The Downtime Explanation

As my blog seems to be down as often as it's up over the last couple of weeks I thought I'd explain why. I use FBH as my host. This site is on server 6 (of 6), which seems incapable of lasting a few hours without Apache locking up and requiring an admin to restart it. The problem in the amount of downtime comes from the fact that there is only one admin to do this.

FBH are a new company, so there will be some teething issues like this one. They are well aware of it and are as frustrated as the users with sites on server 6. They are looking into having a script detect when the server needs a restart and attempt to restart it automatically, or email an admin if it fails to restart. When this is implemented the downtime will be minutes at most, assuming the issues further up the chain still persist.

They have been trying to work with their hosts to find out why this continues to be a problem. To date this has achieved nothing from the server uptime perspective. Since just before Christmas I've had to start 9 support tickets, yes NINE. All for the same thing. Sometimes I get lucky and the admin is not sleeping, so it can be restarted quickly, other times the site is down for several hours before coming back alive. The other day was the 8th ticket, which was acted on (server restarted) just before I went to bed, and when I woke up the site was down yet again. I think it was the 8th, the 9th was last night and my site is only just back up now after the 9th ticket.

I expect it'll be onto double figures in the support ticket count by the end of the weekend.

It's now at the point where I expect my site to be down when I visit it. I am now surprised when I visit and it's actually accessible. It does seem to have the reliability of a Windows server, despite being a 64bit CentOS server. I'm not sure RedHat or CentOS have any plans to use FBH as a showcase for reliability any time soon.

As much as my site seems to be up as much as it's down I am trying to give them the benefit of some time to get it right, I know they're working on it and every new company has some teething issues at the start. It just gets more and more annoying to do so with such large gaps in the "basics of being a webhost" results column.

Perhaps the lesson is just as much "don't touch whoever FBH use as their host".

I have each blog post show the number of views, but can't get any sort of accurate guide if the site's been inaccessible for hours when people have been trying to click through from RSS readers etc. I hardly get any comments, but I've noticed that trend in a lot of very good blogs so it's not an issue other than I don't know how many (if any) spend time writing a reply to a post only to have the server lock up on them before then can submit and they don't know.

I'm wary of updating parts of Drupal in case it can't complete the update and leaves a nightmare to try and fix. Even as I edited a couple of typos in this post it gave me issues in not being able to connect to the database to make the changes, meaning I had to gingerly go back, make them again and hope that the newly restarted server hadn't locked up again.

The one thing that's keeping me with FBH (for now) is that the staff do seem to care, and hopefully whatever is causing the lockups will be fixed so the site stays up for a decent length of time uninterrupted. In the meantime, expect regular prolonged outages.

Sorry.