Reliability Changes July 8, 2009
Posted by ismywebsite in general.add a comment
Here’s the latest in reliability for our network.
Node 6 – Nixism
Uptime last 14 days – 100.00% (No Change)No current issues.
Node 2 – Felweb
Uptime last 14 days – 100.00% (No Change)No current issues. Not open to new accounts.
Node 3 – OSHS
Uptime last 14 days – 100.00% (No Change)Storage will not be upgraded. Closed to new accounts.
Node 1 – SmokyHosts
Uptime last 14 days – 99.54% (Down 0.38%)Storage upgrade complete.
Node 7 – HighLayer
Uptime last 14 days – 99.45% (Down 0.55%)No current issues. Not open to new accounts.
Node 5 – Addora
Uptime last 14 days – 98.21% (Down 0.23%)No current issues.
Will keep you posted.
Node 3 Crackdown July 6, 2009
Posted by ismywebsite in general.Tags: advertising, node 3, oshs, pm, price, rules, storage, worry
2 comments
Node 3 is out of storage at present, and after 15 days of waiting I finally received a response from OpenSource Hosting Solutions, the company managing the node ,that they would only be increasing the storage for more than twice our current price, effectively lifting the price we pay to higher than any other node by 33%. This is an unacceptable rate.
The waiting list of accounts who need extra storage is increasing daily. All the empty accounts are gone, and all known violators are gone, except for those who haven’t placed ads already. There is really no choice at this point but to remove those accounts to clear the space for others.
Essentially, at this point, I’m giving everyone one week to make sure ads are placed or at least respond to the PM I’ve sent them with a plan. Then I start deleting the accounts at random, because this just isn’t fair to everyone else who is following the rules.
If you’ve placed ads, you have nothing to worry about. Everyone else, you have been warned…
Reliability Report July 2, 2009
Posted by ismywebsite in general.Tags: addora, felweb, highlayer, nixism, oshs, relaibility, report, smokyhost
add a comment
I am pleased to report that since the launch of our uptime statistics, uptime has seen an overall increase. With the exception of nodes 1 and 5, all nodes currently report 100.00% uptime!
Node 6 – Nixism
Uptime last 14 days – 100.00% (No Change)No current issues.
Node 7 – HighLayer
Uptime last 14 days – 100.00% (No Change)No current issues. Not open to new accounts.
Node 2 – Felweb
Uptime last 14 days – 100.00% (Up 0.16%)No current issues. Not open to new accounts.
Node 3 – OSHS
Uptime last 14 days – 100.00% (Up 1.24%)Still in process of storage upgrade. Not open to new accounts.
Node 1 – SmokyHosts
Uptime last 14 days – 99.92% (Up 0.39%)Storage upgrade complete.
Node 5 – Addora
Uptime last 14 days – 98.44% (Up 0.65%)No current issues.
We will be examining Node 5 in the near future to determine the best course of action to increase reliability here, as this is still a trouble spot.
Node Uptime Report June 20, 2009
Posted by ismywebsite in general.3 comments
I’m planning on starting these, just to give a vague idea of which nodes are most reliable at any given time. This should help a lot for those people who need to have their sites online reliably. Nodes are listed in order from most reliable to least reliable.
Node 6 – Nixism
Uptime last 14 days – 100.00%No current issues.
Node 7 – HighLayer
Uptime last 8 days – 100.00%No current issues. Not open to new accounts.
Node 2 – Felweb
Uptime last 14 days – 99.84%No current issues. Not open to new accounts.
Node 1 – SmokyHosts
Uptime last 14 days – 99.53%In process of storage upgrade.
Node 3 – OSHS
Uptime last 14 days – 98.76%In process of storage upgrade. Not open to new accounts.
Node 5 – Addora
Uptime last 14 days – 97.79%No current issues.
Node 4 – GalaxyHosts
Uptime last 14 days – 40.68%Use of this node and company has been permanently discontinued. Why?
In the future, I will publish trends and changes in the uptime of servers, which should be helpful to gauge where to locate your website. Keep in mind that servers are judged on multiple aspects, including speed, security, and flexibility, and no server will be the best in all areas.
Lots Of Apologies June 18, 2009
Posted by ismywebsite in general.3 comments
It’s got to come out sooner or later, and of course I could definitely see this coming. At this point, it would appear our data from Node 4 is completely inaccessible. All copies that exist:
1) The account with Galaxy Hosts appears to the best of our knowledge to have disappeared along with all our data, and our friend Patrick hasn’t replied. Either his support system has gliched again, he’s ignoring us entirely, or he’s just not man enough to tell us that the data’s gone.
2) The copy which was rushingly backed up by the one volunteer who I managed to find has been locked away at a location he will not visit for 2 and a half months again.
3) I did a backup of a small percentage of the accounts on my own. These still exist, and have all been restored.
4) The copy you backed up, and keep regularly up-to-date, which you are welcome to restore at any time.
In all honesty, we can blame and point fingers around that table at who’s fault it is. I might as well take all the blame for how this turned out, since that’s usually what ends up happening anyways, but the fact is, I believe there’s only one person who is truly blameless in this whole endeavour, and his name is Kristoffer.
Why is he blameless? Because he actually replied to the blog post and offered his services moving accounts over. He was the only one. Unfortunately, I don’t really know him very well, and I didn’t want someone who I’ve just met yesterday handling your data, as much as I believe in him and the application process I’ve set up.
The other fact I know is that I don’t want this to ever happen again, so I’ve outlined the exact procedure to be followed in the future when we have to deal with this type of thing again:
On Initial Notification
-Blog post about potential transfer
-Inform volunteers1 Week Prior
-Send out email to all users of node
-Perform a cleanup of server accounts4 Days Prior
-Send out PM to all users of node
-Divide server accounts between volunteers2 Days Prior
-Confirmation with all volunteers
-Assign replacements if necessary1 Day Prior
-DNS update commences
-New cPanel accounts createdDay Of
-All volunteers gather backups
-All primary backups transfer overDay After
-Any secondary backups will be restored
As a transfer volunteer, you would be expected to always check your email and be able to respond within 48 hours. In the event, you are contacted, you would be given a specific 12 hour timeframe within which to:
- Gather 50-100 Primary Backups, which are tar.gz files that are stored on your computer. These will be selected for you and presented in a list of links.
- Restore these 50-100 Primary Backups to the new server by uploading them.
- Gather 50-100 Secondary Backups, and keep a copy of them on your computer.
Over the next 24 hours, you would then:
- Restore these 50-100 Secondary Backups by uploading them to the new server, and/or,
- Delete these 50-100 Secondary Backups as requested.
It’s not a hard job at all. It’s just time-consuming, and we must always have someone available to do it.
To deal with the privacy concerns of such a policy, we will be adding a setting within each user account as to whether you would like this service or not. Any users who uncheck the option will receive no help with transfering over their files.
False Alarm May 31, 2009
Posted by ismywebsite in general.Tags: backups, costs, cpanel, dynamic, expires, node 3, node 4, offline, oshs
add a comment
I have excellent news. Node 3, managed by OSHS, which has now only had one instance of downtime, will continue as normal for the time being. After prolonged discussion with the company for the last half of this month, we received the following reply:
Thanks for your long messages.
We confused your account with another account so our apologies for that.
For the time being you can remain [here]. Should any problems arise we will keep you informed.
Thank you for your business. It is much appreciated.
So, in short, the final result is an even faster and more reliable service, now that the server has been cleaned of a full third of all accounts there, and we have planned a further clean out of another third of the accounts, all of which are either from the system we used prior to November last year, or appear to be under construction.
Node 4 is still being dropped, and interesting enough, the company has now decided to triple the costs as well. So it’s a good thing I’m leaving when I am. We have backups taken already, and the new server is just about ready with your new cPanel accounts. We encourage you to still take regular backups if the contents of your site are dynamic, and/or to warn users that content over the next few days may be lost. The old cPanel will not be destroyed, but will eventually go offline on the old host after our term expires.
Bringing Our Hosting Back To Earth May 23, 2009
Posted by ismywebsite in general.Tags: addon, ads, application, backup, domains, downtime, earth, features, galaxy, galaxy-hosts, hosting, hosts, nameservers, node 4, node 7, parked, regular, reliability, security, support, tutorials, uptime, volunteers
4 comments
Hey everyone,
Well, I hate to not have much notice for something this major, and this has been in the works for quite some time, but just now it has been finalized. We will be dropping Galaxy Hosts as our service provider for Node 4.
I understand that many of you will probably want to know the reasons, and there are many. Here’s just a quick tour of the service we experienced from this company from various angles:
Reliability
One thing could always be counted on. There would never be a consecutive string of 3 days without downtime. We did achieve a couple, and at least we haven’t dipped below 90% in average overall uptime. This was largely due to server crashes from a large server load, yet we offered many practical solutions that would help solve the problem. None were accepted.Security
How’s a major security hole, enabling anyone to gain the equivalent of root access? Well, in due fairness, they did fix it, eventually, after we pointed it out to them and gave them some guidance as well. For a company that’s been at this 2 years, they overall did not appear very competent in the area of server security and handling, and also refused to accept any help or suggestions, which would have really been mutually beneficial.Features
Unlimited bandwidth, quota, and features were mandatory, due to a cPanel glitch. Despite our being well within our limit of space used, they would not enable overselling to fix the glitch, despite our repeated requests to upgrade to an account with it enabled. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the Addon and Parked Domains did not default to zero, but alas they did so we had to move many users off for that very reason. Not impressed at all.Support
For the first week or so we were using them, support was excellent. They welcomed us to their hosting, and warmly greeted us. Finally, they realized we actually wanted to use the full extent of what they offered, and problems started to creep up. Before long, there wasn’t even a working support panel to communicate with them, and you couldn’t always be sure they even got your message.
Many of you will have personally experienced many of these problems, and many of them build on one another. We find this service is simply not of sufficient quality, and you as our clients deserve better. Lucky for you, it’s really not all that difficult to find a higher quality service. I could look just about anywhere.
What this means for every user on this node currently, is the following:
1) You should already be taking regular backups of your account, especially on an unreliable node such as this one. If you don’t know how to make backups, there is a tutorial in the ‘Tutorials’ section of your account. Be taking backups daily throughout this period. We can restore your account, and have plenty of hosting space, but we may not be able to restore any lost data.
2) For all users who have valid ads placed, we will be (hopefully) relocating your accounts to another node. I will be assembling a team of volunteers to assist with this. If you are interested, and you’ve submitted a volunteer application, then just reply to this blog post.
3) If all goes well, we will start transfering the accounts to our newest Node 7, which should be set up shortly. The transfer will happen through May 25th and 26th, and will only happen to accounts with valid ads placed. Nameservers will need to be updated if you have a domain. The new nameservers are as follows:
ns1.ismyws.com
ns2.ismyws.com
4) All remaining accounts on this server will be permanently gone on May 27th, or within a short period of time thereafter. If your account does not have valid ads placed, we offer no guarantees of any kind. All clients should have ads placed, and if you have difficulties with this, just ask and we will be glad to assist.
All Systems Go! May 2, 2009
Posted by ismywebsite in general.add a comment
Node 2 Back Online
Alright, so I’ve talked to Felweb now and we are working to sort out the issues.
We would like you to know you have a lot of users that are correctly using the service, but have a lot who do not update their scripts and are [full] of [security] issues. We are right now unsuspending your accounts, [and] we would like you to please do all the clean [up] and let us know when you are done. We will then inspect the reamining accounts and delete any suspicious file.
I have also received details of the exact issues we need to resolve. The most important thing right now is for all users of Node 2 to:
- Ensure all of their scripts are up to date, with the latest versions. This attack resulted from vulnerabilities within your scripts.
- If you have content on your website, ensure it is accessible from the main domain. Set up an entrance page, or a redirect. Either will work. We will be deleting empty accounts in the near future.
(These are both good ideas for users of other nodes as well.)
Node 6 Back Online
Will still be a short while before the DNS is fully updated on all websites, but it is currently in progress.
Help Wanted May 1, 2009
Posted by ismywebsite in general.2 comments
I’ve decided that the best path to getting on top of all our problems is with qualified, dedicated volunteers. I’m currently accepting applicants here:
http://www.ismywebsite.com/volunteer.php
Of course support is bad when I can’t answer it, new websites aren’t accepted, and nothing gets done. If you’re not willing to help solve problems, you have nothing to complain about.
(And yes the application is very long so only qualified, dedicated people like you can get in. I’m ready to get serious, and I don’t need false promises.)
I haven’t received a reply. Was I accepted?
It’s not a matter of if, but of when. Applications that have more details will be chosen first to assist, while others will be chosen once those volunteers are trained and in position.
Did you receive my application?
There have been no reports of applications going missing that have been confirmed to be true. I have also extensively tested the system, and I have dozens of applications coming in at the moment.
When are you selecting the final team?
There is no final team. The exact structure will be slowly built up, volunteer by volunteer, as they are trained and assigned to their positions. At present, we have staff in place to process all email messages, and they are doing a great job of it. Once this group has had a chance to work together for a while and is working stably, selection will begin on the next phase.
Why do you need so much information?
The largest reason is to determine your dedication and competency. How you reply to those questions is a good indication of how you will reply to real situations once you are on the job. Each question has a specific goal in mind, or character trait that is being determined. Different traits are helpful in different positions. Each question is optional, but a refusal to answer any question may be used against you.
Node 6 Moved ‘Silently’ May 1, 2009
Posted by ismywebsite in general.add a comment
On another such issue, not forwarded to me:
SERVER MIGRATION IS COMPLETE. PLEASE READ BELOW.
During the time of migration, your sites may have lost some information because once the migration is started and anything new you may get once it starts is lost once the migration is completed. You would of lost data from 4/19/2009 to 4/21/2009, which is only 2 days.
In order to not lose your most recent information, we would like to encourage you to log into the old server to get your information back. You can log in with your same login information, but make sure you log in through the right server i.p.
Old Server I.P: 216.45.59.90
Node 6 appears to be located at a new IP address, although Nixism hasn’t been completely clear on what this new IP address is. I have, however, managed to track it down on my own.
So, in just 48 hours all websites should be working at the new location.
Now, just to wait.
