For the observant amongst you, it may have come to your attention that simonbunker.co.uk was very much dead for nearly all of yesterday thanks to a serious server outage Just Host who host this blog. Since moving to Just Host at the back end of last year I have been really impressed by them. They have proved to be responsive and reliable.
So yesterday morning at approx 0700 , I awoke to find that my site was down as was the new blog that I had planned to launch yesterday as well – marvelous. So I headed over to the Just host site and used the “Live Support” tool, personally I am never a fan of these solutions as I find the level of support is always pretty woeful and very much scripted. Anyway I got through to the agent and it was soon established that the server that my sites are hosted was down due to a hardware failure, I am totally fine with that, after all shit happens and servers do break. I did a little probing and was informed that the site will be back up in 1-2 hours which again was cool. So far so good and then the geek came out in me and I probed further as to what is actually going on with the server not sure why I did this but hey what the hell. At this point the agent then said that that the server was being upgraded and they were having problems and the techs were working on it. Now at this point I was bloody confused, less than a minute ago it was a broken server and now it was a server being upgraded. Two entirely different scenarios! I decided to leave any further questions and thought oh well 1-2 hours is not the end of the world, so said thanks for your help etc etc. Then the agent had the bloody cheek to send me a message to say thanks for your call and would you like to buy xyz upgrades to your hosting account for a special one-time discount. Clearly this is probably a pre-canned script, but for crying out loud it aint a clever idea to up sell services to a client who is pissed off that his current services don’t work! Just Host, if you happen to read this sort that bit out, it is a stupid thing to do
Forward on 3 hours, still no website. Chased for an update and got this:
am sorry, your server crashed because of a hardware failure.
We are restoring it now to the latest brand new server.
The restoration will take about 16-20 hours more.The files will be synced to the old HDD from cl33 so no data will be lost.
We are very sorry for this unexpected outage.
We are doing our best to bring the server back online ASAP.
Right so at least I know now that it is a hardware problem and not a planned upgrade, but 16-20 hours to restore! I am not sure why it would take so long but I personally think that this is ridiculous.
Forward to 2100 Hrs and finally my server is back and to be fair its all running well. I personally fully understand that servers fail, it happens and always will but the level of stupidity and lack of any form of customer service displayed by Just Host is quite simply staggering. I held Just Host in high regard and have referred many people to them, who I know have experienced good service, but I am considering another move after this debacle.
My apologies for anyone who was trying to access the site yesterday.
If anyone can recommend a good host especially for Wordpress then please do let me know by leaving a comment
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[...] One of the Jobs that I have been doing over the last few weeks is analyzing this blog and trying to figure out what works and what does not. One of the key areas that I have been concerned about is the advertising. Yes, I do affiliate marketing and it kind of comes with the territory but it just did not seem to blend well with the site and to be honest they were not really converting that well. So I have decided to pull all the banner advertising that appears on the sidebars and within the posts, I will still run some text links and have kept the Stuff page which has a few banner links to products/services that I recommend, although the Just Host banners may well be disappearing shortly given yesterdays outage . [...]