Hi,
Jodohost, I feel you’ve let me down a bit today. You turn off aspnet 2.0 on Win2, which is hosting 4 sites for me, and I don’t even get an email to inform me. Then you can’t even give me an estimate of how long its going to be off for!
It makes me feel like I have to set up my own site monitors if I want to know this sort of thing. Obviously some unplanned down time is inevitable, and if I need to avoid such single points of failure, I need to spend a lot more money, but I think people deserve at least an email when you take down commercial sites.
inoodle, There are relatively few ASP.NET 2 sites, I am sorry we had to take them down today, but they were atthe time causing from problems on the server, and taking the server down.
.NET 2.0 has been re-enabled on Win2 innodle. We appologise for having to disrupt it but Win2 was experiencing very major response time fluctuations. For us, our priority was to stabilise Win2 and if we could do so by temporarily deactivating .NET which seemed a possible source, it is well worth it
We are pretty sure we have nailed the issue and we have determined it to be unrelated to .NET 2. I do not forsee any further disruptions in .NET 2.0
But…
I think you should have informed people with an email, and I don’t understand why you didn’t - you inform us if there is planned maintenance, which is usually for a shorter duration. It wouldn’t have been a very difficult step for you to inform those impacted, or even to have sent out a mass mail as you do for planned maintenance.
This is an important issue, how am I to trust that my commercial sites are running ? I know I don’t exactly get swamped with hits, but I have to say at the moment I’m pleased - how embarrassed would I be that my sites had been down for 15 hours!!!
inoodle, we always email our customers when there is a planned server outage or if there is a major multi-hour server outage.
If emergency maintenance is being performed, we normally update the forums directly before proceeding. That is generally what you’ll find most hosts doing. It was not possible for us to email customers only using .NET 2.0, as we have no such mailing list available. If we had that option, we would have done so
Yash, ah, subscribing to threads etc… okay, this sounds useful ! I was unaware of this feature in the forum - although this could be because I don’t seem to be notified by email even though my options say instant notification… do I need to do something else ?
I’ve subscribed to the Network Outages forum, but it only allows me ‘daily email notification’ which isn’t really enough by the sounds of things. If I can get an instant notification for this sort of thing, then that sounds great.
I understand that you’re unable to email a set group of affected customers, which is unfortunate, and I assume you don’t want to update everyone even if they’re unaffected because it could tarnish your reputation if problems are percieved to be occuring all the time.
However look at it from my point of view - my sites (4) were turned off for 5 hours, and then changes made during that period meant when you restarted, my sites wouldn’t come up - so my sites were off for about 16 hours (I had to sleep, then figure out what you’d done). I don’t feel comfortable with this length of outage, but all I’m asking is to be notified via email as soon as possible when this sort of issue occurs. If this can be done via forum notifications then great, but I don’t want to wait around for 12 / 24 hours until the email is generated by the forum.
Aaron, I appologise if you sites were turned off for 5 hours. To my knowledge, the ASP.NET 2.0 pool was disabled for approximately 2 hours. There are very few sites using ASP.NET 2.0 on Win2 compared to the total number of sites hosted. Since .NET 2.0 was still a new rather untested service at JodoHost, and there was some evidence to suggest that .NET was interfering with our configuration causing the slowness, we decided to temporarily disable it, monitor it and update the forum
If you experienced 5 hours of downtime, and you have monitoring reports to support that, please email billing and we’ll credit your account under our SLA. 5 hours by any means is not acceptable. As far as being down for 16 hours, we at JodoHost never have supported full-trust, I am sorry we didn’t clarify this to start with. We have always supported medium-trust, as is with our .NET 1.1 configuration. Some earlier domains were wrongly configured in full-trust and as per our already stated policies, we simply downgraded the trust-level.
As far as why we do not make announcements for every small outage via email, the reason simply is HSphere doesn’t provide us with a mechanism to making specific server announcements. We have problems everyday, considering the number of servers we run and hardware we manage. Surely, if we announced every single unrelated problem, not only will the value of our announcements become diluted, some may wrong interpret them as related to them (happens all the time) and may get worried
Also, I do appologise that there was definately scope for an email announcement in the case of ASP.NET 2.0, considering these sites were pulled down for 2 hours.
But while saying that, most hosts will simply put up a downtime message on their network status website, and customers facing an issue are asked to check that. We do inform proactively , during a major outage. If you look at some of the major outages we have had this year, all have come with email notifications (including the Win2 crash).
When diagnosing ASP.NET 2, our initial intentions were to restore services as quickly as possible. Our initial timeframe was 30 minutes. Hence initially, we felt there was no need to mass-inform customers about an isolated issue we were dealing with, that affected very few websites. Those who were affected could always come to the forum to check out on what’s happening.