Not having fun

[TJx2]

Our site (www.OIIIIIIIO.com) is down AGAIN.

Was off line for several hours last night, up this morning for a bit, and now down hard with the error message "Session initialisation failed" as soon as you try to hit the PostNuke system. Main splash page comes up fine, click the logo to get to the php code.

Could someone please let me know what is up? The site is on mysql08. I hav tried repairing tables, and no improvement. To be honest, that is the extent of my support knowledge when it comes to this stuff, although i know all was working just fine earlier and nothing has changed config wise in very very long time from our end.

These seems to be a frequently reoccuring theme lately.

Thanks

[Karencita]

This is what is going on.... click the link

http://forum.powweb.com/showthread.php?t=49992

[airlinecrew]

Our site displays the same problem, already for 12 hours (or more?)

[airlinecrew]

One day later.... Site is still down. I just recommended this hosting company to 2 other people, who signed up last week. Maybe I should noy have done that... This is annoying. Support tickets are not answered anymore...

:mad: :mad:

[emuzone]

My site [ www.computeremuzone.com ] is also down :(

The server downs are too much frequent since I moved my page to powweb. I'm not very happy, really :confused: ... I hope it will go better next months, coz I have contract for a year and, today, I'm not thinking about renewing the contract.

[takashi_maze]

To be fair, this is definately the worst time I've ever seen. Hopefully things will improve.

[IanS]

My site [ www.computeremuzone.com ] is also down :(

The server downs are too much frequent since I moved my page to powweb. I'm not very happy, really :confused: ... I hope it will go better next months, coz I have contract for a year and, today, I'm not thinking about renewing the contract.Remember you get a 30day money back period..... you still pay for the domain name if it was free as this is yours to move on to another host. You also have a pro-rata deduction for the actual time you've had (theoretically at least) access to their servers.

[linnetwoods]

This is the first time I have seen quite such uproar at PowWeb but, rest assured, I've been hearing far worse horror stories from friends on very expensive servers, so this is not unique to PowWeb by any means.

As I said in a reply to a harangue elsewhere - we only have to take a piece of new technology in, MySQL, php or whatever, when we want to but server staff have to get to grips with all the new technologies that are constantly being thrust into the public arena as soon as they happen.

There's an awful lot to learn very fast and we expect them to learn it all, at the same time as answering the emails with which we bombard them. Perhaps we should expect them to stick brooms up their backsides and sweep the floors as well, to save time?

Perhaps the only real criticism I would make is that staff might have considered posting advance warning that they planned to start performing maintenance before actually doing so, giving an idea of how this might affect some people and for how long they thought that might be the case, advising proper and timely backup in case of problems etc., rather than waiting for the fallout before mentioning it. Hell, we all make mistakes! Give the guys a break!

[toastmaster]

Perhaps the only real criticism I would make is that staff might have considered posting advance warning that they planned to start performing maintenance before actually doing soHeh! You've not been here long! I'm in my third and last year, and that has been the one consistant gripe - no warnings.

From my point of view, the service has plummeted in the last 8 months, and I've had to spent time helping two friends I recommended Powweb to a couple of years back, move their blog and shop sites away.

While Powweb like to say "if you don't like it, leave", I think they need to understand that all they now have over UK and other hosts is bandwidth - if your site NEEDS 5Gb a day, then Powweb is the choice. If you need speed, stability, uptime and reliability, then for the same price as Powweb I can get several UK plans, the only difference being half the space and only 10Gb per month, but if they stuff up and have an outage that brings service below 99.9%, they give you cash back or a free month. I need more bandwidth than that, but for a busy but text-only blog, and a commercial venture which only pulls 3-4Gb/month, reliability is the key.

And the knock-on effect is ill-feeling too - look around the hosting reviews, Powweb used to come out fairly high up the customer satisfaction ratings. But if you look now, and also here in the forums, you'll see the change of mood, especially the "old-timers". There's only so much goodwill you can keep running on, and I've seen "here's hoping the problems won't last much longer" quite a bit lately.

The problems need addressing, acknowledging and sorting out.

[linnetwoods]

Fair enough, but in the two years that I've been hosted by PowWeb, uptime monitoring has shown that there has been 00.00% downtime on my site and any tiny problems I have had, including ones that weren't really in PowWeb's remit to help with, have been resolved speedily, courteously and properly, so I cannot accept that there has been a blanket reduction in quality of service.

A lot of the 'old-timers' may be falling foul of one of two things:
a) familiarity breeds contempt
b) they are learning to use, and using, more and more new technologies, faster and faster and expecting the staff to be able to cope with all of them at once.

I will freely admit that my sites are low-tech and I am close to fanatical about wanting to produce lightweight pages that load fast and impart the text and graphics, ads and links that I want my site visitors to see as fast as possible. If I could afford the appropriate software I would probably reduce the weight of my graphics even further! I don't use animations, Flash, forums, message boards or anything else that is complex and greedy on bandwidth although I am trying to find the time to learn php so I can have an interactive map on my site (not very successfully so far, I might add!) so I am probably not a typical PowWeb customer these days.

Still, there you go - my 25-dollar wind-up radio (you can also use 2 x AA batteries if you want to) will probably go on giving me flawless reception of my favourite stations long after all the electronic equipment on our boat has found a resting place on the bottom of the ocean! The more complex, delicate and interlinked things become, the more difficult it is going to be to keep them working. If only all the other host servers had forums, I wonder how PowWeb would fare by comparison then?

The question is: Out of all the thousands of customers PowWeb has, how many are experiencing problems that can be directly attributed to PowWeb at any given moment? That would be the deciding factor for me if I was trying to make a decision. Judging by the number of people on these forums, I'd say it was probably not many...

[toastmaster]

Fair enough, but in the two years that I've been hosted by PowWeb, uptime monitoring has shown that there has been 00.00% downtime on my site.I'd check your monitoring service - if it checks once a day at mid-night or something then yes, you'll show uptime. I use the free version of internetseer, and that shows some extended downtime.

The question is: Out of all the thousands of customers PowWeb has, how many are experiencing problems that can be directly attributed to PowWeb at any given moment? That would be the deciding factor for me if I was trying to make a decision. Judging by the number of people on these forums, I'd say it was probably not many...Powweb claim over 60,000 hosted sites. As they have had total outages (one lasting 8 hours) in the last couple of months, with ALL services down (http, mail, the lot), I would say ... 60,000+ were affected. Unless we've been told wrong, according to Powweb, when all sites become unavailable, it's due to load balancing falling over. So whereas before, just one server was down, now it's the lot.

[linnetwoods]

Oops! maybe I'd better try a different monitoring service ;-) hang on though, why have all my webstats got action on them every single day, always?

[toastmaster]

Oops! maybe I'd better try a different monitoring service ;-) hang on though, why have all my webstats got action on them every single day, always?Dunno - let's pick a recent one - you got much action in your raw logfile for the 5 hours previous to Mon Apr 04 10:08:04 EDT or on this day (http://forum.powweb.com/showthread.php?t=45142&page=1&pp=35) ?You can't go by webstats - you might have 10,000 hits in the morning, and the site might be down all afternoon - webstats would show you had 10,000 hits that day, that's all!

[linnetwoods]

Ummm, I'm not in that league, old fruit! If I got as many as hits as that in a month I'd turn inside out with excitement! I don't appear to have had problems on either occasion, though. Maybe it's because I still use donkey-driven apparatus and publish low-tech everything to my domain? No squeaky hell no pee h pee...

Speaking of animals, who's your sheepish-looking pal in the photo?

[IanS]

Speaking of animals, who's your sheepish-looking pal in the photo?That'd be the next Prime Minister of the UK :D

[linnetwoods]

How will anyone know there's been a change then?

[toastmaster]

Speaking of animals, who's your sheepish-looking pal in the photo?Wooldn't ewe like to know?That'd be the next Prime Minister of the UK :DBaaaarbera would certainly do a better job...How will anyone know there's been a change then?Well, at least she wouldn't pull the wool over our eyes any more...
I could go on all night...

...just need a sturdy pair of wellies.

[linnetwoods]

Lambast you for your gharsley puns... :D