Rubénerd :)

I just finished the transition from SegPub to Net Logistics, as you can tell from my terribly sophisticated line-up of icons above!

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As my old man would say… bummaire

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In late April, my webhost SegPub informed me the specific webserver causing problems for my site and the sites of many other people was in the process of being fixed. It’s now almost June and the problems are still persisiting for all of us, if the newsgroups are anything to go by.

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I’m not sure whether these problems are just the typical WordPress fare or because SegPub is playing up again. Either way, I can’t wait to get a new host and start fresh with some nice Django goodness, I’m getting so tired of all these problems :’(.

Finally some good news from Segpub regarding the timeouts and slow response times (3 minutes, 38 seconds for a plain HTML file?!) that have been sporadically plaguing my poor sites for months. From a mailing list email addressed to folks on my server:

The issues with [your server] unfortunately are related to search bots and a mix of other nasty traffic. We’re working really hard to get ontop [sic] of these and are pretty close to having everything resolved and back to normal.

Nasty traffic? That’s not a nice thing to call my Nonsense section! ;).

The problem is, because my sites slowed down to a crawl but still eventually loaded, they don’t count these problems as downtime which means they won’t be providing me any free months as stipulated in their uptime guarantee. Sneaky.

This morning’s intermittent Rubénerd outages were brought to you by Segment Publishing. They’re still miles better than Servage was, though that isn’t saying much.

Curiously, many of the outages over the last year have been around this time of day. I wonder if they do server maintenance around 00:00-02:00 Adelaide time, or whether it’s due to increased loads given it’s daylight in the US.

UPDATE: Іt’s now 10:42 and pages are still taking many long minutes to render. Time to move web hosts again?

Some more of SegPub’s legendary reliability from earlier this evening. I suppose it’d been a whole month since my last outage ;).

Another SegPub outage this afternoon, this time lasting from around 14:32 to 14:52 South Australia time. Fortunately I wasn’t using the domain for any of my afternoon classes like the last outage did.

This time I did a traceroute and checked the status of the site using a foreign server and recorded the results. I’m hoping this isn’t becoming a regular occurrence, but I’m going to be keeping my own records of such events.

Today has not been a very good one for the intertubes. For the second time in the last couple of days Rubenerd.com went offline for an extended period of time, fourth time if you count database connection errors. SegPub guarantees a free month’s hosting if uptime dips below 99.5%.

The timing could not have been worse, some of the blog posts I had written regarding OpenSolaris and Java were supposed to be used in a practical today because I thought I could get some valuable feedback (which I did) instead of just writing it up in OpenOffice or Word. I showed the results of a well known downtime indicator to the teacher, but he was not impressed. Serves me right for trying to think outside the box.

I got a reply from the SegPub discussion mailing list regarding the matter:

I can assure you we haven’t had any outages recorded today. We monitor all our services from 19 redundant locations, if 2 or more report an issue then we consider a service to be down and we’ll react immediately.

I’m not saying it wasn’t down for you, but just in regards to our monitoring, we haven’t had any outages today. To give you a bit of background, this is the first time since February 2009 that we’ve had any kind of issues, its just unfortunate when things happen they tend to happen all at once.

It’d be great to see if we can get some source IP addresses you were connecting from so we can trace the issues at our edge routers so we can trace back and work out if perhaps there’s a network issue along the way.

I can assure you we take downtime VERY seriously, and we strive to maintain our excellent uptime and stability.

I believe them when they say they take downtime seriously, but respectively their claim that there was no downtime today is simply not true.

I could understand if it was just my isolated IP address or ISP having connection problems, but I was able to confirm with people living in Singapore and London that it was offline, and as you can see from the screenshot from the following website they were reporting it down too.

I’ve had nothing but positive experiences to report with SegPub, they run a tight ship. Here’s hoping these last couple of days were just one off occurrences. If it does happen again I’ll be running a dtrace to see where the problem starts.