Website back up
Apologies for the extended downtime. The server that Site5, the hosting provider I use, allocated my account crashed during a maintenance reboot and initiated a disk check. Something went awry there and initiated a restore process.
Inexplicably, the restore process kept going for 3 days with little to no specific details from the Site5 hosting staff. There is a thread that many unhappy customers were being very alarmed at the extended downtime over the holiday break and more importantly, the lack of information or even care from the Site5 staff. To put this into perspective, I’ve been a Site5 customer for 2 years now and have had an uptime of > 99.4% per month on my servers. This outage dropped that to 95.2%. And this is a business were companies ‘guarantee’ > 99% uptime. So this is really, really, bad.
Finally the Chief Operating Officer for Site5 stepped in and said how the situation was unacceptable and handled extremely poorly, and a mass credit will be applied for all server customers. Or something. We’ll see.
Apologies to Donny and the other people who use my server as well.
bwb Said,
November 30, 2008 @ 2:42 pm
Hi, our head admin was working on the server and restore process and updates were given as we went, Tom posted an update when it was almost finished as we had time then to post the detailed update. Please let me know if you have any questions.
thanks, Ben
Saket Said,
November 30, 2008 @ 2:58 pm
Thanks Ben. I commented several times on the thread in the Customer-to-Customer Support forum. A few comments:
>> “updates were given as we went”
For more than 48 hours, the only updates that were provided by the staff was “the restore is still in progress”. When a server is down for more than 24 hours, when the server uptime falls below 96% for a service that has a 99% uptime guarantee, and when you have several customers very alarmed and concerned about losing money and customers, simply stating “restore is still in progress” is an inappropriate way to handle the situation. Such comments provide nothing of value to tell our customers or to help us understand the nature of the problem, or what is currently being done to fix the problem.
I pointed this out (username: apollokiev) that Site5′s handling of the situation goes beyond simply the technical nature of getting a server back online. It is about how customers are treated. And the undeniable feeling of those affected, indeed and that of Site5′s own COO, was that the handling of the situation was “unacceptable.”
The summary that you provided is factual, but provides no new information about the situation. If Site5 staff was paying any attention to the Customer-to-Customer Support thread about the server outage, perhaps they would see that those affected users were closely following the situation using every method available to them, checking every hour for updates or news.
We were all repeatedly and constantly asking Site5 for more information, or indeed *any sign whatsoever*, and the response was slow.