April 26, 2007

Site Outages

I apologize for any difficulty you’ve had recently connecting to the site. This blog is hosted on a shared server at SiteGround.com. Unfortunately, when you’re on a shared box you suffer along with hundreds of other providers whenever someone gets spammed, DDOSed, or hit by a runaway process or script. I know — I’ve been the culprit a few times before, and paid the price for it. But once in a while I’m also the victim, and that seems to be what’s happening today.

According to the SiteGround support center, everything’s hunkey dory. According to the server notification center, there are no updates or information that I should know about. So, when I go through the laborious process of collecting information, pulling together stats on server performance (see the graph behind the thumbnail), pinging, tracerouting, and more, I finally get a note back from the help desk:

There has been a short-term overload on the server that hosts your website, caused by an abnormally high activity from a website located on your host server. This probably affected temporarily your website loading speed. SiteGround system administrators are already working on bringing the server performance back to normal.

We would like to assure you that all measures are taken for the problem to be fixed as soon as possible.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation!

Nothing wrong with that response, really. But as I indicated in my trouble ticket, the problems began at 7:30 AM CST, and I was contacting them five hours later! As of this writing, I’m still experiencing server difficulties with long lags and numerous “500 Application” type errors.

I understand what it’s like to provide support to a large user-community — I used to provide help desk and technical support to a network of 1,000 computer users. Yes, it’s not the same scale as, say, 1,000 web sites on a single server on a server farm of hundreds of computers … but I at least get what’s going on.

But there’s gotta be a better way to provide feedback. Despite my complaints SiteGround has yet to initiate a proactive email blast system or even an RSS feed for updates. I mean, how hard could this be? Set up a single RSS feed for each server, and an aggregate feed for all servers, and whenever there’s an outage, plug a note into the feed about the outage and what’s going on. Then, as it’s resolved, plug another note in. Communicate!

:: sigh ::

I suppose if I had a job this wouldn’t irritate me as much. But, nevertheless, it ain’t fun. SiteGround’s answer, of course, to my problems is to buy virtual private network hosting on a dedicated server. Yeah. If I were making $100 a week from Google ads, that might make sense. But, alas, no.

So, anyhow, sorry you’re experiencing problems. I’m sure it’ll be fixed within the next several hours.

Rich