My Innohosting Reseller Account Has Been Down For Over 10 Hours!

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Posted by Louis Prima, 12-02-2011, 01:33 PM
Hi guys. Despite a bump here or there, I've had great service from Innohosting for a long time now. However, today I awoke to find that my shared reseller server had been down for 2 hours. Since Innohosting has always been reliable, I figured "Oh well, they'll have things up and running any minute now", and went out to take care of some "daily life" tasks". When I came home 5 hours later, to my horror, my server was STILL down , and my clients who have access to my alternate off-site email had filled it with complaints .

So after this 7 hours of downtime, I fire off a polite support request to my host, asking what's going on. I receive back a message that basically states "These matters can be complicated. I will forward your email to one of our admins for a response."

So now, all of my sites have been down 10 and 1/2 hours with no response from the "admin".

I've tried-
*Submitting another ticket.

*Contacting the Live Support Online

*Calling their sales line- got an answering machine

*Calling their support line and demanding to speak to an "admin". The response "They don't accept phone calls, we can only handle level 1 support."

*Emailing the company owner at his private email.

None of these have gotten any results- 10.5 hours of downtime now.

I'm on Server 23 btw, which seems to have had a massive crash or something.

Anyone else on Server 23 at Innohosting? Anyone know what's going on??
Again, just to clarify- service by Inno has been VERY good up until now, but this is BAD.
Posted by XTremo, 12-02-2011, 01:46 PM
This is very, very unusual for InnoHosting!
Posted by V7Host, 12-02-2011, 01:49 PM
You maybe should have submitted a ticket as soon as you noticed the downtime rather than expect the host to fix it automatically(this should happen but an extra nudge does no harm).

Hopefully they update you on why it has been down for so long, and hopefully you'll be back up soon.
Posted by Louis Prima, 12-02-2011, 02:00 PM
Definitely VERY unusual for Innohosting. That's why I let it go and didn't report it. They customarily have outages fixed within max 1 hour, so I usually don't bother to report it and everything is fine. This is definitely a testament to Inno's usual stability and fast response time... this time it was just not so fast.

LOL Less than 30 minutes after posting this, my sites are suddenly starting to pop back online. Coincidence? I hope so.

But I still have not gotten an explanation to pass on to my angry clients. Hope I don't lose anyone over this. Probably gonna have to offer some discounts for this month and I certainly hope that Inno will give me a significant discount for this month...
Posted by madchas, 12-02-2011, 02:07 PM
Good to hear things are coming back up.

I know things happen, but that was a long.
Somebody should have been in contact with you.
Posted by IH-Rameen, 12-02-2011, 09:22 PM
Hi,

I'm sorry for the inconvenience you have experienced. Such issues are not common to us. However, a forum update was posted letting customers know the issue. The server you are on had a hardware problem which we've been working on throughout the night, morning and afternoon. In parallel, we're also moving all customers off this server (it was scheduled for decommissioning anyway) onto better hardware.

As you said, such events are extremely rare for us, including hardware as we monitor everything strictly and regularly replace components that are simply of old age to minimise hardware issues. So my sincere apologies for this out of the norm experience.
Posted by FernGullyGraphics, 12-03-2011, 12:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by IH-Rameen

Hi,

I'm sorry for the inconvenience you have experienced. Such issues are not common to us. However, a forum update was posted letting customers know the issue. The server you are on had a hardware problem which we've been working on throughout the night, morning and afternoon. In parallel, we're also moving all customers off this server (it was scheduled for decommissioning anyway) onto better hardware.

As you said, such events are extremely rare for us, including hardware as we monitor everything strictly and regularly replace components that are simply of old age to minimise hardware issues. So my sincere apologies for this out of the norm experience.

That sounds a bit vague, specifically what type of hardware problem were you having and why has it taken over 10 hours to correct?
Posted by Dustin Cisneros, 12-03-2011, 02:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FernGullyGraphics

That sounds a bit vague, specifically what type of hardware problem were you having and why has it taken over 10 hours to correct?

I find it funny that you are in every thread doubting providers, it could be many things that caused this much downtime, as a provider you should know things happen.
Posted by public_html, 12-03-2011, 05:13 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by semoweb

I find it funny that you are in every thread doubting providers, it could be many things that caused this much downtime, as a provider you should know things happen.

Yes you're right.

I never saw him to do any sort of favor.
Posted by WiredStorm, 12-03-2011, 05:31 AM
Sweet about time you got your stuff online!
Posted by tmaniac, 12-03-2011, 09:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by semoweb

I find it funny that you are in every thread doubting providers, it could be many things that caused this much downtime, as a provider you should know things happen.

Nothing wrong with providing more information. Will allow potential customers to make up their own minds about the situation.

Semoweb, if you haven't noticed your site and that of your customers is down:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1104272
Posted by FernGullyGraphics, 12-03-2011, 11:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by semoweb

I find it funny that you are in every thread doubting providers, it could be many things that caused this much downtime, as a provider you should know things happen.

Every thread doubting providers? By "every" do you mean, making a comment every once in awhile in a thread started by one of your customers? I would just call that participation in a public forum, not "doubting providers".

In any event, I do understand that things happen, which is why I was asking for more information. Re-read my comment
Posted by Dustin Cisneros, 12-03-2011, 11:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FernGullyGraphics

Every thread doubting providers? By "every" do you mean, making a comment every once in awhile in a thread started by one of your customers? I would just call that participation in a public forum, not "doubting providers".

In any event, I do understand that things happen, which is why I was asking for more information. Re-read my comment

Reread it your self, its just a thing I laugh at when providers want other providers to explain to them what is going on when you most likely are not even a client of Inno.

But rather than take the thread off topic I will let you have at it
Posted by FernGullyGraphics, 12-03-2011, 12:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by semoweb

Reread it your self, its just a thing I laugh at when providers want other providers to explain to them what is going on when you most likely are not even a client of Inno.

You have a strange sense of humor then, because I do not see anything wrong with it at all. You need to stop looking at everything as a competition. I cant speak for other hosts, but understanding other web hosts problems is very important part of my job as I am often times referring people to other providers (or dealing with other providers clients indirectly, as we sometimes build sites for people who elect to remain hosted with other providers). So knowing which providers are genuine and trustworthy is a big part of what I do (its sometimes the difference between keeping or losing a client).

Quote:

Originally Posted by semoweb

But rather than take the thread off topic I will let you have at it

Good Idea
Posted by Louis Prima, 12-03-2011, 12:44 PM
Well as the original poster AND an actual client of Innohosting, I'll try to be as objective as possible:

I didn't have access to Inno's forums yesterday when I posted. This was my fault, as I hadn't registered before-hand, and Inno was busy working on the problem, so that's probably why my request to access the forums to read announcements was delayed.

On the other hand- even if I had access to the forums, Server 23 went down at 7:07AM GMT according to my site monitor. An announcement/status update was posted in the Inno forums at 10:51AM GMT, almost 4 hours after the server went down. That's a bit late IMHO, especially considering that the downtime was within Inno's normal business hours.

The downtime was caused by a failing hard drive on the server. My sites were down a total of about 11 hours. I'm not a server admin, so I have no idea what the usual amount of downtime is for this sort of problem. So I will not try to judge whether this was an appropriate amount of time or not. I can say that the exact same thing happened with a previous host and I believe the downtime was about 8 hours then, but I have no idea what other problems/circumstances that Inno might have encountered.

On the whole- This is the first major problem that I have experienced with Innohosting. After this, I'm not sure I would recommend them, at least for the next 6 months or so, until I see what happens and where the level of service is now/remains. However, I certainly wouldn't warn anyone to stay away from Inno based on this very unusual downtime. I will be keeping my sites with them. They still offer a great price/performance level for reseller hosting.
Posted by FernGullyGraphics, 12-03-2011, 12:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Louis Prima

Well as the original poster AND an actual client of Innohosting, I'll try to be as objective as possible:

I didn't have access to Inno's forums yesterday when I posted. This was my fault, as I hadn't registered before-hand, and Inno was busy working on the problem, so that's probably why my request to access the forums to read announcements was delayed.

On the other hand- even if I had access to the forums, Server 23 went down at 7:07AM GMT according to my site monitor. An announcement/status update was posted in the Inno forums at 10:51AM GMT, almost 4 hours after the server went down. That's a bit late IMHO, especially considering that the downtime was within Inno's normal business hours.

The downtime was caused by a failing hard drive on the server. My sites were down a total of about 11 hours. I'm not a server admin, so I have no idea what the usual amount of downtime is for this sort of problem. So I will not try to judge whether this was an appropriate amount of time or not. I can say that the exact same thing happened with a previous host and I believe the downtime was about 8 hours then, but I have no idea what other problems/circumstances that Inno might have encountered.

On the whole- This is the first major problem that I have experienced with Innohosting. After this, I'm not sure I would recommend them, at least for the next 6 months or so, until I see what happens and where the level of service is now/remains. However, I certainly wouldn't warn anyone to stay away from Inno based on this very unusual downtime. I will be keeping my sites with them. They still offer a great price/performance level for reseller hosting.

If a drive were to fail, it can definitely take awhile to correct. Most reliable hosts have RAID installed to protect your data in-case of a drive failure (which usually limits the downtime) incase one of the drives were to fail. However I have seen several instances where RAID fails and the host is forced to reload EVERYTHING including loading the back-ups from an offsite location (which can take awhile, sometimes up to 24 hours).

Anyway, not sure if that is what happened in this situation or if they even had some type of raid set-up on the server? Either way, glad everything is back up and running for you.
Posted by Louis Prima, 12-03-2011, 01:38 PM
All of my sites are back up and fully restored to their original state, so Inno definitely had some sort of backup in place. I believe they moved all of the sites to a new server as well. And again, to be fair, I have to say that I have been with Inno a LONG time and this is the first major problem.