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  1. #1

    Acceptable downtime for reseller hosting

    I understand that reseller hosting has it's limitations, and there are certain changes that users will make that will cause Apache to restart, and have a short outage. What do you guys think is an acceptable number of these per day?

    I have a monitor set up that hits the site every minute, and I'll get 5-10 alerts a day saying that it's down, and then will be back up 1 minute later. Is this a normal level, and just a drawback of reseller hosting?

    Thanks in advance.

  2. #2
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    It's not normal to get 5-10 alerts/day. It's not acceptable to get any alerts/day.. It takes seconds for apache to restart - time to change providers I think if you're getting that many.

  3. #3
    Thanks. I switched to HostGator a few months ago, and paid for the year. I was trying to see if I was just being anal or if this is really an issue. After opening a ticket, and getting the run around for a while, they finally found that some users were abusing their power (?) and causing restarts. They say they've handled the issue, and it has gotten better (was 30+ alerts a day), but still not great.

    Getting a lot of runaround from support over there Lots of "there's nothing wrong, we can't go by the Pingdom alerts", then finally, after pestering enough, someone will actually look into the issue and see that something was really wrong, but the issue isn't really fixed. I've asked them which monitoring service I can use (even if it's a pay service), that they will be accountable to, and they say there isn't one, nor is there a report that they generate that I can see for them to prove to me that there isn't an issue. <sigh>

    Since I already paid for the year, would they give me my money back, or am I just out the year? Also, HostGator seemed to be popular, and got a lot of good reviews (also a bunch of bad ones, but it seems hard to find a reseller host that doesn't).

    1) I don't really want to be out the money, but I don't want to be stuck with these issues either.
    2) I don't even know who I'd switch to, there doesn't seem to that great host that everyone loves.

    Thanks.

  4. #4
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    Hi Squeebie,

    As kprojects said, that many alerts per day is not acceptable. You can contact Host Gator and see if they'll refund you for the unused credits, I'm not too familiar with their refund policy. As your answer to question number two, their are tons of great hosts, of course not everyone is going to be happy, you always see the client or two who aren't but, out of experience EZPZ Hosting is a great provider. Dan and their crew do an awesome job, uptime is up to par, support is up to par and they're just all around great.

    Best of luck!

  5. #5
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    If you do cancel, they will refund the remainder for your prepayment, as long as you request it.
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  6. #6
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    Let us know what happens

  7. #7
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    Hi There,


    Do you have a ticket number I can take a look at? I'd like to investigate what exactly is happening here.

    I suspect that Pingdom is hitting some type of firewall limit. We've had this issue in the past with them if I recall correctly. The last time around we had to whitelist their ips.

  8. #8
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    Hello squeebie,

    We actually had this problem on our server before and hostgator.com is correct. This has to do with the firewall. When this happens have you tried checking if the server is responding to ping and http requests?

    All we had to do was whitelist the monitoring server IP under the firewall which was blocking the connections.
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  9. #9
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    We had an issue with Pingdom in the past whereby they were sending out a handful of false positives per day which was killing our 3rd party uptime statistics. In the end, Pingdom found an error at their end and it was all resolved.

    Point being, don't always trust those statistics... but don't ignore them either! Look into the situation if something doesn't seem right... which you have

  10. #10
    If they offer money back guarantee, then they should give you refund.

    Do not forget to let us know what happens.
    Last edited by writespeak; 03-21-2011 at 08:04 PM.

  11. #11
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    IP monitoring, domain monitoring, server monitoring, port monitoring....

    Its just not all its cracked to be no matter who you use. There are so many variables that can muck up the facts. There Firewall, your servers firewall, there network, your network... and everyone and everything else in between!

    Yes, we also have been seeing (especially lately) more and more short outages of less than 5 min, 5, 10, 15 times a day. It gets a little over whelming some times trying to sort it all out to find what is a false positive and a real outage. Then add 1, 2 or even 3 more servers to the equasion... then it really gets ugly!
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  12. #12
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    Use external monitoring services with caution
    When a downtime report occurs, check the server logs to confirm authenticity
    Some such services report downtime simply due to slow response

    I am quite happy to accept downtime when warned / advised in advance, this can then be communicated to all customers that will be affected
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  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by m8internet View Post
    Use external monitoring services with caution
    When a downtime report occurs, check the server logs to confirm authenticity
    Some such services report downtime simply due to slow response

    I am quite happy to accept downtime when warned / advised in advance, this can then be communicated to all customers that will be affected
    Agreed. Pingdom almost causes more problems than it solves with all the false positives it gives.
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  14. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by squeebie View Post
    I understand that reseller hosting has it's limitations, and there are certain changes that users will make that will cause Apache to restart, and have a short outage. What do you guys think is an acceptable number of these per day?
    First and foremost, there is no such thing as acceptable number of outages per day. You need to always find ways to make things running smoothly since the last thing that you want to hear is your client yelling on you.

    Quote Originally Posted by squeebie View Post
    I have a monitor set up that hits the site every minute, and I'll get 5-10 alerts a day saying that it's down, and then will be back up 1 minute later. Is this a normal level, and just a drawback of reseller hosting?

    Thanks in advance.
    I've been doing a reseller hosting for a long time and the longest downtime that I ever experienced was 24-hours. With my experienced, I'm only averaging to 2-3 downtime per year with 15-30 mins duration (that's for unscheduled). I'm always ready to pack and move to another provider if my reseller provider stress me with downtimes.

    If you want to sleep well, I suggest you to pay a decent money to get a decent service.

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    Ask for Server IP & Nameservers IP to check if your reseller provider truly provides 100% white-label.

  15. #15
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    its not normal
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  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by brentpresley View Post
    Agreed. Pingdom almost causes more problems than it solves with all the false positives it gives.
    I also agree. I'm currently trying the free Pingdom and I'm pissed with the false positive. My BinaryCanary and RobotUptime are not reporting anything and the server is up but Pingdom says down.
    Ask for Server IP & Nameservers IP to check if your reseller provider truly provides 100% white-label.

  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by squeebie View Post
    I understand that reseller hosting has it's limitations, and there are certain changes that users will make that will cause Apache to restart, and have a short outage. What do you guys think is an acceptable number of these per day?

    I have a monitor set up that hits the site every minute, and I'll get 5-10 alerts a day saying that it's down, and then will be back up 1 minute later. Is this a normal level, and just a drawback of reseller hosting?

    Thanks in advance.
    Services that drop off intermittently during peak traffic hours is indicative of an oversold server. An oversold hosting environment should not be acceptable for a reseller.
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  18. #18
    Whoa, I didn't realize all these replies were waiting! Catching up now.

  19. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by hostgator.com View Post
    Hi There,


    Do you have a ticket number I can take a look at? I'd like to investigate what exactly is happening here.

    I suspect that Pingdom is hitting some type of firewall limit. We've had this issue in the past with them if I recall correctly. The last time around we had to whitelist their ips.
    The ticket number is OBJ-14786784 .

    It's very hard to judge what's going on, if you read through that ticket, you'll see what I mean. A lot of "nothing is wrong, can't trust Pingdom", and then a few "hey, there was something wrong, we've addressed it". Things like that make me think I should be looking at Pingdom and others, maybe not trusting every alert, but as an overall pattern that a lot of alerts means something is up.
    Last edited by squeebie; 03-05-2011 at 11:04 AM. Reason: Added more details

  20. #20
    Thanks to all warning of Pingdom and other 3rd party monitoring services. I was taking their alerts with a grain of salt, but was using more than one service, and was seeing outages myself.

    If 3rd party services can't be trusted, and Host Gator doesn't provide anything either, than what can I do to monitor?

    Also - the alerts have died down a lot, seeing 1 or none per day for the last 2 days. This happened once before and I thought the issues were gone, then it started up again. Hopefully I won't see anymore, and hostgator.com can provide some insight to all as to what was going on.

  21. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by AvailHosting-Jeff View Post
    Services that drop off intermittently during peak traffic hours is indicative of an oversold server. An oversold hosting environment should not be acceptable for a reseller.
    I don't get the feeling that it's because the box is oversold. The response times have been good (page load times, etc), and it didn't seem to happen at a particular time of the day. Sometimes it would be overnight, sometimes it would be during the day.

    Good thought though, thanks.

  22. #22
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    It sounds like Apache is getting too many connections. If server response is good, it may be a/an (ab)user that's using too many http connections, but not cpu. If they can't resolve the issue, its time to move on. Pingdom is probably the most accurate measuring tool available.
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  23. #23
    Quote Originally Posted by JixHost View Post
    It sounds like Apache is getting too many connections. If server response is good, it may be a/an (ab)user that's using too many http connections, but not cpu. If they can't resolve the issue, its time to move on. Pingdom is probably the most accurate measuring tool available.
    I'm guessing it's something like that. They've already admitted that there were users abusing their "power" (not sure exactly what they mean by that), but they warned those users, and it helped for a bit, then started up again. They again warned and banned some users. I haven't gotten an alert from Pingdom in 2 days, so maybe the worst of it is over.

  24. #24
    Unfortunately, no matter what host you choose -- unless they have a single server that they spend all day staring at it -- you're going to have users who abuse it. Especially on any type of shared hosting platforms like reseller accounts.

    I'd be curious to take a look at a couple of your domains you're seeing issues with if you don't mind (here or in pm). I've been playing with PingDom lately and cleared up a lot of "false positives" that turned out to be DNS issues that were somewhat my fault, as I didn't read some fine print as to how my host had set them up (we all know how that goes eh?)

  25. #25
    Quote Originally Posted by MistahX View Post
    Unfortunately, no matter what host you choose -- unless they have a single server that they spend all day staring at it -- you're going to have users who abuse it. Especially on any type of shared hosting platforms like reseller accounts.

    I'd be curious to take a look at a couple of your domains you're seeing issues with if you don't mind (here or in pm). I've been playing with PingDom lately and cleared up a lot of "false positives" that turned out to be DNS issues that were somewhat my fault, as I didn't read some fine print as to how my host had set them up (we all know how that goes eh?)
    Thanks, but I believe the issue was on HostGator's side. They've said that there were issues with other users on the box, and things have gotten better now. I guess how often this happens and how quickly they handle it will determine how long I stay with HostGator.

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