Hosted with UKFast ?
Hosted with UKFast ?
Author
Discussion

DSLiverpool

Original Poster:

16,532 posts

232 months

Tuesday 12th December 2017
quotequote all
Cable cut = thousands of sites down, quite amazing they had no contingency but it seems not. We have 3 clients with them on Wordpress and Magento and in one case it will cost them over 5 figures in lost sales.

WinstonWolf

72,863 posts

269 months

Tuesday 12th December 2017
quotequote all
  • Some* of their stuff seems to be up still, I've got a customer who hosts a VM there and it's still alive.
Thanks for the heads up thumbup

akirk

5,778 posts

144 months

Tuesday 12th December 2017
quotequote all
does it not depend on where the cable might be? it is difficult to provide full resilience on a standard server setup - you would need to have multi-locations with fall-over setup, can be very expensive - there will always be a cable / bit of hardware somewhere which can fail, to do otherwise is very expensive...

however if it was their main connection it would seem poor not to have resilience there... leads to an interesting question of liability (presumably contractual) as to whether there could be an expectation of resilience / whether the end user should build resilience in other ways / what up-time / down-time is accepted... not a good time of year to see down-time

dmsims

7,461 posts

297 months

Tuesday 12th December 2017
quotequote all
DSLiverpool said:
Cable cut = thousands of sites down, quite amazing they had no contingency but it seems not. We have 3 clients with them on Wordpress and Magento and in one case it will cost them over 5 figures in lost sales.
Surely a quick restore to another host and point DNS at that ?

CzechItOut

2,156 posts

221 months

Tuesday 12th December 2017
quotequote all
akirk said:
does it not depend on where the cable might be? it is difficult to provide full resilience on a standard server setup - you would need to have multi-locations with fall-over setup, can be very expensive - there will always be a cable / bit of hardware somewhere which can fail, to do otherwise is very expensive...

however if it was their main connection it would seem poor not to have resilience there... leads to an interesting question of liability (presumably contractual) as to whether there could be an expectation of resilience / whether the end user should build resilience in other ways / what up-time / down-time is accepted... not a good time of year to see down-time
Sounds like power, followed by generator failure.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/12/pickaxe_c...

Isn't it the responsibility of the end-user to ensure they have a resilient site?

jammy-git

29,778 posts

242 months

Tuesday 12th December 2017
quotequote all
Yup, I have a client with them. Only down for about an hour luckily.

But yes, very, very surprised that there wasn't better failover support or that it didn't work.

And no, as an end user you can't just go walking into a company like UK Fast and demand to see a test of their failover support.

I had suggested to my client that we host DNS elsewhere and have a backup server running on a cheapy DO server, but we thought we'd be fine with just the one server with UKF given their great reputation.

akirk

5,778 posts

144 months

Tuesday 12th December 2017
quotequote all
jammy-git said:
And no, as an end user you can't just go walking into a company like UK Fast and demand to see a test of their failover support.
The hosting company I use for my servers (for my clients) are great - and had no issue spending time with me showing me around their site - resilience in duplicated buildings / duplicated power / back up generators (huge!) / duplicated pipes to the internet / etc. - but that is probably because I am a long standing customer and send them big boxes of chocolates at Christmas!

Of course, there will always be a weakness - for most of my clients, they would only pay for hosting on one server without contingency there, so there can still be failure...

and if down for an hour that is 1/8760 of the year - that is 99.99% up-time - that is still considered pretty good wink

Mortgage_tom

1,548 posts

256 months

Wednesday 13th December 2017
quotequote all
akirk said:
The hosting company I use for my servers (for my clients) are great - and had no issue spending time with me showing me around their site - resilience in duplicated buildings / duplicated power / back up generators (huge!) / duplicated pipes to the internet / etc. - but that is probably because I am a long standing customer and send them big boxes of chocolates at Christmas!

Of course, there will always be a weakness - for most of my clients, they would only pay for hosting on one server without contingency there, so there can still be failure...

and if down for an hour that is 1/8760 of the year - that is 99.99% up-time - that is still considered pretty good wink
Who do you use?

JamieBeeston

9,294 posts

295 months

Wednesday 13th December 2017
quotequote all
Mortgage_tom said:
akirk said:
The hosting company I use for my servers (for my clients) are great - and had no issue spending time with me showing me around their site - resilience in duplicated buildings / duplicated power / back up generators (huge!) / duplicated pipes to the internet / etc. - but that is probably because I am a long standing customer and send them big boxes of chocolates at Christmas!

Of course, there will always be a weakness - for most of my clients, they would only pay for hosting on one server without contingency there, so there can still be failure...

and if down for an hour that is 1/8760 of the year - that is 99.99% up-time - that is still considered pretty good wink
Who do you use?
M247 I'd say, who recently sold out to MetroNet and rebranded back to M247

akirk

5,778 posts

144 months

Wednesday 13th December 2017
quotequote all
JamieBeeston said:
Mortgage_tom said:
akirk said:
The hosting company I use for my servers (for my clients) are great - and had no issue spending time with me showing me around their site - resilience in duplicated buildings / duplicated power / back up generators (huge!) / duplicated pipes to the internet / etc. - but that is probably because I am a long standing customer and send them big boxes of chocolates at Christmas!

Of course, there will always be a weakness - for most of my clients, they would only pay for hosting on one server without contingency there, so there can still be failure...

and if down for an hour that is 1/8760 of the year - that is 99.99% up-time - that is still considered pretty good wink
Who do you use?
M247 I'd say, who recently sold out to MetroNet and rebranded back to M247
Correct - although I think they rebranded from M247 to M24Seven biggrin

There will always be issues with any hosting company - but we have a good relationship with them - we used to use a company called WebTapestry back in the ancient times when they were the only company offering multiple domains on one hosting account - they were eventually bought out by M247... Are they perfect - nope, but they are pretty good, and as well as the normal ticketing systems I can phone them up and speak to tech. staff who we know - and when something needs doing, they get on and do it... We self-manage our servers from a software perspective, they manage them from the hardware perspective and they also manage some bespoke firewalls and VPN systems we have with clients...

JimmyConwayNW

3,653 posts

155 months

Thursday 14th December 2017
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Our car sales website was down for hours as a result of this.

Shocking that there was nothing in place for back up.

jammy-git

29,778 posts

242 months

Thursday 14th December 2017
quotequote all
JimmyConwayNW said:
Shocking that there was nothing in place for back up.
There was, but the backup generators failed to take over. There was no back up for the back up though.

Cyberprog

2,326 posts

213 months

Friday 15th December 2017
quotequote all
If a company is losing 5 figures, then they need to invest in a suitable diverse HA architecture using different datacentres and hosting providers. Sure, it's got a cost attached, but you gotta spend money to make money!