DC outage

[Alexander]

Today the whole DC was down for several hours. They lost a core and they needed time to replace it and bring all the hardware back online. That is why your websites along with our were not accessible.
Unfortunately, we could do nothing about it but wait and call them asking the status.
Thanks for your understanding.

[rlhanson]

Alexander,
Thanks for the update!
I was wondering if gh has an alternative support email that your clients could contact in the event that your site is also down?
I was able to get information from the Glowhost down - Web Hosting Talk

updates and on the gnax.net down? - Page 4 - Web Hosting Talk threads.

I know I will be contacting my clients to obtain alternative emails for them and providing a personal one for a situation like this in the future.

Thanks again - you guys are always on top of things!

[papp]

I appreciate the response on WHT.

I think what upsets me about the situation are two things. Firstly I'm amazed at how long it took to resolve the problem. This, of course, is out of GH's hands.
Secondly I was disappointed by the lack of communication. Whithout a monitoring service I might have never learned of the outage. Had I received a timely mail notification I would have had the chance to reroute to another server through my registrar.

My situation does not warrant the expense of 2 dedicated servers with load balancing as I am not a reseller. I run an ultra low traffic site on shared hosting. From GH's point of view I'm small fish.
However, potential buyers that come to my portfolio site are considering spending 4 to 5 figure sums, and that's where downtime becomes an issue, because it immediately communicates a lack of professionalism. I doubt that my last sales contact would have materialized if the buyer had been unable to reach the site on repeated attempts.

I will stick with GH for now. As I mentioned before, I am perfectly aware of the fact that this was not your fault in any way. But I have to admit, my enthusiasm has waned a bit. An understanding of the technical issues does not help alleviate the frustration factor. Better communication would be a help.

[Alexander]

Well, this is the first case of such huge outage in my practice since I work here. All the monitoring systems along with the systems used to inform the clients are located inside the DC. Since all the DC was not accessible, we couldn't use them. Now we are considering the possibility of an alternative way which can allow us to keep our clients informed.

[Kitelife]

Aye, thanks for the update...

This kind of thing is inevitable, I appreciate your ongoing attention to service and end quality... Happy to have beat the odds in the server world by hosting my sites with GlowHost for 4+ years now, none better.

Keep rocking it.

[Kitelife]

An alternative communication/update channel would be advisable in the event all your servers are down (i.e. DC problems), for sure.

[patentpundit]

Thanks for the information. These things will unfortunately happen from time to time. Thanks for being on top of it and getting resolution so quickly.

In terms of alternative communication channel, in the case of outages perhaps something like a Google group might work. It would save us all some anxiety to know you all are on top of things and no need to panic.

Thanks.

[QHF]

As stated by previous posters this was not a GlowHost failure. We are all at the mercy of our providers, but having said that, I'm surprised the DC does not appear to have a fall back DR (disaster recovery) site they could have rolled over to until the outage was corrected.

[charlesh]

I've been with GH since they were founded and I've worked my way up to a dedicated server. Except for a couple of years ago lightning strike on the GNAX data center, I have not had any interruption at the server level. That one was only a reboot of the server as well. To say that this is a rare event is an understatement.

The interruptions in the past that I've gotten calls on are usually due to an ISP fault in my client's area.

Rare event. Fielded a lot of calls today, though... BTW, what is a "core"?

Good job GH in being so reliable over the years.

An alternate way would be a good idea. How about one of those ol listservs we can all subscribe to? Ah, but we'd have to all create emergency gmail accounts as well....

In the meantime, "I'll have my emergency email get in touch with your emergency email..."

CharlesH

[sergey]

Thanks for all your warm words and understanding. We will be discussing what we can do about our backup website and how we can inform our clients when the entire network along with our main website are not reachable.