... though I've waited hours and sometimes a whole day for a response to their support system. Until recently, the link to their support service was broken... they moved it without fixing the link on their homepage, and assumed we'd figure it out, I guess.
It's a big hassle to move, but I'm already making plans. I'm thinking hostgator.com looks good, and have already moved one site there and it went flawlessly... doesn't seem as fast at times, though, but I did get the cheapest account available for that test. I'd get the "swamp" account for my important sites. All I want is a host that I can get service (like changing file ownership and stuff like that), and one that will stay up all the time... or 99% of the time, at least.
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- damo
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 2142
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i feel for you, i really do. its a bit short notice and for that alone i wouldn't be moving but based on everything else you've said it's a concern. you should check out this thread:
www.rockettheme.com/forum/index.php?t=7579&rb_v=viewtopic - www.c3p0.se - sweden
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- Donna Vincent
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 348
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I've tried several different hosts over the years and the only one I found to be consistently reliable, secure and responsive is godaddy.com. And the icing on the cake is that their prices are also the lowest.
They just upgraded the system that installs Joomla and other open-source scripts for you, so that you choose the database and directory. They started out great and are getting better and better all the time. I get lots of coupons from them too.
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- Cubfan
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 192
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damo wrote:
you should check out this thread:
I have checked it out. That's what got me looking at hostgator, and I'm impressed with the responsiveness I've had with them so far.
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- Cubfan
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 192
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Donna Vincent wrote:
I've tried several different hosts over the years and the only one I found to be consistently reliable, secure and responsive is godaddy.com.
Really? It's been over a year ago, but on another site I frequent there were literally dozens of horror stories about godaddy.com, and many of those ended up moving.
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- Donna Vincent
- Hero Rocketeer
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Wow, that's surprising. It's the only hosting company that I DON'T have a horror story about. I have all my clients use Godaddy. Never had a problem with my many accounts or my clients' accounts.
In fact, on just one single economy hosting accont (3.99/mo.) I have 4 joomla installations that I use for development and demos, plus half a dozen live static websites.
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- John Sanchez
- Hero Rocketeer
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I'm on hostgator and I must say they are the best I've dealt with so far.
Here's my horror story. My old web host's email server were completely down. I couldn't send or receive email for days. I called tech support and got an incident number and was told everything should be resolved in 24-48 hours. 24-48 hours with out email for a tennis club that was planning a 200-player, $15,000 charity tournament is a LONG time to not be able to contact sponsors and volunteers just 34 weeks before the tournament. The tournament director and the club president agreed we needed to make the switch if they fell outside of the 48 hour window. I called every couple of hours desperate to get things moved along quickly, but nothing happened. After a little more than 56 hours after we put in our incident report, I migrated the site over to host gator, changed the DNS records, etc and was up and running in 30 minutes. No site-downtime and email was updated with the new MX records.
The old host? They sent me an email stating the issue was resolved 108 HOUR LATER. The issue that was "resolved"? Your MX records are incorrect. Please update your MX records to reflect xxxxxx Host Servers."
Nice. It took more than 4 days for you to realize that I switched hosts, making no mention of the original problem.
I like hostgator. I'm glad I switched.
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- Stephen O Connor
- Sr. Rocketeer
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For me, hostgator provides the right mix with pricing and support.
I set up a series of websites almost exactly a year ago (although I had done so before--on a much simpler basis), and I looked into a number of hosts. Although things might be different now ( I haven't looked at reviews lately), I liked the resources offered and the level of service. I am a fairly demanding customer, but I have been happy with their service. On fairly complex issue, making php.ini over-rides for joomla security on a phpsuexec server, took a few days of back and forth to resolve--but in the end, they customized a script (that I couldn't get to work) to do it, installed it, ran it, and told me how to update it myself!
After a year--I am very happy with hostgator.
Steve
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- Heather Claus
- Hero Rocketeer
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I have to say I am not a fan of GoDaddy, since their systems are not fully compatible with Macs. When I have trouble, they essentially tell me to go scr3w...
I am not familiar with HostGator, but I will sat that I LOVE westhost.com, which has helped me out many times int he wee hours of morning. The support guys are great, and the price is very, very good, IMO. - --
Heather M. Claus
www.nookienotes.com/index.php <--- in development
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- Peter Osipof
- Elite Rocketeer
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- I am on HostPc.com great customer service.
- VirtueShop
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