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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Jul 2003
    Location
    Phoenix, AZ
    Posts
    30

    Nocster has vanished

    Nocster has had slow service for the last couple of weeks. Last week they had a complete faliure which had all the servers down for hours. The service has been intermitten since then with no detailed ifno comming from the support staff. Answers like
    We're currently working on the problem, I have cannot provide you with an ETA.
    Today the servers went completely down again. I cannot get to their support ticket system or the network status thread on their forum because both are down. They are no longer answering their phones. So this puts me in the position of having nothing to tell my angry customers.

    Also when I signed up for this service back in sept, I signed up for a weekly backup service. Only to discover last week when I actually needed the backup, that it had never been setup. They promptly refunded my money for the backup service, but that does not make up for the value of the lost data!!!

    Does anyone have any info? Are these guys going out of business? What ever happened to redundancy?!!!

  2. #2
    Join Date
    May 2003
    Location
    Scotland
    Posts
    4,549
    Hmm, still down and cant find any info on the cause of the problem, any one called them and can post the downtime reason??

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Feb 2004
    Posts
    162
    Wow, that really sucks guys. Especially that they charge you for a service, and supposedly it's working fine, until you actually need to USE that service. "OOPS, I guess we never set it up. Ok, heres your money back since you caught us!"

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Jul 2003
    Location
    Phoenix, AZ
    Posts
    30
    They are not answering their phones. I've been calling all day. It would be nice to at least have something to tell my customers.

  5. #5
    im switching i think

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Jul 2003
    Location
    Phoenix, AZ
    Posts
    30
    Hey If I got a server at rackshack and then rsync my Nocster server to rackshack, is there a way to setup some kind of redundancy through DNS? So that if nocster is down it will resolve to the rackshack server?

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Jan 2003
    Location
    Canada
    Posts
    5,073
    I doubt that if any DC was having the problems that poor Nocster is having, that they would answer their phones. I'm sure they got everyone trying to pull it all back online as fast as humanly possible.

    Keep your eyes open on the outage forum. The Burst CEO goes there and posts a update usually (always?)

    ~Francisco
    BuyVM - OpenVZ & KVM Based VPS Servers - Chat with us
    - All popular VPN methods supported
    - Affordable offloaded MySQL & DDoS protection
    - 5GB backup space, unmetered private LAN bandwidth & native IPv6 included. All with a strong serving of pony

  8. #8
    Originally posted by talon39
    Hey If I got a server at rackshack and then rsync my Nocster server to rackshack, is there a way to setup some kind of redundancy through DNS? So that if nocster is down it will resolve to the rackshack server?
    Why would you want to do that? For what you would pay for both servers you could go to a high quality, reliable datacenter that really does have some redundancy in their network. Then you wouldn't need to worry about your server being up.

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Jun 2002
    Posts
    234
    Are these guys going out of business?
    I wonder if they will... If things keep going the way they are, sympathy for them simply doesn't matter - people can't afford to stay with them. I ordered (possibly stupidly?) a $50/month server from them about 3 weeks ago and have had packet loss ever since. Luckily I don't need to bring the server into production for another couple weeks so it's certainly not as urgent for me, but if things keep going the way they are I'm ready to switch.

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Jul 2003
    Location
    Phoenix, AZ
    Posts
    30
    Originally posted by Watcher_TVI
    Why would you want to do that? For what you would pay for both servers you could go to a high quality, reliable datacenter that really does have some redundancy in their network. Then you wouldn't need to worry about your server being up.
    Ok lets say I get one of these Nice reliable Datacenters. I think I will still want to do an rsync server if it is possible. I will no longer rely on the Datacenter for my redundancy unless I have to. If I can add my own redundancy through DNS, I would like to know how.

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Oct 2003
    Location
    NY
    Posts
    180
    Thanks nocster for the great downtime!! Lost money and clients.. plus i have my phones ringing off the hook..

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Location
    Brussels
    Posts
    31
    same here , we also have a server at noster we are also losing clients + loads of mony :p.

    BUT we tried to offer our clients a very nice compensation :

    We will rent a new server , (Dual Xeon 2.8) at a new datacentre and their first month will be free .

    Via this way we can let the clients stay at VespaCious.

  13. #13
    Join Date
    Aug 2002
    Location
    Washington, D.C.
    Posts
    502
    Originally posted by talon39
    Ok lets say I get one of these Nice reliable Datacenters. I think I will still want to do an rsync server if it is possible. I will no longer rely on the Datacenter for my redundancy unless I have to. If I can add my own redundancy through DNS, I would like to know how.
    DNS "redundancy" is somewhat of a myth. You can setup entry-level load balancing over 2 servers by having 2 IP numbers assigned to the same A record name, but if one server goes down you'll get "unreachable" errors 50% of the time. You could have a really low TTL and change it manually, but again, you'd have to do it manually. If both servers are on the same netmask you can get past this by having each one look for the appearance of the other, if it doesn't see it, it "nails up" (ifconfigs) the IP of the downed server onto itself until the down server goes back online... I'd suggest a fine quality load balancer though to do a job like this properly. None of these would really help if your whole provider goes down though.
    ServInt
    Providing Managed VPS for over 11 years
    Managed Dedicated Servers for almost 19 years!
    http://www.servint.net

  14. #14
    There site is still not accessible for me

  15. #15
    Join Date
    Jan 2004
    Location
    Brit in Calgary, Canada
    Posts
    71
    Originally posted by talon39
    Ok lets say I get one of these Nice reliable Datacenters. I think I will still want to do an rsync server if it is possible. I will no longer rely on the Datacenter for my redundancy unless I have to. If I can add my own redundancy through DNS, I would like to know how.
    There is a half decent way of providing redundancy through DNS, but it requires good programming skills, and a fairly low TTL for resource records. Consider this scenario:

    1) Idle backup box (also secondary DNS) monitors primary server and waits for it to go down.

    2) Disaster - your primary server is hosted at Nocster and becomes unreachable for a predefined period of time.

    3) Backup server now executes disaster recovery script:

    - Implements it's own set of zone files which point back to itself
    - Sends nameserver SIGHUP (loads new zones)
    - Apache and any other services started (all mirror configuration of primary server)

    4) Script now waits for primary box to come back up, when it will do the reverse of step 3.

  16. #16
    Originally posted by talon39
    Ok lets say I get one of these Nice reliable Datacenters. I think I will still want to do an rsync server if it is possible. I will no longer rely on the Datacenter for my redundancy unless I have to. If I can add my own redundancy through DNS, I would like to know how.
    Running two identical servers can be cost prohibitive, especially if you have dynamic sites. Even if you get the DNS issue worked out so that it functions, do you realize what is involved with mirroring two servers that have dynamic sites? What if the server only goes down for some routes? Then you will have data being posted on one server and not the other. Now you will have to rsync between both of them? That surely won't work very easily.

    My suggestion would be to go to a place like ServInt and get yourself on a reliable network. Then set up a backup scenario and rsync nightly. If an earthquake shows up in Viriginia and swallows ServInt whole you would have a backup you could be up and running with in a few hours. I'd call that a worse case scenario though. In the absence of an earthquake, I think you will be very happy with their network.

    The question you need to ask yourself is really this;
    Is saving a few dollars by going to a budget provider worth all the money you are losing right now?

  17. #17
    Join Date
    Jul 2003
    Location
    Phoenix, AZ
    Posts
    30
    Originally posted by DeltaAnime
    I doubt that if any DC was having the problems that poor Nocster is having, that they would answer their phones. I'm sure they got everyone trying to pull it all back online as fast as humanly possible.

    Keep your eyes open on the outage forum. The Burst CEO goes there and posts a update usually (always?)

    ~Francisco
    What "outage forum"? If you are referring to a forum on Nocster's site, that would be impossible. Nocster site is down.....I think the whole Datacenter is down.

  18. #18
    Join Date
    Jun 2003
    Location
    New York, NY
    Posts
    248
    I have looked into the fail over DNS and would have to say that with dynamic sites, it is not feasible to maintain two boxes in sync. I would have to batch copy from production to backup twice a day to move customer information over and that would eat up so much bandwidth, that I would be better off with a hardened box with multiple lines to it.

  19. #19
    Join Date
    Jan 2003
    Location
    Canada
    Posts
    5,073
    Goto the WHT front page, scroll to the bottom, It's the last forum on the page. There is a subforum that has the word 'outage' in it.

    ~Francisco
    BuyVM - OpenVZ & KVM Based VPS Servers - Chat with us
    - All popular VPN methods supported
    - Affordable offloaded MySQL & DDoS protection
    - 5GB backup space, unmetered private LAN bandwidth & native IPv6 included. All with a strong serving of pony

  20. #20
    Join Date
    Jul 2003
    Location
    Phoenix, AZ
    Posts
    30
    Originally posted by Watcher_TVI

    My suggestion would be to go to a place like ServInt and get yourself on a reliable network. Then set up a backup scenario and rsync nightly. If an earthquake shows up in Viriginia and swallows ServInt whole you would have a backup you could be up and running with in a few hours. I'd call that a worse case scenario though. In the absence of an earthquake, I think you will be very happy with their network.
    Unfortunately we do not have a server locally to rsync too. So if we do an rsync backup it will have to be to another dedicated server at a different DC. I figure if we have to have that expense anyway, it would be great if we could get some kind of redundancy. It's starting to sound like it's not possible, unless I have physical access to the DC network.

  21. #21
    Originally posted by talon39
    Unfortunately we do not have a server locally to rsync too. So if we do an rsync backup it will have to be to another dedicated server at a different DC. I figure if we have to have that expense anyway, it would be great if we could get some kind of redundancy. It's starting to sound like it's not possible, unless I have physical access to the DC network.
    Then why not just spend the money to get yourself into a better DC to begin with, then start with a RAID and tape backup?

  22. #22
    any updates?

  23. #23
    Join Date
    Jan 2004
    Location
    Brit in Calgary, Canada
    Posts
    71
    I think every host should at least have a minimal contingency plan, even if it is not as far as mirroring identical servers. As you say sheer amount of data may prohibit this, and it might not be cost effective.

    The majority of Nocster customers have sites that are completely unreachable (browser 'cannot find server' messages and such like) - their customers would probably be happy if their host's main website redirected to a network status page hosted off-site, and provided them with information... imagine if Burst had this setup - it might have resulted in less complaints.

    Just my 0.2c.

  24. #24
    Join Date
    May 2002
    Location
    Cupertino, CA
    Posts
    12
    Just got this from my provider:

    There has been a problem with a Commonwealth Telephone Entreprises transit fibre optic to the data center in Scranton, PA.

  25. #25
    Join Date
    Nov 2002
    Location
    Hot, hot Michigan...
    Posts
    3,506
    Guys, all this is being covered in:
    http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showth...hreadid=242805

    Lets post down there regarding todays outage so that everyone gets informed with the same information. If you're looking for a new provider, the by all means use this forum to find suggestions and whatnot - but status updates are best found down there as it can come direct from the company.

    -David
    Ion Web Services/TronicTech
    http://www.ion-web.com or Unsupported webhosting?!?
    Shared hosting, Reseller accounts, Dedicated Servers, and More
    Proudly hosting since 2002

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