How often is your site down?

[Chevalric]

For the last three weeks, a collegue of mine has been actively running a site which is hosted on Xenon and in those weeks there's always been at least one period that the server was unreachable.
The periods last from 15 minutes to several hours.
Of course, you can't expect the world for 10 bucks, but this kind of structural failures are getting annoying fast.

[Eric]

Hi,

The first step would be to run a traceroute from your own machine to the server to make sure the problem is not on your end or in route to the server. You should also open a support ticket, including the traceroute. If the problem is on our end, we can correct it.

[Chevalric]

Well, today's problems were probably caused by the virus that is rampaging on the net, so that might indeed be just the connection.

And don't get me wrong, Jag's service level is still excellent. If the problem is something they can fix, it will be done within a few hours time.

This wasn't so much a complaint (although the wording might suggest otherwise ), but more of a "poll"

[spacespider]

I hardly ever notice my site offline and I'm online quite a bit.

[Connie]

My sites have very good uptime.

[lookout]

I've been here long enough to have seen it all, but things have been pretty stable for the last few months. Knock on wood. I no longer feel that I have to check on the status of my different sites that are hosted here as much as I once did.

Some here might say that you can expect your site to go down quite often in a shared server environment. It certainly can be an environment conducive to that. One should expect SOME downtime from time to time, but typically not on a daily basis, IMHO. What Eric suggested is a good first step in figuring out who's actually responsible for the problem. It often is NOT the host, even though they might appear at first glance the culpable one.

[jason]

I've been here since JPC was tiny compared to what they are now. My site has been hosted in three different datacenters on three different servers. Jag moved everyone to a JPC owned and controled datacenter last year in an effort to cut down on long downtimes, and so far, it seems to be working. Servers do go down from time to time, but the JPC staff is very proactive in finding the cause of these problems and mitigating them when the problem is on their end.

When you think about how the Internet works, its really quite amazing that data gets routed as efficiently as it does. Its not uncommon for "roadblocks" to occur, though, so often the server may be running, you just can't get there.

--Jason

[lookout]

Yes, things have finally settled down since the move to the latest data center after some initial chaos. At least the chaos seems better controlled now, and that, along with quick and effective tech support, is about all one can hope for in these shared server environments.

I've had my sites run through a number of datacenters here myself, and I've lost count of the servers I've been hosted on over the few years I've been a client here. But much of that was under Aletia before Jaguar bought them out over a year ago. I'm seeing fewer service disruptions now. Seems like the fences (jail shell) Jaguar put up awhile ago have helped make us all become better neighbors.

As previously mentioned, a traceroute from your colleague's computer to his site would be helpful in finding the source of his connection woes. There's a number of good traceroute tools on the net, but you may be get by just with standard operating system commands on his computer, like tracert.

[BabyBoy]

Well, mine is messed up quite a bit. It goes down for maybe 5 minutes every few hours. I do support tickets and trace routes, and it also happens to members, but still, they say nothing is wrong. Only two times have they said something is wrong.

[lookout]

Originally posted by BabyBoy
Well, mine is messed up quite a bit. It goes down for maybe 5 minutes every few hours. I do support tickets and trace routes, and it also happens to members, but still, they say nothing is wrong. Only two times have they said something is wrong.

The server or another one along the way may just be temporarily too busy to process your request. 5 minutes is just a hiccup in terms of Internet downtime. The speed and quality of your connection will have an effect on whether your server requests get thru or not. Not to mention the problems the site itself might be causing. Or whether whatever you or someone else is doing to monitor the server uptime is exacerbating things. I wouldn't put too much faith in a network monitoring service. They're not as reliable as you might think.

What I was talking about were periods long enough to appear on the JaguarPC network status page for more than a half hour (at least!) on a regular and recurring basis (at least several times a week, if not daily).

[BabyBoy]

Dude, you are from the valley. What part? I am from the Fresno area.

[lookout]

The self-proclaimed capital of that other valley northwest of you, now best known for its silicon. That's the old name I use under my avatar. Hard to believe now, but not that long ago (pre WW2), it was practically a twin to Fresno in both its size and its agricultural economy.

[Vin DSL]

Originally posted by Chevalric
How often is your site down?

That's a trick question. It isn't as simple as that...

My site goes 'down' all the time, but it isn't actually 'down.' The problem is usually MySQL. MySQL hangs and my site is coded in PHP and 100% dependent on MySQL. So, when MySQL goes down, so does my site; but not really. HTML is still working fine, but I don't run a static HMTL web site.

It took me a while to figure this out. My site is 'down' almost ever day, but other ppl say they have been here for 2 years and never had a problem. I starting thinking, either there are a LOT of liars here, or something is different with my site.

When my site goes 'down' now, I try typing in a file with a HTML extension and 99.9% of the time, my site is working fine. It's MySQL that is down.

Is this making any sense

[jason]

Vin,

I can attest to that. I've rarely had major trouble with my site, but for the most part it is mostly semi-static (most of my site is driven by PHP, but not database dependant), so what you are saying is logical.

I'm in the process of writing a home-grown CMS-like system for a personal site. I've got a prototype of it that I'm testing right now. Once I get the final release on the server, I'll have to watch and see how well it performs.

--Jason

[Connie]

Originally posted by Vin DSL
Is this making any sense

Makes sense to me. I have 3 sites at Jag. 2 of the sites have been
through all the moves Jason mentioned. Jag was a small company
located in Alaska when I first signed up with them. Other than the
disruptions that come with changing data centers, and Doss attacks,
90% or more of the problems I have ever had have been related to CP.

The sites were up but the shopping cart wasn't working, or couldn't
receive e-mail for a few hours. Even the CP problems seem to have
stabilized in the last several months.

Back to your observation. My sites are all static HTML pages. It seems
to me that a lot of problems posted about site problems are related to
SQL and PHP.