Regarding Olga Performance

[IanOBrien]

Hello GlowHost,

I have services located on Olga, and this past month I have been very unhappy with how often the server has gone down or there have been issues with the MySQL databases and versions. This month you are not meeting your 99.9% uptime guarantee, and I have been disappointed as of late with the performance of your Olga server--my services have been down 3 times this month in excess of 12 hours.

I would like to be transferred off of this server as soon as possible.

As well I would also like to receive a refund for this month's shared server bill in accordance with your uptime guarantee located at http://www.glowhost.com/features/gua...eb-hosting.php

I am also letting you know that if I continue to have these kinds of troubles through the next month that I will be changing off of you as a hosting provider.

Sorry to sound so negative, especially on the eve of Christmas, but I hope you can understand my upset and that we can resolve these issues quickly and efficiently.

My best wishes to you all in restoring Olga soon.

[Matt]

Hello Ian. Yes we are just as unhappy about this server as anyone is. We definitely do not want to be working on this server over Christmas.

I do realize there have been some performance issues on that server over this month, and we have been trying to diagnose the problem. I suppose some of this is to be expected as it is a budget server, however we are still at a loss as to why the OS completely borked on us today. It is something that is impossible to predict otherwise it would have been handled before it became a problem.

On a side note, we offer a 99% uptime guarantee on Budget shared hosting servers. If you would like a 99.9% uptime guarantee we suggest an upgrade to a Professional hosting plan or dedicated server.

You will need to provide us with your monitoring stats for the 12 hours of downtime though....Do you have any tickets on this at our helpdesk, or where are you getting these numbers from?

If you look at our forums, there are no outages listed for Olga with the exception of today.

We show several reboots that lasted several minutes over this month, the only hour+ outages we have for this month on that server is today's incident which started at roughly 10 AM EST.

We will be happy to extend your service by a month, but we are still running above your hosting plans uptime guarantee.

[IanOBrien]

Matt,

Thank you for your prompt response, especially so near to the holiday.

Let me be more specific about the recent trouble--when I say "downtime", your web hosting service does not go down, and the trouble I have been experiencing is not of this nature. Rather, the MySQL server on Olga has been fluctuating too much for comfort--this month alone I received (at last count) 1287 email notices from my vBulletin software indicating it could not contact, or had trouble contacting MySQL. This will not show up in any monitoring service that I know of, and since everything I do on your service is forum based (therefore relying entirely on database driven information) I would consider this as much "downtime" as if the server actually failed.

Is the hard drive on Olga still functioning, and will everything be restored, or will I lose all information that I haven't backed up?

I realize that errors of this nature do happen at the worst times possible, and I am certainly conscious about it this time of year... I do not expect, nor want any of this to affect you and your staff's Christmas and you have my understanding if this issue is not resolved until after Christmas--we all deserve some time off to spend with family and friends.

That being said I hope everything is restored without too much incident and you all have a Merry Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah or whatever you celebrate.

[Matt]

Matt,

Thank you for your prompt response, especially so near to the holiday.

You are welcome. Thanks for your patience.

Let me be more specific about the recent trouble--when I say "downtime", your web hosting service does not go down, and the trouble I have been experiencing is not of this nature. Rather, the MySQL server on Olga has been fluctuating too much for comfort--this month alone I received (at last count) 1287 email notices from my vBulletin software indicating it could not contact, or had trouble contacting MySQL.

Well again, one of the largest contributors to this sort of thing is running in a shared environment especially if the boards have any sort of activity on them. If it is in your price range I suggest an upgrade to a dedicated server or at the very least a VPS Medium package. vB is a pretty intensive script and there are several other forums on that server that are competing for connection though generally they behave together, load spikes do happen and MySQL can start refusing connections.

On a side note though, there is some sort of issue with either one of the hard drives or the raid controller, or possibly heat on that machine, which we have been trying to get a grip on the exact cause for the last month. This were what has contributed to those several minute reboots.

How long are you being refused to MySQL? If this is something that lasts for more than a minute at a time it would be a good idea to open a ticket at the helpdesk so we can try to debug it at the exact moment it is happening.

Is the hard drive on Olga still functioning, and will everything be restored, or will I lose all information that I haven't backed up?

There is actually 3 hard drives on this machine, 2 of which are in a RAID array and the 3rd is where the backups are stored. All of these appear to be fine but we will not know until the OS and control panel have been reloaded.

I realize that errors of this nature do happen at the worst times possible, and I am certainly conscious about it this time of year... I do not expect, nor want any of this to affect you and your staff's Christmas and you have my understanding if this issue is not resolved until after Christmas--we all deserve some time off to spend with family and friends.

Thanks. I am still working on getting breakfast and maybe lunch will follow that. I have not even started thinking about the Christmas part yet.

[dazkeirle]

Firstly thanks for your dedication to trying to get whatever can be done to help done, especially on the holidays.

While I am empathetic to you guys for getting this back online asap. I don't really like the attitude of "this is a budget server so whatever". Your budget server package is only marginally cheaper than stable base packages by other vendors which don't have anywhere near the issues.

I signed up to your services because I'd read good stuff and positive customer reviews, not only about your service but also about professionalism and quality of customer service. But today I must say I'm feeling a little deflated as there are now thousands of my forum members checking out competitors sites.

Olga has been really bad of late, I've had too many complaints to mention of downtime, and while on a budget server it may be, I don't think its had anywhere near the stability expected for cost.

Still, thanks for doing what you can. I will definately look into a better hosting package over the coming days.

Out of interest how many customers does this outage affect?

[jmarcv]

... I don't really like the attitude of 'this is a budget server so whatever'.

I think you are interpreting this completely wrong. Matt is merely pointing out that budget servers carry a different uptime warranty, and have more accounts that can affect stability and load. I can assure you, problems get attended to just as rapidly. Our monitors do monitor mysql as well as most other services so if there are extended issues with mySql that the monitors dont pick up, please put in a support ticket. Just because it is a budget server does NOT mean we simply ignore it and say "Oh Well" and I would HOPE that today proves that.

[Matt]

I don't really like the attitude of "this is a budget server so whatever"

That is not what I am saying. I am saying that the Budget servers have many many more users on them and carry a different guarantee than the other shared server types and that is what we have always said on our site. Because of this, there are more people all trying to use the server resources in comparison to the other types of shared hosting, VPS or Dedicated servers. That leads to more frequency of load spikes, services being unavailable more often, and many other reliability issues.

They are more error prone because many people prefer more disk space and transfer, than stability of their site. The see more disk and transfer and think it equates to a better deal. For some people, it does. For those of us making money on our sites, it usually does not. That is certainly a judgement call of the site owner.

The other problem with a Budget server is that you have to wait longer in the event of a server meltdown to get your sites back online. This is because there are many more, MUCH larger sites on the server and the unpackaging scripts can only work so fast.

The bottom line is every other package type have smaller sites, and less of them. This improves performance because there are less people competing, playing (AKA "testing")with scripts that can potentially crash the entire server, and speeds the recovery process since there are less sites to restore.

If Budget is what you need, there is nothing wrong with it, it is simply a different service level. Most of the higher end packages have well established sites and the budget packages do tend to weed out the more unstable sites from the sites that are less likely to affect an entire server.

Sorry, I can not pretty it up for you any more than that, but that is the best way to describe the primary difference in that product line.

Olga has been really bad of late, I've had too many complaints to mention of downtime, and while on a budget server it may be, I don't think its had anywhere near the stability expected for cost.

Do you have tickets where you have reported any problems in the past? Please provide the ticket numbers so that I can have a look into the problem. You can post them here.

[dazkeirle]

ok, well at least I now know the score, unfortunately bandwidth is my commodity and looks like I'll have to put my hand in my pocket to get the security I require, or of course look elsewhere.

To save me continuously checking this site all night long, i dont suppose you could answer my questions please?

1. What is the ETA of the full backup restore process. Without at least a rough figure it's hard to quantify action. In the supporting system tickets your staff say that the OS is being reinstalled and so I assume port of call is see if the sites are all still functional on the local 3 disks, if not then they need to be restored from the nightly remote backup.

edit * I RTFM and now see the difference between Basic and advanced. ~ Wish I'd thought about this earlier then i wouldn't be in this predicament.

Finally, yes thank you for showing you support, especially at the holidays. It's obvious you'll do anything to defend your reputation. This is very admirable and good quality in a hosting company.

[Matt]

...or of course look elsewhere.

I can save you the trouble and just google for "overselling web host" and you can read up on these types of plans. All the articles are going to say the exact same thing. Hosting in this price range (or less) with the same disk and transfer (or more) are all going to be problematic at times, and possible a lot or all of the time depending on the host.

Some hosts only offer packages like $5.99/mo for 500 gigs of disk and 4 Terabytes of transfer but it is simply craziness if someone expects to actually be able to use that for five bucks a month. The site will either always be down because the server is so tightly strained or they will force you off of the server to a quarantine server and give you 48 hours to choose their overinflated upgrades which usually mean a $300-$400/mo dedicated server, or kindly ask you to find another host.

To save me continuously checking this site all night long...

If you go post or subscribe to this thread
Then you do not have to keep checking in. We are posting in that thread each time there is a notable update. The system will then email you.

What is the ETA of the full backup restore process. Without at least a rough figure it's hard to quantify action.

I wish we could, its impossible to say but it looks like they were able to salvage the contents in the /home directory which means it will save us a huge amount of time instead of having to restore each account from the backup. That is one of the things that takes the longest is getting all the public_htmls copied off the backup drive.

What makes an advanced 5 sat package different to a budget 5 star? The stats look the same, are we talking different/older machines and less service the lower you pay?

More sites per server on Budget, which means more competition. Less sites on an Advanced server which means less sites competing. Advanced has tighter restrictions on email sending and other things along those lines.

As for hardware. Olga is actually one of the newest servers with some of the nicest hardware. So hardware is not a factor.

Pro has the biggest difference and it should be a noticeable one over Advanced or Budget. Followed by VPS and then Dedicated.

Finally, yes thank you for showing you support, especially at the holidays.

You are welcome. Thanks for your understanding.

[dazkeirle]

o.k. excellent.

I wont be going elsewhere. I don't usually get this level of support on any of my other sites hosted by others. Sure i din't get quite as many issues but then as you say, i pay more there and so I'm sure there are less users on the server.

My issue with going up to pro is that none of the packages go up to 100 Gb bandwidth per month, and that is roundabouts what i'm using so I'm forced lower or almost double the price to a semi-dedicated. While I'd love that, it's just a little too pricy.

Thanks for tips on subscribing. I'm such a n00b, should have thought of that.