Afrihost cloud down again, and again, and again, and again.

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ezras

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:mad:Once again my Afrihost cloud server is down since Saturday night :mad: 11th of January 2014. :mad:

-It becomes a monthly thing where my server is either down or the network so slow for at least a day, especially on a weekend.
-Server is down since Saturday night - all 80+ domains. This mean google removed all 80+ domains from indexing until the problem is resolved, no emails for any of my clients.

How do you run a business with no emails, going day 3 now? Then to put a "cherry on the cake", do we run two elearning sites.

Not a problem! My clients cant even contact me because my helpdesk and emails is down..... again!

It starting to get really embarrassing every month when I must send a bulk sms to my clients apologizing for the services that is down. I had issues October, November, December and now in January. (even before october)

I would love to move away from the "Afrihost Managed Package" to a new service provider. Only problem is that its going to take me between one to two weeks moving all the domains and setting up. Would do this if I just had the time.
:mad:

Afrihost - don't bother to contact me. My emails don't work, again, since Saturday night.
 
Same problem here. Been offline and losing money.

Ordered my Digital Ocean servers yesterday. Sick of sitting with unhappy clients.
 
Azure guys... azure. Do some reading up on Azure hosting and how they built their infrastructure, then make the switch. Local hosting for the sake of it is pointless if your uptime is pathetic.

www.windowsazure.com
 
shogun said:
Azure guys... azure. Do some reading up on Azure hosting and how they built their infrastructure, then make the switch. Local hosting for the sake of it is pointless if your uptime is pathetic.

www.windowsazure.com
Click to expand...

We even had downtime with Azure once. I know it can happen anywhere, just saying :)
 
reinhardholl said:
We even had downtime with Azure once. I know it can happen anywhere, just saying :)
Click to expand...

Absolutely. Reading up on how they manage their infrastructure though, it's pretty clear that they do a better job of it than the local guys (especially if you choose globally redundant storage and use multiple instances). And when they have do have downtime, they credit your account automatically... which is a big incentive for them to get it right... 10% if the monthly downtime is 43 minutes or more (99.9%), and 25% if it's more than 7 hours (99%).

Is Afrihost at least crediting you guys for this outage? I'd be asking them for that at least. They need proper incentive to get things right.

Having hosted locally with both Afrihost and WA, with Hetzner Germany (which are also really good, but don't provide cloud hosting) and now Azure, I'm most happy with the flexibility and redundancy provided by Azure.
 
I use Azure and it's fantastic. But one of my clients now needs a local hosting company because their application which is based on MySQL needs decent latency. Any suggestions?

EDIT: Also, if you're a registered Microsoft partner, you get R900/month credit free!
 
I'm in the same boat - 80+ domains down, no email, and piss poor response. I'll give the Afrihost telephonic frontline support credit for
trying to help as best they can, but they're limited to passing stuff along to the 'server admins', who at this point I imagine just as a shadowy cabal who require supplicants sacrifice goats to them before they'll deign to send a message back to front line support.

I've been on hold with them all morning (let alone yesterday), and two hours later I've yet to get any kind of resolution except that they're 'monitoring' the situation. From what I've gathered from frontline support, 'one' of their cloud hosting servers in Bryanston went down, indicating that they're not actually providing a proper cloud hosting service, which to my mind would include some kind of clustering/failover.

Now I'm told that they have reactivated my server, but it still won't be available for me or anyone else to access for another hour because it needs to 'propogate' - no one was able to explain what they meant by that, and it makes no sense to me.

I cannot run a business like this - Afrihost are effectively backing out of any kind of accountability for their failures and this lacklustre reaction severely affects my clients, who I promised a reliable service to on the back of Afrihost's promises to me.
 
shogun said:
Absolutely. Reading up on how they manage their infrastructure though, it's pretty clear that they do a better job of it than the local guys (especially if you choose globally redundant storage and use multiple instances). And when they have do have downtime, they credit your account automatically... which is a big incentive for them to get it right... 10% if the monthly downtime is 43 minutes or more (99.9%), and 25% if it's more than 7 hours (99%).

Is Afrihost at least crediting you guys for this outage? I'd be asking them for that at least. They need proper incentive to get things right.

Having hosted locally with both Afrihost and WA, with Hetzner Germany (which are also really good, but don't provide cloud hosting) and now Azure, I'm most happy with the flexibility and redundancy provided by Azure.
Click to expand...

I agree with your about crediting our accounts. We are paying for a service that is not being delivered. They need to give us some money back for this outage :/
 
An hour later, we're still down, and server admins are still refusing to take calls. I've yet to see such terrible service from a company that promised so much.
 
Apparently the issue was resolved - spoken now to two people on the helpdesk, "there should not be any issues in this regard".

We can login to the cloud server but still no web traffic or emails for hours.

Eventually restarted my server through the clientzone form this side and started received emails for the first time since yesterday morning. Let hope it last this time.
 
joes3029 said:
An hour later, we're still down, and server admins are still refusing to take calls. I've yet to see such terrible service from a company that promised so much.
Click to expand...

Ask for "Oscar" - he is my life line with Afrihost.
 
Charlene did a good job, and phoned back after the call dropped, so definite props for her. Chris has also been good.

On that note though, server still down. Since my own monitoring system shows it going down at 1am yesterday, it's now been 35 hours, give or take half an hour.
 
An hour later, and only after contacting them, do I find that they have found a backup, and can try and restore from that - but that it may take up to 24 hours. For about 80Gb of data, I can only assume they're backing up onto sequential floppies or USB 1 flash drives.

Downtime now: 36 hours
 
An hour later, and only after contacting them, do I find that they have found a backup, and can try and restore from that - but that it may take up to 24 hours. For about 80Gb of data, I can only assume they're backing up onto sequential floppies or USB 1 flash drives.

Downtime now: 36 hours
 
joes3029 said:
An hour later, and only after contacting them, do I find that they have found a backup, and can try and restore from that - but that it may take up to 24 hours. For about 80Gb of data, I can only assume they're backing up onto sequential floppies or USB 1 flash drives.

Downtime now: 36 hours
Click to expand...

Ha Ha - I phoned them two months ago to ask for something from the backup and they told me they dont have it. At least yours is still on floppies... you have one.

Try restarting the cloud server through your clientzone yourself - under my products. Done the job for me, well for an hour at least. Server still very slow with abnormal CPU usage but at least you get emails for a short while after restarting. Mine stopped again and also cannot get hold of anyone senior in Afrihost about this.
 
ezras said:
Ha Ha - I phoned them two months ago to ask for something from the backup and they told me they dont have it. At least yours is still on floppies... you have one.

Try restarting the cloud server through your clientzone yourself - under my products. Done the job for me, well for an hour at least. Server still very slow with abnormal CPU usage but at least you get emails for a short while after restarting. Mine stopped again and also cannot get hold of anyone senior in Afrihost about this.
Click to expand...

I have my own backups running to my office, but those don't include emails, and would take rather more than 24 hours to reupload over a 600k up DSL line, so you're right, there is that at least :)

I did restart the server earlier, to no avail - according to their support it threw a kernel panic on boot, although they assured me no changes had been made on their side which might cause that.
 
Last 15min, 3 phone calls, 3 website cancelled "Cant run a business with emails that is constantly down" - I'm still in the dark and not sure whats happening with my server.

Spoken to "oscar" in the customer service department that is busy finding out now. Said he will phone back.
 
ezras said:
Last 15min, 3 phone calls, 3 website cancelled "Cant run a business with emails that is constantly down" - I'm still in the dark and not sure whats happening with my server.

Spoken to "oscar" in the customer service department that is busy finding out now. Said he will phone back.
Click to expand...

Likewise - 39 Hours downtime, and 3 major lost clients. The server is apparently being restored, but I get no replies to my queries while my business falls apart at the seams.
 
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