Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Managed Hosting and Services : A bad day at Rackspace

[brunnock]

This morning one of our hard drives stopped responding. The error messages indicated a hardware problem to me, but the technician who responded insisted that it was just a corrupt journal and an fsck would do the trick. It did. For 4 hours. Then the filesystem couldn't be fixed so a new hard drive was installed. It took several hours to restore the data. Then I had to repeatedly explain to a technician that it didn't make sense that they backed up 5 GBs of data on Sunday but could only restore 3.3 GB today. They managed to restore most of the data, but we're still missing files.

So our main server was out of commission for 13 hours today. As far as I know Rackspace is still the best, but if I'm mistaken I'd sure like to find out.

[ntfu2]

Softlayer.com will show you the light

[submenu]

What kind of backup was it? A control panel backup, rsync, dd or something else?

Hard drive failures happen. Ultimately unless you have a raid setup, you just have to live with it.

[brunnock]

Rackspace uses EMC Legato.

I don't think you understand- they backed up 5 GBs of data and then restored 3.3 GBs. Those two numbers shouldn't be different. I already had to explain that once today.

[HL-Justin]

Stick with rackspace, I continue to think they are the best. Softlayer.com == good too, have a few friends with them. I wouldn't switch for a million bucks, but thats just me.

[[inx]Olly]

Give their response times, you would seem to do a lot worse...

[Laws]

To the people suggesting softlayer, remember they are unmanaged, they would have replaced the drive and stopped at that. They are not there to backup/restore files.

[WindowsMaster]

Stuff happens at ALL providers. Keep in mind that probably 100 percent of the extra cost you pay at RackSpace is devoted to two things. Competant people and advertising that BIG NAME

[reiteration]

Personally thats not good enough.

"I don't blame people for their mistakes, but I do expect them to pay for them"

Compensation HAS to be paid.

[music]

It would be nice if everyone paid for their mistakes, but thats not they way alot of the world works.

RackSpace is a Great company, hope it all works out.

[HostTitan]

Depending upon the config and the terms of your contract, upgrading to a server with raid may be in your interest.

You might also want to think about buying a cheap server somewhere else as a failover; outsource your DNS to a competent company (there are a number of good companies that do this for a $10-$15 a month with a strong track record) and they can handle the immediate failover.

[sprintserve]

For 4-5GB of data, 13 hours is a bit long. I would expect less than 5 hours as reasonable from start to end. That is from experience, how long it would take to replace a drive, reinstall OS, reconfigure, and restore backups. If there's much more data (example 10-20times what you have), about 8 hours.

[NameSniper]

Exactly for 4-5 GB 13 hours is too long
When my hdd has failed my hosting company has restored it within 3 hours (10 GB backup)

[brunnock]

I should point out that it didn't take Rackspace 13 hours to replace a drive. I notified them of the second failure at 12:30pm and it was restored at 7:30pm. They had to restore it twice because they botched it the first time.

[reiteration]

So they've failed the "fanatical" support and you'll be compensated ?