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  1. #1
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    Aug 2008
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    Thumbs down Avoid GigeNetCloud At All Cost - So called "Maintenance"

    I just wanted to warn everyone about the GigeNetCloud. The first month was great with them, no downtime or anything. But as our relationship with them progressed we were starting to get about 30 minutes or more per month of downtime.

    Here is a summary of the downtime.

    June 2nd - 30 Minutes
    June 16th - 2 Hours
    June 26th - Approx 2 Hours and 5 Minutes
    July 28th - 1 Hour 3 Minutes
    August - 50 Minutes
    September 7 - 8th 14+ Hours

    If you're looking for Cloud Solutions, I would high recommend looking elsewhere such as the RackSpaceCloud. Even though the overall VPS there isn't as powerful you won't get downtime like you do with GigeNet.

    GigeNet hasn't updated our ticket for about 6 hours now. In this case it is an outage, all previous downtime was "maintenance"

    http://www.pingdom.com/reports/br4a1...xigy+Corporate

  2. #2
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    Dec 2007
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    Did they give you any reasons for the maintenance/outages out of curiosity? I've used the Softlayer cloud servers with positive experiences in the past but I've never tried RSC (I thought it to be too expensive).
    Michael Denney - MDDHosting.com - Proudly hosting more than 37,700 websites since 2007.
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  3. #3
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    The only solid cloud experience I have, is with LW.

    Did they give you any reasons for the maintenance/outages out of curiosity?
    I would like to hear the same!
    Mellowhost - Providing High Quality Web Hosting Services since 2007
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  4. #4
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    Aug 2008
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    Mike,

    No. A majority of the so called maintenances were to "improve and help with redundancy" a majority 90% were unannounced.

  5. #5
    Don't ues cloud. All I hear is downtime from anyone that uses any sort of so called cloud product.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Mar 2005
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    Chicago
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    GCM,

    When you had come in to livechat I was trying to get you to msg me on AIM and/or call me to explain the problem. This is what I sent out to all our customers:

    Today we experienced a problem effecting part of our Cloud services. The problem was due to a hardware failure on one of the SANs. The failover to the secondary SAN did not function as expected and we are currently working with the vendor to ensure that this does not happen again. Luckily we are redundant on all levels so restoration is a relatively easy task. However, due to the fact the drive mappings were lost we have to go through and manually fix the machines 1 by 1 from the pool of servers effected. There is no way to determine the order in which the VMs will be restored because of the drive mappings. All of our support staff and programming department are working to get all the machines properly restored in a timely fashion. An estimation for recovery will be anywhere from now and 1 hour from now.

    In the immediate future (now) we will have the mappings backed up so if this event happens again the failover should only take a few minutes. We are also working with the vendor to ensure that the failover functions correctly with no downtime at all for all future failovers.

    We appologize for the unfortunate turn of events that has caused this downtime and would gladly offer compensation to any and all customers effected by it. Please email us back with any questions and/or concerns you might have about these events.
    Chris Armer - Cloud Communications LLC
    GigeNETCLOUD.com GigeNET.com
    Phone: 1-800-561-2656 x 8106
    Email: chris.armer@gigenet.com

  7. #7
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    Dec 2007
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    Quote Originally Posted by XFactorServers View Post
    Don't ues cloud. All I hear is downtime from anyone that uses any sort of so called cloud product.
    That's like saying "Don't use hosting because anybody who has used any sort of called hosting product had reported downtime"... Well yeah - downtime is going to happen.

    Go with a reliable company, don't spend more than you can stand to lose, keep your own off-provider backups, and be ready to move to a new provider if things go south.

    Quote Originally Posted by GCM View Post
    Mike,

    No. A majority of the so called maintenances were to "improve and help with redundancy" a majority 90% were unannounced.
    Very interesting.
    Michael Denney - MDDHosting.com - Proudly hosting more than 37,700 websites since 2007.
    Ultra-Fast Cloud Shared and Pay-By-Use Reseller Hosting Powered by LiteSpeed!
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  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by chrisarmer View Post
    GCM,

    When you had come in to livechat I was trying to get you to msg me on AIM and/or call me to explain the problem. This is what I sent out to all our customers:

    Today we experienced a problem effecting part of our Cloud services. The problem was due to a hardware failure on one of the SANs. The failover to the secondary SAN did not function as expected and we are currently working with the vendor to ensure that this does not happen again. Luckily we are redundant on all levels so restoration is a relatively easy task. However, due to the fact the drive mappings were lost we have to go through and manually fix the machines 1 by 1 from the pool of servers effected. There is no way to determine the order in which the VMs will be restored because of the drive mappings. All of our support staff and programming department are working to get all the machines properly restored in a timely fashion. An estimation for recovery will be anywhere from now and 1 hour from now.

    In the immediate future (now) we will have the mappings backed up so if this event happens again the failover should only take a few minutes. We are also working with the vendor to ensure that the failover functions correctly with no downtime at all for all future failovers.

    We appologize for the unfortunate turn of events that has caused this downtime and would gladly offer compensation to any and all customers effected by it. Please email us back with any questions and/or concerns you might have about these events.
    Ouch, I feel sorry for you - that's a lot of very complicated and time consuming work. Best of luck.
    Michael Denney - MDDHosting.com - Proudly hosting more than 37,700 websites since 2007.
    Ultra-Fast Cloud Shared and Pay-By-Use Reseller Hosting Powered by LiteSpeed!
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  9. #9
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    This just reaffirms that stuff happens, to even the most reliable of providers. The best to the OP and GigeNetCLOUD.com getting this resolved quickly.
    ProlimeHost - Dedicated Server Hosting & KVM SSD VPS
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  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by GCM View Post
    Mike,

    No. A majority of the so called maintenances were to "improve and help with redundancy" a majority 90% were unannounced.
    Unannounced unavailability is not "maintenance" in my book.
    edgedirector.com
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  11. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by MikeDVB View Post
    That's like saying "Don't use hosting because anybody who has used any sort of called hosting product had reported downtime"... Well yeah - downtime is going to happen.

    Go with a reliable company, don't spend more than you can stand to lose, keep your own off-provider backups, and be ready to move to a new provider if things go south.



    Very interesting.
    Get a grip dude, actually read my post rather then replying just to grow your ego with your post count.

  12. #12
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    Aug 2008
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    Quote Originally Posted by plumsauce View Post
    Unannounced unavailability is not "maintenance" in my book.
    I agree. But when we've confronted them about it that's what they've called it when they needed to do some tweaks to improve "availability".

  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by plumsauce View Post
    Unannounced unavailability is not "maintenance" in my book.
    It is also not in ours either, we have worked hard to properly communicate what we are doing with the cloud and have given ample notice for all procedures that were expected.

    There have been some procedures in the past that had gone south causing some unexpected "maintenances", but those were in the very beginning and we have not had an occurrence like that since.

    What happened yesterday was unexpected and completely related to failing equipment. All of which we have replaced and repaired in as timely of manner as possible.

    Our apologies for the time incurred during this event.

    Thanks

  14. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by XFactorServers View Post
    Get a grip dude, actually read my post rather then replying just to grow your ego with your post count.
    Your post, in its entirety, characterised a class of hosting as being unreliable based on anecdotal evidence heard by you. In other words, it is an opinion, informed or not.

    Mike simply countered that it is not necessarily fair to do so, and that it was analagous to painting all classes of hosting as being unreliable.

    On the other hand, his advice was good and does apply to all classes of hosting.
    edgedirector.com
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  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by Winstyn View Post
    It is also not in ours either, we have worked hard to properly communicate what we are doing with the cloud and have given ample notice for all procedures that were expected.

    There have been some procedures in the past that had gone south causing some unexpected "maintenances", but those were in the very beginning and we have not had an occurrence like that since.

    What happened yesterday was unexpected and completely related to failing equipment. All of which we have replaced and repaired in as timely of manner as possible.

    Our apologies for the time incurred during this event.

    Thanks

    Perhaps then, the terminology employed when communicating with your customers is what is setting off the alarm bells. If it's a "whoops" and you call it a "whoops" then maybe the discussion would simply be limited to the problem instead of also debating the merits of calling it "maintenance".
    edgedirector.com
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  16. #16
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    That's alot of downtime, I would stay away.
    Respectfully,
    Mr. Terrence

  17. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by Winstyn View Post
    There have been some procedures in the past that had gone south causing some unexpected "maintenances", but those were in the very beginning and we have not had an occurrence like that since.

    What happened yesterday was unexpected and completely related to failing equipment. All of which we have replaced and repaired in as timely of manner as possible.

    Our apologies for the time incurred during this event.

    Thanks
    Not to be rude or anything, but if you refer to the "very beginning" that would be June/July. Those two months had the worst uptime but did not surpass what happen yesterday/day. I would say GigeNetCloud's is still in its beta stages til now, it has been the least reliable compared to all the 5 I've tried (TerreMark, RackSpaceCloud, StormOnDemand, Linode, and GoGrid)

    Anyhow, I've solved that issue with Chris.

  18. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by GCM View Post
    Not to be rude or anything, but if you refer to the "very beginning" that would be June/July. Those two months had the worst uptime but did not surpass what happen yesterday/day. I would say GigeNetCloud's is still in its beta stages til now, it has been the least reliable compared to all the 5 I've tried (TerreMark, RackSpaceCloud, StormOnDemand, Linode, and GoGrid)

    Anyhow, I've solved that issue with Chris.
    I don't think they can call it "cloud" shouldn't cloud be redundant?
    Respectfully,
    Mr. Terrence

  19. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by XFactorServers View Post
    Don't ues cloud. All I hear is downtime from anyone that uses any sort of so called cloud product.
    Sorry, this is useless "advice". You must be spending 100% of your time on a "Cloud Downtime" forum since that's all you've been hearing.
    InterNich LLC
    Founder

    Bringing you PicResize.com (More than 95 million pictures resized since 2005)

  20. #20
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    Quote Originally Posted by GCM View Post
    Not to be rude or anything, but if you refer to the "very beginning" that would be June/July. Those two months had the worst uptime but did not surpass what happen yesterday/day. I would say GigeNetCloud's is still in its beta stages til now, it has been the least reliable compared to all the 5 I've tried (TerreMark, RackSpaceCloud, StormOnDemand, Linode, and GoGrid)

    Anyhow, I've solved that issue with Chris.
    Its not rude, just feels like it is a reflection of our work and its not the kind of reflection we want.

    I have taken a couple excerpts here out of a forum post on our forums which I think apply to this topic.

    Secondly, communication, there is a different between planned maintenances which we do our best to send out emails 24 - 48 hours before time, depending on the severity of the issue, and like what has happened yesterday it was an outage and we wanted to at first make sure everyone knew that there was something going on. The word "maintenance" was improperly used as this was an outage from a failure, but that is something we could not avoid.
    Fourth, stability, this is a topic that I believe needs some clarification to better understand from a clients point of view. The "cloud" architecture is designed to eliminate relying on a single piece of hardware to function. This is true, but at the same time there are now more pieces of hardware that can fail and a majority of these hardware pieces are critical to the functionality of a single VM. In the case of yesterday had we not had redundant SANs we would have lost a good majority of the machines hosted on that SAN, instead we were able to completely recover everyone within a 24 hour period. Finally keep in mind that a good portion of a dedicated servers resources are not used, disk, memory, cpu, etc. Even on the busiest machines certain resources are rarely used. Clouds, on the other hand, have such a large variety of clients doing such a wide variety of services the hardware is pushed to its absolute max in every aspect.
    Fifth, performance, we are constantly looking for ways to improve performance. I am not sure what would cause "wake up" times for your VMs, but keep in mind that you are sharing the CPU's with other machines which may lead to your machines having to wait their place in line to get clock cycles. Of course adding vCPUs and vCPU priority helps, there can still be a shortage of clock cycles to run on. Also, there is no way to design the hardware setup for a specific purpose, instead, it has to be designed for general purpose use which can hurt certain setups such as database servers. We are working to create some solutions to fill in the gaps for certain niche services.
    I am glad everything is solved and we will continue to do our best to improve overall system stability. Please also keep in mind that this whole thing did not affect everyone. On top of that many that it did effect was from us trying to protect their data in case the failure became more catastrophic. I am sorry you ended being one of the ones affected by the failure. All we can do from this point forward is come up with new systems that will in our hope be more stable in the time to come.

    Thanks

  21. #21
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    Dec 2003
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    I'm beginning to think that Gigenetcloud is still in a BETA stages. There are some things they just don't seem to have sorted out.

    I have been fairly happy with the service for the most part. However there have been some major issues. The first was with an ip block I was assigned on a VM. I set the VM up, moved the customers sites to the VM's and everything ran fine for a little over a day. Then the server disappeared. It took 3 days to sort out the ip issues and get the server back up, it also gobbled bandwidth during this period, I was compensated for the issues and although I was a little unimpressed with the response time, I stayed.

    Luckily this latest outage did not effect me, but WTF? I thought the advantage of the cloud was redundancy, where is the redundancy??? The BS email about maintenance was VERY disappointing as well. Some honesty should have been applied to the issue right away.

    That said, I will prolly stick it out and see if they get their issues sorted out, their tech support is top notch, fast and friendly and the servers I have run great when these issues don't crop up.

  22. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by plumsauce View Post
    Your post, in its entirety, characterised a class of hosting as being unreliable based on anecdotal evidence heard by you. In other words, it is an opinion, informed or not.

    Mike simply countered that it is not necessarily fair to do so, and that it was analagous to painting all classes of hosting as being unreliable.

    On the other hand, his advice was good and does apply to all classes of hosting.
    That's correct - it wasn't a personal attack on XFactorServers but instead in the logic (or lack there-of) of their opinion/statement. Some people take things so personally when there really is no reason to do so.
    Michael Denney - MDDHosting.com - Proudly hosting more than 37,700 websites since 2007.
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  23. #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by phinsup View Post
    I'm beginning to think that Gigenetcloud is still in a BETA stages. There are some things they just don't seem to have sorted out.

    I have been fairly happy with the service for the most part. However there have been some major issues. The first was with an ip block I was assigned on a VM. I set the VM up, moved the customers sites to the VM's and everything ran fine for a little over a day. Then the server disappeared. It took 3 days to sort out the ip issues and get the server back up, it also gobbled bandwidth during this period, I was compensated for the issues and although I was a little unimpressed with the response time, I stayed.

    Luckily this latest outage did not effect me, but WTF? I thought the advantage of the cloud was redundancy, where is the redundancy??? The BS email about maintenance was VERY disappointing as well. Some honesty should have been applied to the issue right away.

    That said, I will prolly stick it out and see if they get their issues sorted out, their tech support is top notch, fast and friendly and the servers I have run great when these issues don't crop up.
    We in no way think that the system is in a beta stage. We are working to rebuild portions of the cloud that are on the older setups which we have found betters ways to handle. The SAN that failed yesterday will be completely replaced within a short time. There are definitely ways to prevent what occurred yesterday and we are working to get new methods implemented to the protect the system.

  24. #24
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    May 2005
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    Toronto / New York
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    *

    I'm a GigeNet Cloud customer, just wanted to add my 2 cents here as well.

    This is the first notification I got after my server was down for a few minutes (started getting website monitoring alerts already):

    "We are performing maintenance on one of our SANs to improve speed, and will be pausing affected VMs briefly while we switch back to primary storage."

    Coming from an ITIL background (corporate NOC), there is a big difference between "maintenance.. to improve speed" and an "outage". If the former, it should have been done during a scheduled change window.

    At this point it's pretty obvious the GigeNet team was trying to pass this off as maintenance, while in reality it is a serious outage, and it should have been communicated as such from the start. Maintenance does not and should not happen "off the cuff" or it should be called "emergency" maintenance and the reason for it should be crystal clear (ie. not simply "to improve speed").

  25. #25
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    Quote Originally Posted by rezilient View Post
    I'm a GigeNet Cloud customer, just wanted to add my 2 cents here as well.

    This is the first notification I got after my server was down for a few minutes (started getting website monitoring alerts already):

    "We are performing maintenance on one of our SANs to improve speed, and will be pausing affected VMs briefly while we switch back to primary storage."

    Coming from an ITIL background (corporate NOC), there is a big difference between "maintenance.. to improve speed" and an "outage". If the former, it should have been done during a scheduled change window.

    At this point it's pretty obvious the GigeNet team was trying to pass this off as maintenance, while in reality it is a serious outage, and it should have been communicated as such from the start. Maintenance does not and should not happen "off the cuff" or it should be called "emergency" maintenance and the reason for it should be crystal clear (ie. not simply "to improve speed").
    It has been stated a few times that the comments made in that first notification were not correctly worded and should have been communicated differently. This is a mistake we will not make again.

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