-- Q: How many tech support people does it take to
change a lightbulb?
A: "The lightbulb works fine on my system."

Based on posts on this board, I decided to move my site to JaguarPC.com. Certainly the person posting as "Jaguar" seems to be a decent and responsible fellow.

Unfortunately, I have been having escalating problems with this company. The other day, pings to my site were intermittently averaging 1300 ms (they normally average between 88 and 100 ms). I did a tracert, and found that every hop was fast until the hops at dialtoneinternet and my site, which strongly suggests that this was not a problem with my ISP. I also subscribe to the MIT site checking service, which showed several hours of downtime the night before. I wrote to tech support and was told that neither problem could be happening.

I then subscribed to Netwhistle so that I could double check the MIT service. I found this morning that both Netwhistle and the MIT service showed my site was down for more than an hour earlier this morning. I wrote to tech support, and got the following response:

[From JaguarPC support:] Despite your gadgets to motnitor service it was not down the time we informed you went down. It was taken offline for approx. 5 minutes last night to perform upgrades. There is no way we could run a business with a server down 181 minutes last night, and however
many minutes the tool reported the other night. This would mean our servers go down every night. We could not have built a growing business based on such statistics. If you personally observe downtime then please contact us. There have been two instances of downtime in the last month, each for only minor amounts of time we do admit to that. Neither amounted in any substantial amount of time and we do not forsee any more upcoming upgrades to that server your site is on. Thanks


>
> Subject: JaguarPC Support
>
> ==========================================================================
> Name: Jonathan Bender
> E-mail: jbender@ibusinesslawyer.com
> Uername:
> Password: ****
> Domain:ibusinesslawyer.com
> Phone:
>
> ===================================
> Problem: Last week I reported that
> the MIT robot service had detected site down time, and
> you told me that it could not have happened. I therefore > added netwhistle so that I could double check the MIT
> service. I got the following reports overnight:
> __________
>
> http://www.ibusinesslawyer.com/uptime/index.txt returned "success".
>
> It was last reached by Uptime at 2000-10-01 05:05:49 (Eastern Time (New York)).
> Currently our Oracle database thinks it is 2000-10-01 08:12:50.
> In other words, your server has been unreachable for approximately 187 minutes.
>
> ___________
> FROM NETWHISTLE:
>
> This monitored resource came back on-line.
> Earlier, we detected that it had failed.
> Detailed information is included below.
>
> ************************************************************
>
> Member Account: IBUSINESSLAWYER
> Name: IBUSINESSLAWYER
> Device Name: LAW OFFICE SITE
> Device Type: HTTP
> Device Tested: http://www.ibusinesslawyer.com
> Alert Time: 10/01/2000 12:35:28 (Greenwich Mean Time)
> Monitor Run Timestamp: 970403728
> Monitor Error Msg: TARGET IS BACK ONLINE AFTER A PREVIOUS FAILURE
> ************************************************************
>
> This monitored resource experienced a failure.
> Detailed information is included below.
>
> ************************************************************
>
> Member Account: IBUSINESSLAWYER
> Name: IBUSINESSLAWYER
> Device Name: LAW OFFICE SITE
> Device Type: HTTP
> Device Tested: http://www.ibusinesslawyer.com
> Alert Time: 10/01/2000 08:35:31 (Greenwich Mean Time)
> Monitor Run Timestamp: 970389326
> Monitor Error Msg: CONNECTION REFUSED - CONNECTION TO SITE WAS REFUSED.
> ************************************************************
>
> As I said before, I know tech support can be a
> thankless job, and I know that folks can take frustrations > out on tech support people. But I cannot accept any more > declarations that the site "could not have been down." > > Please let me know what you are doing to ensure that
> this will stop happening. If you know what has been > > happening, please let me know. Thanks, and I look forward > to hearing from you.
>
- - - - - - - -

Now if TWO independent sitechecking services show my site was down for so long, then the chances are pretty darn high that my site was, in fact, unreachable for longer than 5 minutes -- whether or not the whole server was down. MIT checks every 15 minutes, and Netwhistle checks every hour.

I post this in the hope that "Jaguar" is using an employee or contractor for tech support, and is unaware that
customers are getting this kind of response when they send
in this amount of evidence about problems. I hope to hear from him soon.

-- Jon Bender

If you get a regular flow of visitors to your site, your access logs should show distinct blackout periods. Check the logs to see if there are holes at the same time netwhistle reported the outage.

The other thing you might check, is perhaps there is something wrong when they set up your dns, even leaving a period out can cause ip address's to be unavailable to some people at some times.

THe other thing you should know is that the Internet is not a perfect works and if you want 100% uptime your going to have a hard time finding it, even with 98% uptime you can still have up to 7 hours of downtime a month.

The problem I have with your whole situation is how the tech responded to you, by saying its "IMPOSIBLE" and didnt happen and then starting to talk about how his business is ran. This is not a professional way to conduct yourself. He should have first apol. to you, and said we havent noticed any problems but we will check into it.

I would contact Jaguar directly (hopefully the tech wasnt Jaguar) and let him know about it but I think Jaguar may be a 1 person company so it may have come from the horses mouth.

Let us know how it turns out.

Well, I agree with everything the last poster said. I know that there will be SOME downtime w. any host. I try to keep up with this board, and I read about the recent Alabanza outage. But, yes, it is unreasonable to just demand that no problem could be occurring. Obviously, something is up, somewhere.

Of course, one can't expect perfect uptime. One can, however, expect tech support to take well-substantiated reports of problems seriously, even if they can't immediately figure out what's up.

Hello iBusinesslawyer,
I would like to apologize on behalf of the tech that may have responded to your worries about the connection.

I will make sure personally that your site dns and log files get reviewed.

cbaker17 I would contact Jaguar directly (hopefully the tech wasnt Jaguar) and let him know about it but I think Jaguar may be a 1 person company so it may have come from the horses mouth.
Sorry, I was not the one who responded to this client and obviously that takes care of the second half of that remark :)

If you have future issues like this you can email me directly at admin@jaguarpc.net

Many thanks, Jaguar. I didn't know how to reach you directly. All the best.

-- Jon

Originally posted by cbaker17

THe other thing you should know is that the Internet is not a perfect works and if you want 100% uptime your going to have a hard time finding it, even with 98% uptime you can still have up to 7 hours of downtime a month.


This post is not totally related but I wanted to say that while 100% uptime is totally impossible, you can easily have over 99% uptime. Once a server is balanced, that you have multiple backbone provider, the server shouldnt have to be restarted for at least a month. Restarting a server take approximately 5 minutes at most, thus... 5 min / month equals a nice 99.9886 % uptime. If you know what you are doing, you can most likely provide a 99.9% uptime without any problems (that gives you 44 minutes of downtime per months... 2 reboots per week approximately.)

I meant 99% uptime not 98% sorry

Félix C.Courtemanche,

Well, companies can say they offer 99% uptime, but when it comes down to it, they probably won't give you that free month or whatever they promised you.

I remember when I was a customer at Communitech, one of their servers was down for an entire day. Pings all day from at least 5 places in the world proved it was unreachable yet all of their other servers were up and running. Did they give a free month? Nope. There was only one time when I remember when they gave a free month. It was when one of their hardrives broke and it was down for 2 days.

Just a warning to all. Be careful when you see uptime percentages. There may be something in the fineprint, and don't always count on the host upholding it!

ok, lets rephrase this :)

If your host is honest and really care about his business, he can easily achieve 99% uptime and more. I know, we had 99.7% the first 6 month we started hosting... and in the first 6 month it is when you learn how to do stuff.

Right now, none of our server has been rebooted for 2 weeks, one is up for more than a month with no problems at all.

That was what I meant :)

Félix C.Courtemanche,

Much better. You are a more respected man here, so I would personally trust your guarantee over other's. :)