Hi.

As some of you know, I'm part of the team responsible for the back-end of esnipe.com which has critical connectivity requirements to eBay.

We recently moved to Weinbar as our primary site, with Pegasus as our second site. We use our own co-located servers at both locations.

We are enhancing our site to support automatic switchover between the two servers if problems are encountered. However, it is not fully ready, so we have been running 100% on Weinbar and letting our Pegasus site act as a "warm standby" that we could switch to manually.


Wednesday 8:00pm PDT
====================
Starting Wednesday night we started to have random packet loss between esnipe-west.com (Weinbar) and eBay. eBay was doing some major work, and the loss was rather infrequent (one or two packets every 3 minutes)...

We have seen minor problems like this in the past and just let them clear up on their own (keeping a close eye). Plus it can take a lot of time to determine which end (ebay or esnipe).

Thursday comes around and the problem hasn't gone away. We start making preparations to move our users over to esnipe-east (Pegasus). However, we were in the middle of development of new code and it wasn't ready to do this... so we accelerated that development. At this point we still aren't certain if eBay or Weinbar is the problem...

However, it is getting worse. Then I start having trouble with network connection into Weinbar using both my Sprint and Qwest lines (I'm in Seattle area). THAT MEANS we were having packet loss from three locations (eBay, Seattle Sprint, Seattle Qwest).

Finally we decided last night to move our users over to Pegasus, as the problem was getting worse and worse. 5 to 7 packets lost every 2 to 3 minutes. Plus substantial network delays. This has been over 24 hours at this point...

So this morning we completed the move to Pegasus and the problem went away... which to us confirms that the problem was on the Weinbar end (or backbone provider) and not on eBay end. We are still seeing the problem from our Weinbar server.


Problems
===========
This is the first network problem we have had at Weinbar since we went live over 6 weeks ago. However, we have been nervous given the reports of their support staff being unresponsive.

Now that we are certain the problem is at Weinbar or at backbone between Weinbar and eBay, we tried to contact them starting at midnight (13 hours ago) and have been unable to reach them.

Our server is UP, and 98% of the packets are making it (although at least 30% are much slower than before)... there is clearly something wrong. We were getting 99.99% of our packets to eBay without delay for over 6 weeks... something clearly changed starting at Wednesday at 8:00pm.


Anyone else?
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Has anyone else had network problems since Wednesday 8:00pm (still going on Friday 1:00pm)?

Anyone been able to reach Weinbar?

Thanks.

Stephen Gutknecht
Renton, Washington

Originally posted by StephenRS
Anyone been able to reach Weinbar?I crashed one of my servers on Tuesday afternoon. So I sent message to support@weinbar.com that afternoon to request a restore from backup. I got no response. So I phoned the support phone number a few times and finally got through on Wednesday night (around 10 PM on the east coast). I was told they'd be "right on it" and a full restore would be done in an hour or two. Nothing happened.

I've sent messages and left voice mail since then, but still nothing. :(

I think they only had one tech. support now. I requested for server upgrade three weeks ago, but they still haven't done it for me,:angry:

It seems as Weinbar is turning into a BurstNET here. Good at first; get to popular, grow tooo fast.

Weinbar did get back to use the same day (Friday), but I don't know the exact time (it was somone else on my end who was doing the contact).

So at least they are "still alive".

This cant be good. I am glas I didn't go over to them. I read positive reviews of weinbar and saw a weinbar person posting on these boards frequently. Lets all hope they dont turn into garbage like some other hosts we all know.

Originally posted by Fiber
It seems as Weinbar is turning into a BurstNET here. Good at first; get to popular, grow tooo fast. Growth wasn't the only factor. Weinbar lost its tech support staff to a competitor (see http://forums.weinbar.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=125 ). And Michael becoming a new father may have reduced the time he has available for handling the overflow of customer requests.

Originally posted by Fiber
It seems as Weinbar is turning into a BurstNET here. Good at first; get to popular, grow tooo fast.

I wouldn't go that far. Webinair has a great ruputation from what I've seen. But there will always be problems that fall through the cracks. I hate to say that being a host myself, but unfortunatly it's the way the world works. No matter how good your staff is and how much attention you pay to detail, you will always have a customer or two who you don't serve to the best of your capabilities. Damn murphy's law I tell ya ;) . What matters is how they fix the issue when it finally comes to the attention of the right person.

Weinbar have been lacking in tech support for quite a while. I do understand the situation they are in and i have dealt with both Micheal & Joe thru email. Both of them are really nice people & helpful and it is sad to know that they must be feeling stressed and overworked to manage the whole data centre based on 2 staff. Michael had also just became a father recently and i do hope that things start to get better for him and weinbar.

I personally has 3 virtual account with them and i must say that my experience is still very well with them. If you dont have any problem and all is setup properly like changing of MX records, then weinbar is very ideal for me due to the uptimes and speed.

I had 1 account on a server that has an uptime of 25 days and the other 2 account on the server that has an uptime of 7 days. This 7 days server had experience high load due to one account overloading the server to 20 ++. The account have since been removed :)

Lets hope this 7 days uptime servers continue and nothing goes wrong.