It’s been a frustrating few days – this morning I got up ready to get back into some serious blogging only to find that my blog’s were no longer online. The problem was with EV1Servers who seem to have come under some sort of data center attack today which caused my server to be out of action for 6 or more hours putting me even further behind after a weekend of being offline.
I guess these things happen from time to time and we just have to roll with the punches. Apologies for those who’ve been frustrated with this blog in the past few hours – hopefully things will be sorted now.
I’m certainly glad you are feeling better and that the rumours were false.
During your site being down I was reflecting on your advice on having a proper domain name. I was thinking “this could be a perfect example..”
So do we get any comments about sex and chocolate cake?
Glad to hear you’re doing better Darren and not actually in the hospital.
I was wondering if you noticed this (or if someone somewhere else did as well) but Feedburner subscription stats have been really low the last few days… wonder if it’s because an estimated 6M people are without power in Florida? Your usual stat of around 1200 is now around 900 and I’ve experienced similar %-age drops.
could be Jim – although it’s probably to do with me not posting the past few days also.
Switch to the best dedicated server host ever, http://www.servermatrix.com. I’ve been using them for a while now.
I am glad you are better. While you were gone I read this on idleyap.com and I guess they are going to write more about this.
Adsense as most of may know is a pay per click system that allows bloggers like myself to earn a bit of money. Going through some websites I came across a scam that involved not only one person, but many perhaps into the hundreds of thousands. What these people would do is make a blog and over the course of several months they would click on the Adsense and other links on that persons blog. Imagine having the word Home Equity which I last heard was paying just over $10 per click according to Overture. Wow 100,000 people clicking those links throughout the course of six or more months.
Darren if I was you I wouldn’t be hosting any of my high revenue generataing sites/blogs at discount hosting/server companies like ev1. I view server costs like retail shop rentals in the offline world, you pay the extra money for the better position at a good shopping centre and online you pay the extra money for high quality servers and support. Just that if you are earning $15,000 a month via advertising then the 6 hours of downtime today has just cost you $125 in lost revenue which most likely could have been avoided through hosting with a better provider.
No worries, just keep those great posts coming and the feedburner stats will bounce back in no time! :)
Darn, but to someone who periodically checks your site throughout the day, it seemed that problogger.net was down for Forever.
Having nothing better to blog about, my last couple of posts were related to your outages (and prior to the outage, B5Media’s outage which affected ProBlogger). Is B5Media with the same hoster?
Also as I mention, you should be sure to renew your domain – it comes up due soon.
I would also recommend hosting your blogs on a dedicated server by reliable hosting provider. For a couple hundred dollars per month you can sleep better and 6 hours like yesterday will be history.
Long time reader, first time commenter. Thanks for all of the useful information!
We adhere to the trite but true “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” philosophy when it comes to hosting our web applications and services in part to avoid the full consequences of such outages. However, two of our hosting companies were affected by the recent Los Angeles power outtages, so that didn’t help. Monitoring tools can be useful, but most reputable hosting companies monitor themselves and don’t need customers to torture them with phone calls and emails. It’s very frustrating when sites are unavailable, but you are right that we just have to roll with the punches.
I use EV1Servers’ dedicated servers and from personal experience their network is one of the best. Ofcourse.. they don’t have managed servers so you’ll either need a network admin or you will have to be proficient with servers your self. I’m sure Darren is already on one of their dedicated servers.
Denial of Service attacks can effect anyone no matter what company a person goes to. Due to the nature of the current network protocols stopping a denial of service attack is no easy task because spoofing IPs is easy and there is no easy way of filtering the good traffic vs. the bad traffic.
There are, ofcourse, software that can effectively guess which IPs are bad but even those usually end up blocking out good traffic as well as the bad.
Yeah, I noticed it was out a few times yesterday also. I guess when it rains, it pours…
Good luck getting back into the swing of things.
Great to see you back, Darren.
Yep, couldn’t get access to your site for hours – looked like ProB had vanished – I know the feeling of having your site down for that long (frustrating, isn’t it?), you just can’t do anthing about it excpet scream at the monitor.
Hmmm, I use EV1servers and have never had a downtime as long as 6 hours… I guess I lucked out this time.
Anyway, welcome back from the abyss! (At least that’s where a couple of people made it sound like you were.)
I did notice that pb was down when I tried to access it last night. I’ve had some frustrating server down times – my personal site was offlined for over 12 hours last week which was totally unacceptable – it incapacitated my email and two blogs. Fortunately I don’t earn enough for it to notice, but it can cause lost credibility if it happens a lot.
Net problems hit the best of sites from time to time, but investing in the best host you can afford is one of the best defences.
Fortunately at PB you have a loyal following that mostly will tolerate downtime and keep clicking until you’re back – harder to get passing search engine traffic back.
Yup DoS and DDoS can take any network/IDC down. I have used EV1Servers in past they are dam good and very good prices. Last time I checked ev1server they said they have something to fight against DoS attack… if your own box comes under attack then they have alert service in control panel and they you can block those IP at iptables.
Btw glade to see you back.
Downtime issues happen to the best of them – Webmasterworld was down over 24 hours recently.
I like the way ev1servers handled the approach of the hurricane last month, they had extra techs bunkered in at ev1 hq in Houston, and a wad of cash to purchase oil for the generator incase the power supply in Houston went out.
Still it’s good to have a backup site stored on another host, if problems persist you can just change the nameservers.
Laptopical I can see what your saying with:
“Still it’s good to have a backup site stored on another host, if problems persist you can just change the nameservers”
Just realise it can take a couple of days for the change to finish progogating to all the ISP’s around the world and by the time that’s done the problem with the original web host could be fixed anyway (depending on the problem of course). By “propogating” I mean the process of updating the information in the database of IP addresses that every ISP has for each web site address. This is why people say that when changing web hosts it’s good practice to wait a couple of days after changing your nameserver details to point to the new web host before cancelling the account at your old web host. Otherwise your site could disappear for up to a couple of days, while the propogation is taking place.
Also with the extra cost of having a seperate web host with a backup copy of your site probably means it would not be a worthwhile exercise in most cases.
Hmmm… When I couldn’t access your site, I just assumed that you had died. Glad you didn’t, though.
I’ve had a dedicated EV1 server for about 3 years and the only downtime I’ve had was not because of a network downtime, but because I either was attacked (which has been rare) or other things that qualify as “my fault.”
I agree though, it is extremely frustrating. A couple days ago my server was hacked and down for awhile. It is nerve racking, annoying and scary.
You pay for what you get. If your primary income is generated from your online activity then paying more for your hosting is like paying a higher rent for “footfall”