Clustering?

[noam]

Jaguarpc's servers are consistently down for various hardware issues, and ram replacement, etc....

Has Jaguar ever considered implementing clustering? This seems to be a more and more common standard configuration for hosting companies.

[jason]

It has been discussed as a possible "premium service" in the future, but I haven't heard much about plans for it lately.

--Jason

[JPC-Greg]

I would contest the comment about clustering being a more common practice in hosting. Perhaps for high end premium companies like google or fortune 500's it is but it certainly is not the common practice in shared hosting.

We have researched the possiblity of hosting clusters for shared hosting and determined it isnt a profitable venture at the current price level we target. It certainly isnt possible with cpanel as it now exists but other software may be more forgiving. We treid to see if it was a viable option for our cpanel hosting market and due to cpanel limitations it is not possible.

It is possible, just not at this price point and not with the software we are currently using. We may venture to create extrememly high availability hosting but it will come at a premium. In the meantime there are many other ways to increase performance and stablity through things like VPS platforms. But the only way to deliver and not just guarantee 100% uptime for every website and not just your network is a cluster, until someone makes hot swappable ram, cpus, motherboards, etc .

We are however still exploring that clustered premium service as an optional service we may one day provide. It boils down to people or companies that truly just cant survive with downtime. And someone that needs that true of level of security will also be willing to spend more on monthly hosting than they do in a single day for lunch. Lets face it the $.30 per day most of our clients pay per day for hosting isnt the level of hosting your going to see Progressive Insurance go for but they actually need true 100% or they literally lose far more than what their little hosting bill is.

Its the same principal with us. We pay a significant amount more to our providers to make sure we have what our business model needs and then we buy mutiple "just in case" . Sure there are ways we could do things cheaper in Jag and fluff our pockets. Theres no shortage of cheap fly by night hosts on the internet now that are nothing more than a 12yr old leasing some $60 server with his parents credit card and a template monster website. Thats just not what Jag is about and you, our clients, know this about us and we love you for it .



Wow, what was this thread about? heh, sorry. My point was if its 100% you seek, shared isnt it . We can give it to you but not in the form of shared hosting, sorry.

[mikerosati]

Theres no shortage of cheap fly by night hosts on the internet now that are nothing more than a 12yr old leasing some $60 server with his parents credit card and a template monster website.

lol

Mental note:
1, find a company to lease a $60 server...
2, find a 12 year old to run it.....
hehe..

[Spathiphyllum]

Mental note:
1, find a company to lease a $60 server...
2, find a 12 year old to run it...
hehe..

[Vin DSL]

Hahahaha! Been there...

Addendum: Watch server go down for two weeks because 'tech support' was grounded for smoking...

[Gwaihir]

Jaguarpc's servers are consistently down for various hardware issues, and ram replacement, etc....

I just counted the announcements: 13x server maintenance in 16 weeks, given that there are well over 50 shared servers listed on the status page, that comes down to an average of one interruption in about 14 months. Doesn't sound so bad to me.

I think software issues are causing considerably more trouble and given that clustering only makes the software situation more complex, I don't think it is such a great idea to go clustered on this "low end" shared hosting stuff.

[Connie]

Wim thanks for the research. I thought this

Jaguarpc's servers are consistently down for various hardware issues, and ram replacement, etc....

was overstating the case.

I've been a member here several years and have an e-commerce site. Up time is extremely important. There have not been many times my site has not been available for more than a few minuets.

For what we Pay you should expect to occasionally be down on a shared server.

Greg I would possibly pay a little more for clustering but for me the service has been so good not much more.

[JPC-Greg]

Greg I would possibly pay a little more for clustering but for me the service has been so good not much more.

Thats an awesome statement, I'll be ripping it for a testimonial soon.

[mikerosati]

I would have to agree that the uptime is far better than stated above.

I've been a client of Jaguar now for over 2 years, and have had the servers go down maybe 4 times, each for less than 3-5 minutes.. Jag has been a consistantly good deal, with the tech support staff, as well as the support here. In fact, I've had such a good experience, I set up a reseller account a few months back to put my rep with clients on Jaguars shoulders.. I haven't looked back since.

[gerilya]

I've been a member here several years and have an e-commerce site. Up time is extremely important. There have not been many times my site has not been available for more than a few minuets.

clssam,

Could you elaborate more on how you make your judgement?
For example, if you use 3rd party monitoring service, may be you could show availability reports? Given the nature of your business, I wouldn't assume you have your own staff 24/7 who monitors the site, so if it's not a monitoring service, you must be making that statement based on your own occasional checks, which can't provide accurate picture of the situation. Not knowing about problems doesn't mean there aren't any.

I would also guess that the e-commerce software you are using doesn't require MySQL to render content to visitors. If this is the case, then your experience is even less relevant to vast majority of hosting clients whose sites powered by MySQL.

As far as reliability is concerned, our experience was very disappointing to say the least. This is, in fact, the main reason why we are moving away. I realize it might vary from server to server, but on 2 different servers where we have accounts that was the case. One of them barely reached 3 weeks uptime during 6 months period.

I am glad you are happy with the service, though

[Connie]

Just a personal observation. Actually I have 3 sites here and I'm on one of them constantly. In regard to the e-commerce I use a couple of things. One my daily visitors and number of sales. If there were any serious problems both of those would be seriously affected. I'm not saying there might not be some short hiccups that I'm not aware of. But nothing that has affected me.

Another thing It has been my experience here that if something happens to a server It wont be long before someone post about it. I don't think the 3 different servers I'm on have been mentioned since Jag moved to Houston. Prior to that move there were some occassional problems, but for the most part nothing serious.

The worst I have ever seen it was during the move. I't didn't go quite as smooth a Greg had hoped for as I recall.

[gerilya]

Well, like I said, I am glad it works for you.
What's your daily number of visitors, if I may ask?

[Connie]

I might add the biggest problems I observe relate to mysql and I don't use that.

In regard to visitors it's not a high traffic site. Up until March 2004 the site had grown to about 700 uniques per day. In March that I lost most of my rankings with Google and they dropped to about 200 a day. Now that Yahoo and MSN have their own SEs and I'm starting to get some rankings back with Google visitors unique visitors are around 400 per day. This is a time of year when visitors are down for me naturally.

My highest months will be from Sept through January.