March 2008
Monthly Archive
Hosting adventures
Posted by Yannis Lionis on 07 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: Internet, Software
The 1and1.co.uk hosting package I’m using just failed massively, and it’s the second time week. Out of 4 servers (2 dedicated, 2 virtuals) 3 were inaccessible this morning, and the response the technical support gave (after fiddling around trying to ssh in themselves I presume) was “here’s the number to the server team, call them in 2 to 3 hours for an update”.
2-3 hours! In server time, that’s about a year. It is seriously bad form for a hosting company.
On to buy a box from another hosting company, I opened two browsers and typed in the address for slicehost and vpsland (I’ve happily used the former so far and the latter was suggested by a colleague). It took 30 seconds to choose a slicehost package and by then the vpsland website hadn’t come back. It subsequently took 2 minutes to complete the very short order form in slicehost, and vpsland website had come up by then, but too late. And in 4 minutes, I was ready to log in to my server. Brilliant, well done slicehost.
Hosting is a highly commoditised industry, and reliability and good service makes all the difference…