Powweb down for How Long!?

[gdi2k2]

Hey folks,

I've been really pleased with Powweb's service so far (I've been a customer for a few months now). The features are great, easy to use and unbeatable at that price. However:

The secure portion of my website has been down for the best part of the day today (I first noticed at 9:00 AM GMT+1), and it came back online around 6:00 PM my time (beginning of CA Office hours I guess) - that's a 9-hour outage!

The non-secure portion of my site was fine (hosted on venus.powweb.com), but as I run an online shop (that needs to be secure), my shop was effectively closed for this 9-hour slot :(

Funnily enough, Powweb's site (http://www.powweb.com) was down for the same period of time, and came back up shortly after the secure part of my site did (I guess they lost more revenue than I did, so who am I to complain).

BTW: I’m fairly certain that it’s not because my ISP was unable to connect to that part of the web etc. as I did traceroutes to both my secure site and to that of Powweb.com from all over the place using a handy gadget at http://www.tracert.com/cgi-bin/trace.pl (all come back with “unkown host: powweb.com”).

Anyways, as I'm a fairly new customer, I was just wandering whether this is a frequent occurance, or just a once-in-a-lifetime freak, as I depend quite heavily on my site, and would not want to experience such an outage again.

Any comments welcome...

gdi

[fcsnc]

If an average month is considered to have 30 days, then 9 hours would be 1.25%. However, spread over the course of a whole year (assuming you paid for a year), your 99.7% guarantee would allow Powweb to have you down for a total of 26.28 hours.

So, in your case, it looks as though they have used up over 1/3 of their annual allotment.

Like you, I am a fairly new client of Powweb, but I came from a host that cost three times as much and was down all weekend, every other weekend.

I work in a large IT shop and we have *next to no* downtime, but I also know the 100's of 1,000's of $$$$ that it takes to maintain that.

I have also considered running my own server in my own bedroom, but I figured that even with a failover system I probably couldn't get to 95%.

"Some people see things as they are and ask, 'Why?'. I see things that have never been and ask, 'Why not?'."
--Tom Brown paraphrasing some well-known historical figure whose details escape me at the moment.

[gdi2k2]

Thanks for the reply, Tom. Hadn't considered doing the uptime calculation - indeed, they are within their guarantee as long as I don't get more than another 17 hours 16 minutes of downtime between now and next November :)


BTW: I think it was George Bernard Shaw that originally said what you quoted - RFK probably just pilfered the quote ;)

gdi

[fcsnc]

Come to think of it, I wouldn't stake my life on the exact wording. I assume G. B. Shaw said it in English?

Correction accepted ...