Gadget’s Airstream Chronicles

If you regularly stop by to check out the Airstream Chronicles, you might have noticed some issues last week. Actually, issues is an understatement:

The table above was generated by Interseer for me.  They’re a web monitoring service.  They’ve been watching my sites for me over the past few years.  If you look at the end of the table you’ll see, I had 4 outages in a week.  17 hours and 52 minutes of downtime.  Sunday I was down for 10 hours.  Ick!

Now, the report is even worse if you look at it from Sunday to Sunday.  If you look at it that way I had more than 30 hours of down time.

Last week I contacted IX Webhosting and logged a trouble ticket.  After nearly 24 hours the troubles stopped, but I heard nothing.  48 hours after logging my ticket I received a response.  The English was poor, as the support center is not based here in the US.  I was told it was an issue with my ISP (how I connect to the Internet).

Ummm…..my readers had the same problem, and to my knowledge you’re not connecting to the Internet over my connection.  Interseer reported the site outage, and they have a big facility with lots of servers.  But this “support” person told me it was my issue.  That’s the easy way to blow a customer off.

Sunday I had another big outage on all of my sites.  This time I contacted tech support on a live chat.  Once again, really bad English!  Ah well.  After 10 minutes the support person told me that my database passwords and login names must be wrong.  He was going to hop off the chat with me at that point.

I said NO, and I got a little snarky about their support.  The database names, logins, and passwords were all correct, and I wasn’t getting blown off.  There was an issue with their database server, period!

45 minutes later the support guy on the chat told me he could do no more.  “The Admins” were now working on it.  Nice it only took me 7 days to get these guys to look at their servers to find the issue.  Poor quality service is an understatement!  Several hours later the sites were restored.

Apologies for the issues all.  If you know any good hosting companies that are reliable please let me know.  IX claims 99% up time.  When I first signed up with them that was true.  Today, not so true. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 7:01 am and is filed under Notes from Gadget.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.