Hosting for the future? How about now?
As I write this, it’s getting much closer to the 24-hour mark than I had ever imagined!
Some of you may have noticed that ChurchMag ( and 8BIT, TentBlogger, etc … ) was down for quite some time.
There was a major hiccup burp vomit with our host. We were originally told it would be resolved in 4-5 hours.
I wish it had only been that long.
Here are a few things we can all learn from this:
- You never think about the .1% of the 99.9% up time guarantee.
- These are the times when other hosts look good.
- There is no perfect host.
- Hardware failure happens.
- Is there a backup of the backup?
- At some point, your site host will disappoint you.
- Death, taxes and servers.
- It’s hard to be an Internet start-up when the Internet doesn’t start.
- More from 8BIT
- And more thoughts from TentBlogger
These are bits and pieces taken from Twitter and some backchannel communication regarding the server fallout.
Thankfully, these are First World Problems and this too has passed.
So, before you have a knee-jerk reaction and lose your Christianity during your next IT catastrophe, be sure to keep yourself in check and remember that the Internet life goes on.
We’re glad to be back.
Did you miss us?
Lance M. says
Yes, I did.
I am currently feeling your former woes.
Eric Dye says
Bummer. Innerweb woes are no fun :-/
James Cooper says
Been there, done that and have changed hosts cos they kept going down (and am now happy where I am!). Great to have you back!
Eric Dye says
Where are you with, now?
James Cooper says
I’ve got a hostgator reseller for my normal sites/clients and for my big christmas site (3 million+ pageloads Dec 2010 I’m with Linode).
Eric Dye says
Thanks, James 🙂
Chris Ames says
Man. What an ordeal!!!
🙂
Eric Dye says
Word.
thyrkas says
Yep – missed you, wondered what the problem was, and thought, “Wasn’t JS just starting a family vacation? I think that was his last post on the community forum.”
Glad you’re back!
John Saddington says
still on vacation. 😉
Eric Dye says
So are we!
BenJPickett says
Indeed life does go on and so do lot’s of other things. It really sucks that the down time was for so long but in all actuallity what control do YOU really have over it? Other than picking the host of course and you never know when this is going to happen because it does happen to all of them. Not too long ago Amazon S3 went down and my off site backup didn’t run for a couple of nights. Anoying but my business critical data backs up in more than just 1 way.
I’ve gotta say, just for shameless promotion, I’ve been on Rackspace for over a year now and I’ve only had about 15ish minutes where I couldn’t get to my stuff in one way or another. Best hosting company I’ve ever used. Ever. If for anything because they are sympathetic when something goes wrong, they let me know when there’s a problem and what it is, and they keep me in the loop.
Eric Dye says
Thanks for sharing your experience/recommendation!
Djs says
I’ve been with Rackspace Dedicated hosting, Serverbeach dedicated (Rackspace semi-managed) and Rackspace cloud for 11+ years.
Never had any provider downtime that I’m aware of. Always great support. (No I don’t work for them, nor will I get any benefit for posting this.)
Eric Dye says
Ha-ha! Thanks Djs!