Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Sites Are Still Down

I actually believe in shared hosting. Shared hosting shares computer resources and has a lower impact on the environment than dedicated servers.

Unfortunately, hosting companies have a tendency to oversell their servers. So share hosting is often a nightmare when web sites on the host grow.

I had had long periods of down time on my shared hosting account. So, I moved Community Color to a new cloud server.

A cloud server is theoretically more robust. The servers have a dedicated amount of resources. The web hosts add resources to the accounts as they grow.

Well, this last week the cloud turned into a nightmare. Something on my web hosts cloud keeps causing the sites to go down. Even worse, tier one technical support has been unable to reboot the sites. That means I have to sumbit tickets to a mysterious tier-two technical support ... which may or may not respond to a support ticket on a shift.

Anyway, I've suffered over 50 hours of down time this week.

The sites are currently down. They were down all night.

I was told by the technical support that the engineers would move my site to a new server today.

I am probably low on the priority list and really don't know if this will happen, or if moving to new hardware will actually solve the problem.

Moving to the cloud has proven a negative experience.

I apologize for all of the down time. This is out of my control. I do not make enough money on the site to afford my own hardware ... which means that the down time I experience is pretty much out of my control.