Finally!!!

[BerksWebGuy]

YOOHOO...Finally back up. I guess Powweb has been having some problems lately. 4 hours is a long time for the whole network:(

[stevel]

The announcement says that a switch crashed, but the symptom for me was that name servers couldn't resolve www.powweb.com or forum.powweb.com. Do the name servers have a single point of failure? I thought there was a requirement for two independent name servers for a domain, preferably geographically separate?

I know that I didn't get any mail forwarded through my Powweb domain during the outage - this is troubling.

[BerksWebGuy]

I'm not sure about the name servers, but you will never get an email from Powweb about outages. Most people do want this feature...but Powweb does not offer it, and from the looks of it, never will.

[JustJerk]

After learning that Powweb has fixed the problem the night before, I finally ran my website submit program for the month. I've already put it on hold for the week because of the on going problems. To my dismay, my site was down all morning. If I was informed that the site would be down again for 1/2 day, I would have wanted till tonight. Thanks Powweb, another job well done!

We need to be notified for outages like this!!!

[BerksWebGuy]

Some outages can't be planned or expected...as this one was.

BUT...there should be some kind of email, grouped by server, that will let the people know when the servers will be down for maintenance, re-boots, etc. Most people do not check the announcments board to see when their server will be down. There should be something???

[stevel]

I'd be happy with a web page I could go to. But it seemed that anything at powweb.com was unreachable (and in fact had dropped out of the namespace, which is worse).

[BerksWebGuy]

Usually its not the whole network, just a server. But I guess the whole switch went...and thats not good.

[JustJerk]

I called Powweb around noon; the tech told me that the company who hosts the backbone was doing routine maintenance. An email would be good. Plus a lot of times that they have problems, they don’t even post on the forum.

[stevel]

"routine maintenance" on a network backbone doesn't result in an outage - these systems are configured many-ways redundantly. I'd like to understand exactly what happened and how this took down DNS service.

[BerksWebGuy]

Oh Steve...you haven't been around long have you. We usually don't get detailed reports about our servers (but we should). The only thing we get a brief sentence saying - Outage, sorry for the inconvenience. Sometime we don't get that much.

For powweb, this is rare that all this is going on. At least they are resolving issues so it won't happen again.

[SimCoWeb]

Greetings :)

It's obvious that the issue was not something in the 'control' of Powweb for the entire server network to go down. Since there's many different entities involved between the time we click the 'go' button on our browser and the page actually arriving, any number of issues can arise. A simple router box could have a meltdown and render the system inaccessible.

There's going to be times when a specific server has issues that would cause some sites to go down. An entire blackout like we experienced is way beyond a server issue. I assure you that Powweb would love to have 110% up time if they could, but being reliant upon these other entities does not provide total control over that. Other hosts have the same issues with their upline links, trust me. I experienced plenty of down times with other hosts prior to coming to Powweb. :)

The fact that Powweb has a low cost for hosting doesn't mean they went out and purchased a bunch of used computers that have hand cranks on them. The cost is only related to the fact they offer one package. By controlling their disk and bandwidth usage in this package they can afford to sell us cheap hosting on servers that are above the normal standards in speed and reliability.

If we desire to keep these costs as cheap as they currently are then we can't expect a tech support guy to be sitting there 24/7 waiting for our calls at 3a.m.

Powweb has many new plans currently in the works that will make it an even greater bargain. Just hold onto your socks...it's going to be great! :D

[JustJerk]

Don't happen again! You must be kidding me. I'm on the Mars server and all last week my site might have been up tops, 60%. 4 nights in a row I couldn't work on it because of timing out errors. Granted this is the first time in 1 1/2 years but still, if I had a business site, I would be piss. Just feel sorry for the people who lost thousand of dollars in the past week.

Time: Mon Jun 10 14:56:23 EDT 2002, EST
Total Time on Error: 5 hours, 31 minutes, 42 seconds
Time: Mon Jun 10 14:44:36 EDT 2002, EST
Total Time on Error: 4 hours, 17 seconds
Sun Jun 09 12:49:38 EDT 2002, EST
Total Time on Error: 25 minutes, 18 seconds
Time: Sun Jun 09 07:29:49 EDT 2002, EST
Total Time on Error: 2 hours, 45 minutes, 47 seconds
Time: Sun Jun 09 05:50:02 EDT 2002, EST
Total Time on Error: 1 hour, 8 minutes, 11 seconds
Time: Fri Jun 07 12:22:28 EDT 2002, EST
Total Time on Error: 1 hour, 2 seconds

[stevel]

At $7.95/month, I don't expect 100% uptime nor 24/7 support. But it seems to me that Powweb is making promises it is finding difficult to keep. On the other hand, businesses who would stand to lose a lot of money over site downtime are probably better off with a host that has redundant equipment in place for instant failover.

I am a new user, less than a week so far. I do hope this was just an abberation.

[JustJerk]

Steve,

Been w/ them for 1 1/2 years. This is the 1st time I had a problem w/ them. Powweb is definitely worth the money. Just have to ***** to someone when you want to do work but the site is always down. Actually, Powweb got a lot better over the last year between speed and features. Stick w/ it.

[suedove]

Hi,

Some tell me this is making excuses for others but I was taught it is compassion for others....
If it were to take six hands to fix the problem and we all were asking for a detailed notice of the problem then wouldn't we be holding up the solution to the problem by borrowing two of the fixing hands?
Oh sure I would like to know what the problem is,and was, and all that, but I believe (in fairytales) that when we don't get that notice it is because all hands are busy bringing the "horse back to the barn" or that the notice can't be sent because of the broken part. I know that speaking out is part of today's attitude (or is that freedom) but isn't it children (I have five) that usually think nothing is being done because they can't see what's being done? You can't unring the bell once you ring it. If you don't ring it is that tolerance and patience or does that mean that you don't care what happens like perpetual happiness? Sometimes the frustation from the complaining posts sting and make all the good gains look smaller than they actually are. Just my words and thoughts, Sue

[JustJerk]

Here is the report for the week.
Weekly Total
Outages 6
error 22:03
% Uptime 86.87

Not even close to theirs 99.7% Uptime.

If you actually check the powvalue, it never states the uptime % guarantee!!!

Powweb Package (http://www.powweb.com/pow1detail.html)