General Server Issues

[jasonthorpe]

Is anyone else having server problems today? I have raised a support request for one of my VPS's which is running on host 29 but haven't heard anything from the support team.

Although in their defence, the support system seems to have gone offline also so whether or not they received the request I don't know.

If anyone else is having problems please post below

[oscmeister]

... or the ticket submission page. I have reported the problem via email. No response yet, but it's only been about 20 minutes. They've probably got their hands full.

[oscmeister]

Support has essentially been down for more than an hour now.

The system status page results in the same "Problem" page I got when I tried to logon to the VPS control panel. Haven't received any replies to the emails I sent off to support and I can't find a phone number to call.

I sure hope this gets resolved soon.

[jasonthorpe]

On further inspection, it seems that it is only the VPS's on host 29 that are affected.

The support system has been down for nearly 3 hours now BTW. I havent' heard anything from anyone in over 4 hours either, which seems really unusual for Rimu.

Are your VPS's on host 29 also?

[oscmeister]

On further inspection, it seems that it is only the VPS's on host 29 that are affected.

The support system has been down for nearly 3 hours now BTW. I havent' heard anything from anyone in over 4 hours either, which seems really unusual for Rimu.

Are your VPS's on host 29 also?

Nope. I'm on host24, but I need support and can't seem to get any. This just adds to my belief that the hosting market is ripe for the picking; if someone comes along and does it correctly and efficiently they will take the market the way the Japanese took autos and electronics in the 70's. Virtually every hosting service seems to suck. RimuHosting may be one of the better ones, but that doesn't mean much when the level of service reliability for the industry is so poor.

[jasonthorpe]

Nope. I'm on host24, but I need support and can't seem to get any. This just adds to my belief that the hosting market is ripe for the picking; if someone comes along and does it correctly and efficiently they will take the market the way the Japanese took autos and electronics in the 70's. Virtually every hosting service seems to suck. RimuHosting may be one of the better ones, but that doesn't mean much when the level of service reliability for the industry is so poor.

In Rimu's defence, I have always found their support to be excellent. I think that there will be a very good reason for the support system to have failed. I think that in this instance it would be useful to have a telephone support number as a last resort though

[oscmeister]

In Rimu's defence, I have always found their support to be excellent. I think that there will be a very good reason for the support system to have failed. I think that in this instance it would be useful to have a telephone support number as a last resort though

Yup, they are good people and have been very patient and gone the extra mile for me. They rated excellent in my book until this morning. But the service I pay for is 24/7 support and three nines, that's 99.9%, uptime. I haven't been with them 30 days yet and their support has now been unavailable for more than 4 hours in one day alone and I am now aware of at least one server that has been down for at least that long. Makes me wonder if they can actually live up to their promises.

They can't claim 24/7 support if no one is available for support in any one 7 day period for more than 30 minutes. They can't claim 99.9% uptime if any server goes down for more than 10.08 minutes in any given week or 43.68 minutes in any given month. So what they do is pretty typical, they have a 99.9% SLA that promises credits if the service level violation is breached.

So instead of spending money insuring they do not breach the SLA, they take the risk that they will lose some cash flow if a customer happens to notice and complain about the breach. Still better than the average hosting service, but not even as good as the level of service from the post office or most local telephone companies.

Having just re-read the AUP(Terms and Conditions) the only SLA in the document is for server up time, but they do still advertise 24/7 support so I would expect them to live up to that dispite failing to mention it in the AUP.

At this point I am at a loss what to do. I had planned on firing my current hosting service as soon as I could move my sites to the RimuHosting VPS. Now I am as dissatisfied with RimuHosting as I am with ixWebHosting. I am now strongly considering the purchase of a rack in a data center somewhere where I can co-locate my own servers (which I used to run from my home office until bandwidth requirements exceeded available copper ISDN connections).

My experience with web hosting services is leading me to the conclusion there are no affordable and acceptable alternatives to running my own servers.

[retep]

Hi Guys.

I'm sorry about these problems.

Uptime is a factor of a few things. We try to get the best and most reliable hardware we can. And we use RAID arrays to protect data. Sometimes we have hardware (typically memory or disk) problems.

We choose data centers with good reputations and good peering.

We run reliable (Linux) kernels. I think we have a bad patch on some host servers at the moment. And this is causing problems. I'll be scheduling some server restarts so we can correct this on affected servers.

And the final piece of the uptime puzzle is responding to problems. We try to do our best here. e.g. We have a support system that will page us in emergencies. We have someone on pager support 24x7. We have people available for support probably 16 hours a day. And in the event of a problem our http://rimuhosting.com/maintenance.jsp maintenance page is updated frequently so people can be kept in the loop of what's going on.

This last piece is what failed last night. Our rimuhosting.com database decided to stop working (at the same time there was a server issue). And without the database working there was no way for customers to put in a support ticket. That would have triggered a page. And we would have responded to that 24x7.

I'm going to work on improving our monitoring so that we'll get the page in the event the support system is unavailable.

[arthur]

Hi, I have to say that I have always found Rimu Hosting support to be excellent and fast and run 2 VPS's with them. This has to be very unusual and would just say that maybe those that have had a bad experience will notice a difference in the future. To be fair, wherever you go for hosting there will always be some sort of problem, it is in the very nature of industry and things do fail from time to time and we do have to put up with some 'inconveniences' now and then even with a good reliable provider. I have used numerous other providers in the past and have found that Rimu far exceeds any of them with regards to both support and any follow up enquiries.
kind regards, Arthur