Power Maintenance - June 21, 2006

This message pertains to the hardware connected downstream from ew62a.01.dllstx2.
The following hardware devices are affected:
gator.hostgator.com
gator3.hostgator.com
gator4.hostgator.com
ferrari.websitewelcome.com
porsche.websitewelcome.com
gator2.hostgator.com
gator5.hostgator.com
gatorasp.websitewelcome.com
escape.websitewelcome.com
lexus.websitewelcome.com

During a recent facility inspection, Facility Engineers have found it necessary to correct a power issue that affects your server. Our facility engineers will need to take your server down to address this problem, and as such a maintenance window has been scheduled for Wednesday, June 21, 2006, from 0000hrs to 0600hrs CDT, during which time this work will be performed.

This maintenance is necessary in order to provide your server with our high availability offerings. The server should only be offline for approximately 20-30 minutes between this time, and not the entire duration.

[amartins]

We were down a bit more than that long from just over 11AM to 5 minutes short of 12.

I really wish u guys would implement some sort of email warning system or an off-site server status and scheduled downtime. It would have saved me a ton of time (and abuse) to be able to warn my customers of what was gonna happen.

[Podge]

Originally Posted by amartins

We were down a bit more than that long from just over 11AM to 5 minutes short of 12.

I really wish u guys would implement some sort of email warning system or an off-site server status and scheduled downtime. It would have saved me a ton of time (and abuse) to be able to warn my customers of what was gonna happen.

Easiest way to keep up with this forum is to simply subscribe to the forum. I've just subscribed to daily e-mail updates to both this and the announcements forum as i too was puzzled why my server wasn't reachable (Gator2).

Easy enough to do to keep yourself in the know.

EDIT: Additionaly you could also use this: http://forums.hostgator.com/showthread.php?t=7644

[dema]

In addition to the fourm RSS, HG is working on a system to report things like this in various formats.

More info here: http://forums.hostgator.com/showthread.php?t=9602

[amartins]

Thank you for the info, I really had not been on the forum regularly for a while, nice to see finally something is being done in terms of a system status service.

I know that probably for marketing reasons HG may not want to let people know things can and do go wrong but I guess we resellers should be educated on how to best to keep informed, even if the only option now is to subscribe the forum, maybe that could be in the info emails sent out to new resellers.

This should probably be in another forum but taking an example in this case: It may well be the datacenter's fault because as far as I could see even HG's forum and main site were down as well. Maybe not enough lead time is/was given before these outages occur to make provision for other solutions. I run a Football (soccer) site and this outage hit me just before lunchtime 3 hours before a world cup game we were involved in... I lost a reasonable amout of google revenue. Had I been aware of this I would have had enough time to move dns over to my backup host without a problem.
Now considering this forum sends out a message once a day even if I had subscribed I doubt I would have had enough time to do this.

Anyway... spilt milk and all that... glad something is being done in terms of keeping us informed even though, in my experience, when the proverbial S---- hits the fan staff will be too busy sorting things out rather than giving us info... although other companies I deal with have their own datacenters HG can only provide us with as much info as their own provider gives them.

Antonio.