Afrihost Continuous Downtime

House

House

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Okay, first off, I have to admit that I am totally, totally against South African hosting. The past 9 years I only hosted and made use of dedicated servers in the US, sending almost R2m in hosting fees abroad.

For the first time in 9 years we decided to test out local hosting again to see if anything changed in a decade. We decided to make use of Afrihost and took one of their top packages just to test out waters.

In less than a month we had about 20+ downtime incidents. The website is down even as I am typing this. In this month we probably had a 70% uptime record.

What is wrong with Afrihost servers or DNS? Why so much downtime? I have 23 dedicated servers abroad, some of which still had a 100% uptime record for 8 years!
 
I moved all my overseas hosting to MWeb Business. Now....... let me state for the record that I know I will get a huge bashing from everyone for even mentioning M-Web, but I also don't like their ADSL and everything else, but when it comes to M-Web business hosting, you will be surprised...

I have 10 dedicated servers with M-Web Business Datacenter in Victory Park. It is truly a blazingly fast datacenter and the support staff is top notch. You will be surprised when you go there that all the top guys running that datacenter will give you their cell numbers and you can call them on a Sunday or whenever you have issues and they help immediately.

All their hosting is completely uncapped and unshaped and I've done terrabytes per month without a single moan or letter or throttling from them.

Last year, through the entire year, I had 50 minutes of downtime in one incident, when some construction company damaged a few of their cables. That's it.

This year, from January until now, I've had 2 downtime incidents, both lasting 10 minutes each, and during that downtime, they SMS'd me about 6 times telling me exactly what was wrong and what they are doing to fix it.

They rent out servers too, if you don't want to purchase your own. And what I do like about them, is that you can go through to their Datacenter 24 hours a day if anything is wrong with them and go sort it out yourself.

Once or twice I've needed a server rebooted this year, and they attended to my reboot request in 5 - 10 minutes.

So I really can't complain and our customers comment on this and tell us all the time how impressed they are.

Also, some really big sites, like all the Media24 sites (News24, Property24, Sport24, etc) are hosted in that datacenter, as well as Multichoice, Sony etc.

Now I'm gonna run, cause the M-Web haters are coming for me!
 
I run servers at Victory Park too.... the servers have never dropped, but the network has.... countless times. That's the one thing that's really annoyed me.... they go offline and don't think that they inform you [on time at least].
 
I moved to Afrihost about 6 months ago, I have had two incidents yesterday and today morning. They must sort out their issues, I must say the environment has been good to me, but it only takes a few issue to make clients to loose trust in the services we provide. They are about to cost us business....
 
House said:
Okay, first off, I have to admit that I am totally, totally against South African hosting. The past 9 years I only hosted and made use of dedicated servers in the US, sending almost R2m in hosting fees abroad.

For the first time in 9 years we decided to test out local hosting again to see if anything changed in a decade. We decided to make use of Afrihost and took one of their top packages just to test out waters.

In less than a month we had about 20+ downtime incidents. The website is down even as I am typing this. In this month we probably had a 70% uptime record.

What is wrong with Afrihost servers or DNS? Why so much downtime? I have 23 dedicated servers abroad, some of which still had a 100% uptime record for 8 years!
Click to expand...

Simple buy your own server and rent rackspace from a ISP ... if you spend that much money you might as well do it properly. I rent servers from the premium mweb datacenter at about R4000 you get a quad core xeon with 32gb memory and 4tb space. I have over 99.% uptime on all my servers, the 1% is due to my maintenance.

I am not sure what Afrihost does or if you have physical access to the servers, at Mweb the entire server is my responsibility the only thing mweb is responsible for is hardware replacement and the network.
 
GoofySmurf said:
Simple buy your own server and rent rackspace from a ISP ... if you spend that much money you might as well do it properly. I rent servers from the premium mweb datacenter at about R4000 you get a quad core xeon with 32gb memory and 4tb space. I have over 99.% uptime on all my servers, the 1% is due to my maintenance.

I am not sure what Afrihost does or if you have physical access to the servers, at Mweb the entire server is my responsibility the only thing mweb is responsible for is hardware replacement and the network.
Click to expand...

I do do it properly abroad, mainly due to their infrastructure that is almost perfect.

I just did a test on one my my sites to see how the SA hosting scene has improved since the last time I used them 10 years ago. And, also to consider taking up a few dedicated servers here.

However, as I was 10 years ago when I moved everything abroad, I am now even more pessimistic over SA's infrastructure. I do not think our country allows for big websites to be hosted here without any problems, even if on Dedicated servers.

I am not saying it is Afrihost's fault alone, it may be continuous DNS issues, which will even cause dedicated servers to go down.
 
House said:
Okay, first off, I have to admit that I am totally, totally against South African hosting. The past 9 years I only hosted and made use of dedicated servers in the US, sending almost R2m in hosting fees abroad.

For the first time in 9 years we decided to test out local hosting again to see if anything changed in a decade. We decided to make use of Afrihost and took one of their top packages just to test out waters.

In less than a month we had about 20+ downtime incidents. The website is down even as I am typing this. In this month we probably had a 70% uptime record.

What is wrong with Afrihost servers or DNS? Why so much downtime? I have 23 dedicated servers abroad, some of which still had a 100% uptime record for 8 years!
Click to expand...

House,

Sorry to hear that you having such bad luck with local providers. I don't believe all local providers are like this and I know for a fact that we certainly aren't. So in an effort the try improve your outlook on local hosting providers, I am willing to give you 2 months free hosting on our infrastructure and hopefully we can change your opinion regarding local providers. If you want to take up this offer, please PM your details and I will get the ball rolling from this side.

-Dave
 
OP, how can you judge the whole SA hosting industry by trying just ONE ISP??? And the cheapest and most consumer one available at that.

Try Hetzner and RSAWEB at least to properly guage market.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9780 using Tapatalk
 
Telasera said:
Yes, anything less than 99.9% is worth reconsidering.
Click to expand...

Something like this?


100% Website Uptime Guarantee
The 100% website uptime guarantee is applicable only if the web server on which a client's shared web hosting account resides crashes or goes down at an unscheduled time. This guarantee is not valid if there is any network problem between the client and the web server which prevents the client from seeing the web server, e.g. if the client's ISP's link to the respective data centre goes down or is faulty, but the web server Afrihost hosts is still up, we are not responsible for the client not being able to reach their website.

Afrihost is not responsible if any third party operated network or service experiences problems and outages (i.e. all network infrastructure and links, client 's internet connection, firewall service managed by external parties). If the applicable web server is up and running at all times then the website will deemed to have achieved 100% uptime.

The 100% website uptime guarantee does not apply to any scheduled downtime for maintenance of any of the Afrihost web servers. If there is scheduled maintenance to be done the client will be notified at least 24 hours in advance. The scheduled maintenance will always be done after hours (based on Central African Time (CAT)) and the web server downtime will be kept to a minimum.

Third party monitoring service reports may not be used for justification due to a variety of factors including the monitor's network capacity/transit availability. The uptime of the server is defined as the reported uptime from the operating system and the Apache Web Server which may differ from the uptime reported by other individual services.
Click to expand...
 
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