[Hidden-tech] web host problem - advice request

[B. Kimo Lee]

Hi Herschel,

Thanks for your input. I neglected to mention that the 2-week outage  
experienced by my client was with their previous hosting company.  
Obviously everyone reading this would have a long list of ways in  
which such an outage would affect their businesses, including my  
client, and believe me, they were at their wits end about it. Their  
former host was a small hosting company running their own servers off  
of a couple t-1 lines and I'm guessing that they just didn't have the  
infrastructure to solve the problem quickly. That was the most extreme  
example I've personally heard of — leading ultimately to my acquiring  
them as a client.

In Val's case, without knowing what actually happened, we can  
speculate all day about whether Bluehost's response was good or  
terrible. Bottom line is that it sucks that Val's site will be offline  
again, that's pretty clear, and this thread has benefitted her by  
providing her with some background on questions she can ask of  
Bluehost that may affect how they handle the upcoming switch.

I'm with you in terms of restoring from backup — in two hours. We do  
twice-daily backups and keep snapshots for 30-days. I don't think  
anyone was advocating "settling for less", just trying to help get Val  
back to a stable point given her current situation and maybe to a  
place where she'll be distanced from it. She herself said that they've  
been excellent in every other way, and has been able to feel  
comfortable making her decision.

Best,
Kimo


AZURELINK  ::  "Simply Connected!"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Web Site Design & Scalable, Managed Web Hosting
Joomla! Content Management System Implementation
eCommerce Development
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
321 Main Street, Suite 4
Amherst, MA 01002
(413) 549-2020
Skype-In: (413) 306-4248
Fax: (413) 825-8344
For more information, please visit: www.azurelink.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------




On Jun 10, 2010, at 8:27 AM, Hershel Robinson wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 4:39 AM, B. Kimo Lee <bklee at azurelink.com>  
> wrote:
>> I have a client whose site was offline for more than 2 weeks while  
>> the hosting company struggled with cleaning up the affected server.  
>> So I think you're pretty lucky to be up.
>
> I honestly can not understand how someone could leave their site
> offline for two weeks. For an e-store, even a matter of several hours
> can mean a lost sale. For some stores, the profit from that sale (or
> sales) could have paid for a month of not a year of inexpensive
> hosting. And if the store is offline for even two days, then they
> (obviously) just lost more than they thought they were gaining by
> using cheap hosting.
>
> For a web dev site, one day can mean a lost new client. For an NPO one
> day can mean a lost donor. Either of these losses could represent
> literally thousands of dollars if not more. For a site with a proper
> backup from another host, I can have a site back online in a matter of
> hours. The DNS may take time to propogate, but that should never take
> more than 48 hours.
>
>> Intrusions certainly are a risk on shared servers since you can't  
>> control what the other site owners are doing. Hopefully Bluehost is  
>> keeping up with the necessary server software patches on their end,  
>> though they do claim to host over 1 million domains.
>
> Hopefully? Obviously they are not doing a good enough job with
> security. I understand that sometimes hackers do get in and that's not
> necessarily a sign of a horrible host (certainly not a good one,
> however) but a proper host should have backups of their sites and
> spare servers and should be able to simply replace a bad server with a
> good one. This process should NOT take more than a few hours.
>
>> It sounds like Bluehost has done a reasonable job in the face of  
>> difficult
>> circumstances, if they promptly diagnosed the problem and moved you  
>> out of the way.
>
> I would say this is not "a reasonable job" at all, actually. The OP
> didn't mention "promptly diagnosed" but that aside, the OP's site was
> offline for a day or two. I don't consider that reasonable at all. And
> now that it's online and everything is working and everyone is happy,
> now this host wants to take it offline AGAIN for two days to change
> it's IP once again? Why? Is she paying for hosting or paying to be
> transferred and left offline repeatedly?

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.hidden-tech.net/pipermail/hidden-discuss/attachments/20100610/606d8d5b/attachment.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Azurelink.vcf
Type: text/directory
Size: 611 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.hidden-tech.net/pipermail/hidden-discuss/attachments/20100610/606d8d5b/attachment.bin 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.hidden-tech.net/pipermail/hidden-discuss/attachments/20100610/606d8d5b/attachment-0001.html