Nickel???

[tinnel]

Anyone have a clue when nickel will be back up? There is a post at 3:33pm saying it will be down for 20 minutes for maintenance. Still not back up... In general, service has been very good/smooth for some time, but...

I'm also wondering what the policy is for maintenance. Most organizations do this "after hours" (e.g., starting between 10-12pm and ending between 3-6am, depending on time zone). I'm also wondering if there is any attempt to provide redundant services so that domains do not become unavailable when maintenance is performed. I don't see how you can guarantee 99% uptime without such...

[tinnel]

Interesting... post claims to be for "yesterday at 11:54pm". Don't know how it got set to "yesterday" as I just posted it about 5 minutes ago. It is now 7:04pm EST.

[tinnel]

Well, it appears to be finally back up. I never got any answer as to why it was down so long. I also didn't get any answer on why they can't do maintenance outside of prime US hours.

[Connie]

Jag does maintenance when they have to. Yes it would be great if they preformed maintenance in off US prime hours. Keep in mind that Jag serves an international community. Any maintenance is going to be a bad time for some of their customers.

Be glad that you have a host that tries to keep the best interest of all their customers in mind. Be glad that you have a host that does server maintenance.

[tinnel]

Thanks for the reply. It would be nice if Jag would reply.

Keep in mind that Jag serves an international community. Any maintenance is going to be a bad time for some of their customers.

This I understand, which is why it is even more important that there is some form of redundancy so that domains aren't taken down during maintenance. My web site serves an international community (although mostly US), as I am sure many do. Further, it is hurtful to search engine placement if your web site is down when it is spidered.

Be glad that you have a host that does server maintenance.

I don't understand this comment. This is a minimum requirement, not an option. Any ISP that doesn't do maintenance shouldn't be in this business.

Anyway, the site is back up, and I have to give Jag credit as this is the first serious outage in months. Communicating the cause sure would go a long way towards good customer service though.

[jason]

Be glad that you have a host that tries to keep the best interest of all their customers in mind. Be glad that you have a host that does server maintenance.

You'd be surprised how many hosts are out there that don't keep their servers up to date. Some friends hosted a site with a host that once told them "yes, we're having trouble with ftp--give us a couple weeks and we might have it working again!" No lie! I was with a host once where my site disappeared with no explanation. When I inquired about it I was told that the drive crashed so they had to wait for a new one to be shipped.

Hardware is so cheap these days that any Joe can put together a decent server. I've heard horor stories of people finding out that their host was using an old Pentium PC connected to a home cable connection. Anyway, what Connie is getting at is that there are many hosts out there that don't know what they are doing, nor do they care. Some of them will update their servers when they feel like it, other won't ever do regular maintance (like so many home users) because of lack of knowledge about how to run a server. JPC is a professional company. They take great care to keep their servers up to date and to keep the rif-raf out of them. When they do take a server off-line it is usually because of a serious problem.

Now, about redundancy: to the best of my knowledge, JPC's servers are all stand-alone machines. Each machine has its own hard drives (using RAID for internal redundancy) and daily backups are performed to move copy that data off the server. They do not use any of the newer storage models that some hosts are starting to use, such as SAN storage. This is the same way that most hosts opperate. The ones that do offer these redundant services are out there, but they charge a premium for such service. JPC gives you a lot for $10 a month. If they were to offer redundant services, it would be changing their whole data center model and would likely be quite costly.

I realize that this is starting to sound like a flame, but that wasn't my intent. I'm sorry that you had to experience such downtime, and I'd be upset if it was my server that had been the one that was down, too. I have no knowledge of what happened to your server. I'm just another shared client like you, but I have a background in server administration, so I wanted to shed some light on my experiences and what I've learned from hosting here. Is JPC the best host? I don't know (and there are too many factors involved to say any host is the best for everyone). If you can't live with occasional downtime like this and you really need redundancy, perhaps you should consider different hosting arraongement--like a dedicated server (or two, for redundancy) so you can be in control. What I am getting at is that you have to expect some downtime in any $10/month shared environment, and I know that JPC works hard to keep that to an absolute minimum.

One more comment, about the 99% uptime claim. Every host makes that claim, but wht does it really mean? With no context it is meaningless:

99% of 1 day = 14 possible minutes of downtime/day
99% of 1 week = 101 minutes/week
99% of 1 month = 432 minutes/month
99% of 1 year = 5256 minutes/year

Hopefully your server's problems are over and your site will be stable again. I wish you the best of luck with your site from here on out.

--Jason

[Eric]

Please not the following link with an update on what happened.

http://jaguarpc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12076