Comments(0) We printed their own beer labels with the Dharma Initiative logo on them, just like the rations on LOST. There’s a PDF so you can print your own. Clearly, we have too much time on our hands.
Comments(3) My Poundhost server was in-accessible for most of yesterday again. The main cause of the outage for PoundHost, was due to their fibre provider, TeliaSonera, *disconnecting* the wrong fibre when testing another customer’s link, due to them mis-labeling the fibre in their London datacentre suite (Telehouse East).
This affected many of my own and my customers web sites. Although this was not Poundhost’s fault per se, they have been having many of these sort of problems recently. They seem not to be able to cope too well when something unexpected happens. They supposedly have redundancy in place for these sorts of occurrences but they often don’t seem to work as planned. And the worst thing is that their system status and announcement mailing lists seem to be hosted in the same place, so when their network goes down they have no way of keeping us updated. Their phone lines also go down as they are all VOIP.
The good news is that once I got email access back I had a very (very) quick response from them (at 9.30pm):
We are rolling-out some significant changes over the next few weeks and months, namely a new client Portal and support system, which will eventually be hosted off-site.
This will also include a status mini-site, as our current one has been unavailable for some time, as you pointed out.
Thank you for your time listing these concerns - I have noted them and will be sure to bring them up when discussing future service improvements.
They also mentioned the issue with their phone lines in a follow up email:
Some customers have mentioned that contacting us via phone was difficult, this is due to our phone system being VoIP (voice over IP) based, so the bad connection meant we had troubles hearing customers, and in some cases no phones at all. I have this morning ordered 4 BT lines to replace the VoIP system to be installed within the next 14 days direct into our support office using the existing numbers, to avoid this happening in the future.
It’s great to hear they are aware of the problems and have plans in place to sort them out, so I wont be switching just yet. They may not have the best infrastructure yet, but they certainly are trying their best to give a good service. If they could just keep us more informed when something goes wrong I’d be much more happy.
During the outage one of the most annoying things was not having access to my main email account. A good friend (who also has a Poundhost server and didn’t lose his email access) said to me - ‘It’s best not to have all of your internet eggs in one basket’. He’s right, of course, so last night I set myself up a Dreamhost account and moved over my personal domain. This web site is now hosted in LA :).
So far Dreamhost seem very good. I’ve heard lots of good reports about them, and so far they seem to be true, at least for developer hosting anyway. My account is on a Debian shared server that looks like it is hardly being used. Of course they oversell, but apparently you don’t get penalized for using everything they are offering. For less than £50 for 2 years, here’s what I get:
Plus loads more. They even throw in a free domain registration!
To get this deal go to the Dreamhost web site and when you sign up enter the following code ‘ADREAM’. This will give you up to $94 discount.
I’m not sure exactly what I am going to use it for yet. At the very least I’ll use some of the disk space for backups. I’ll let you know how it goes.
