Judge Slaps Fasthosts for Damages for all-round uselessness
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/02/fasthosts_ukmm_court_case/
A county court judge has awarded a disgruntled Fasthosts customer almost £1,500 in damages and costs, after the Gloucester firm failed to meet its uptime and customer service guarantees.
Hampshire consultancy UK Mobile Media was prompted to take Fasthosts to Southampton small claims court yesterday by a four month period that saw its dedicated servers suffer 22 per cent downtime. It was paying about £15,000 annually for its dedicated infrastructure, used to offer clients services such as mobile email.
The claimant's managing director Matthew Rahman told the judge that Fasthosts had repeatedly ignored support requests.
Fasthosts did not appear in court to defend itself, but submitted a document that said: "We feel that we have made reasonable efforts to ensure prompt resolution of the problems reported." The judge felt differently, however, and awarded UK Mobile Media £1,212.68 damages and £220 in fees and loss of earnings. Fasthosts has until 15 September to pay.
Rahman told El Reg today that the worst problems occurred between October 2006 and January 2007 when a repeated hard disk failure caused periods of up to 72 hours offline for some of UK Mobile Media's clients. "It was something you would ordinarily expect to take 15 minutes to replace... we lost significant custom through it," he said.
"We made a big mistake [in using Fasthosts] and we've learned a big lesson. I certainly would never recommend anyone relying on them for anything important to their business." Rahman said other businesses hit by poor reliability and support should consider action against Fasthosts.
Fasthosts declined to comment.
The hosting firm was founded by schoolboy entrepreneur Andrew Michael in 1999. He sold out to fellow budget operator 1&1 Internet for £61.5m in 2006. Fasthosts has since made repeated security, technical and customer service gaffes but boasts it is "still the no.1 for UK hosted websites".
UK Mobile Media switched to another hosting provider in December 2007.
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Is it your Host that's Slow, or your site!
I've been playing with a fun little tool (its free), that I thought would be attractive to many people with a webpage. We are all quick to point the finger at the web host when our site not being up to snuff may be the culprit.
Many of us add plugins and widgets to our sites without considering the resultant implications to site load speed... which we all recognize as being vital in this day and age of instant gratifications.
FireBug lets you explore the far corners of the DOM by keyboard or mouse. All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including a debugger, error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors. A must for every person concerned about optimizing their site's performance!
Firebug was written by Joe Hewitt, one of the original Firefox creators.
The Firebug plugin YSlow is a web development tool and analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. It offers
Performance report card
HTTP/HTML summary
List of components in the page
Tools including JSLint
http://www.joehewitt.com/software/firebug/
http://getfirebug.com/
Some Fun Features
Logging for web pages
Web developers have suffered with "alert debugging" for centuries. If you enjoy clicking the "Ok" button 40,000 times a day, FireBug is not for you. Otherwise, you'll enjoy having the ability to log messages from JavaScript in your web page directly to the FireBug console.
JavaScript Debugging
Want to stop your JavaScript and step through it line by line? No need to fire up a big fat debugger. FireBug includes a simple lightweight way to set breakpoints in your scripts and examine every step of execution.
Errors at your fingertips
Nobody likes to see errors in their web pages, but with FireBug you won't mind as much. FireBug adds a little icon to the Firefox status bar which tells you if your page is busted. Open up the FireBug panel and you're looking at the errors that occurred in that page, and only that page. No more digging through the muddy pile of errors in the JavaScript Console window.
Inspectors galore
Elements and styles and events, oh my. There's a lot going on behind the curtain of a web page. FireBug's inspectors let you stroll lazily through the DOM using the familiar hyperlink model of the web. If you see an object reference, you can click it to inspect it.
Command line
If you enjoy "alert debugging" then you probably also enjoy typing "javascript: " urls in the location bar all day. If not, then you'll enjoy using FireBug's JavaScript command line instead.
Ajax Request Spy
If you feel hip every time you fire off an XMLHttpRequest on your Ajax website, FireBug will secure your place amongst the avante garde. The FireBug console can log all Ajax request traffic as it happens, and allows you to inspect the responses.
Live Editing
It's no fun just looking at the DOM. FireBug's inspectors let you edit some parts of the DOM. More editing features to come in a future version...
Cloud Storage FlexiScale Drops the Ball
Cloud Storage FlexiScale Drops the Ball ... well loses the ball would be more acurate.
Cloud storage service FlexiScale has been offline for several days while it attempts to fully restore customer data from backup.
The initial problems for FlexiScale began when one of the main storage volumes was accidentally deleted by an employee during a system upgrade earlier this week. FlexiScale then encountered problems while trying to restore the data from backup, as explained by CEO Tony Lucas in a email:
Dear Customer,
I felt it important to send you all an e-mail explaining the current problems our FlexiScale service is having, what we are doing about it & when we expect it to be resolved.
As some of you are aware, we have been having issues with I/O (disk speed) in recent weeks. We identified short term and long term measures to eliminate these problems. The short team measures involved reorganising how data was stored across our storage network in a more efficient manner, and the long term measure was to increase the overall I/O capacity of the platform.
As a preparatory step to adding additional capacity one of our engineers was reorganising the data structure on the storage network and whilst cleaning up the snapshots we use as our backup process accidentally deleted one of the main storage volumes. This caused an immediate outage to a large amount of our customers
We immediately took action to take the entire disk structure offline (which caused the remaining customers to be taken offline) as it was the only way to preserve the integrity of the data on the system. Work then commenced with our storage vendor to restore this data.
Although we have now successfully gained read-only access to everyones data, a bug in the storage platforms operating system has prevented us from providing read-write access to it. This was discovered at 11pm last night, just when we thought we were about to bring the entire disk structure back online.
After consulting with our storage vendor it was agreed the most sensible option would be to copy the entire volume to a new disk structure (still maintaining it's integrity and structure), from where we could re-mount it correctly. Unfortunately due to it's size we didn't have spare capacity on the platform to create a complete duplicate of it.
An investigation of other ways of restoring the data then was undertaken but all options were considered too risky, and although downtime is a major problem for everyone, we felt the integrity of the data was the most important factor.
The decision was then taken to get additional capacity in from the storage vendor as soon as possible so that we could then increase the capacity to a sufficient level to allow us to copy the volume and successfully restore it. We originally thought we would be able to get this today, but unfortunately it will not arrive until mid-morning tommorow, although we have done (and will continue to do) everything we can to speed this up.
At this time we are assisting customers who need access to specific files to get this, and we will continue this as long as we can into the night as resources allow.
Tomorrow morning once the storage arrives and is online, we will copy the data across and then begin to restart the entire platform as quickly as possible, but as the system wasn't designed to restart everything at once, this will take time.
We will be offering credits against our SLA, which will be determined once everyone is back up and running, as I'm sure you can appreciate all resources are being focused on that at this moment.
I, and all my staff are well aware of the potential impact this will be causing to you our customers, and we are doing everything we can to help in that respect. We will also be undertaking an investigation to ensure additional safeguards are put in place to prevent this happening again.
Sincerely,
Tony Lucas
Chief Executive Officer
XCalibre/FlexiScale
Hostingplex acquired by Millenium Data
Millennium Data Systems announced it has acquired the assets of Toronto based managed hosting provider Hostingplex (www.hostingplex.com).
Hostingplex is the third acquisition of Millennium this year.
”We believe that Hostingplex is a great fit for the organization and look forward to serving their 5,000 small medium business customers”, Matthew Saunders, COO of Millennium Data Systems stated.
“Its been a very busy summer for us with acquisitions”, noted Tony Di Benedetto CEO of Millennium Data Systems. “In total we have added 12,000 business customers to our Network, expanded our data center capabilities and introduced many new managed services and offerings to our customers”, added Di Benedetto. “Our focus remains to fortify and build upon our managed services platform aggressively by acquiring accretive and highly synergistic managed service providers”.
Management expects Hostingplex assets to be fully integrated by September 2008, with no disruptions to Hostingplex’s 5000 clients.
We reported on the botched transfer of clients after the acquisition of Hostvector by Millennium Data Systems, that resulted in days of downtime.
Millenium Data Systems acquisition of Hostvector
Millennium Data Systems Acquires VistaPages Inc.
About HostingPlex
Since 2000, HostingPlex has been providing mission critical web hosting solutions to businesses, both in the public and private sectors of today's marketplace. HostingPlex is a service of Inverdigm, which is a privately-owned, IT-related services company located in the City of Toronto.
Find other sites on a server by entering a domain address
Ever wonder how many other domains are sharing you server real estate. Bet you do every time your site is taking just a little to long to load. Well now there is a cool little tool thatmay just help you know. While there is no guarentee that you'll get the complete list, it will certainly give you an idea of the number of domains shared on a server.
A reverse IP domain check takes a domain name or IP address pointing to a web server and searches for other sites known to be hosted on that same web server. Data is gathered from search engine results, Knowing the other web sites hosted on a web server is important from both an SEO and web filtering perspective, particularly for those on shared web hosting plans.
http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/
Background
All web sites are hosted on web servers, which are computers running specialized software that distribute web content as requested. Each web server typically has a single IP address, a unique numeric identifier assigned to no other computer on the entire Internet. Web sites are usually associated with domain names, textual strings like "google.com" that are easier for users to remember than numeric IP addresses. Since HTTP version 1.1, many domains can be hosted on a single IP address.
As of 2003, more than 87% of all active domains names were found to share their IP addresses (i.e. their web servers) with one or more additional domains. More than two thirds of these domains share their server with fifty or more additional domains. Simply put, most web sites are hosted on servers that host many other web sites.
While IP sharing is typically transparent to ordinary users, it may cause complications for both search engine optimization and web site filtering.
Concerning SEO (search engine optimization)
Almost all popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) increase a web site's rank based on the number of links pointing towards the web site. In an attempt to falsely inflate a web site's popularity, an individual may generate hundreds or even thousands of dummy web sites containing little to no content except for links pointing towards a specific domain name. One method that search engines use to detect this type of miscreant behavior is to see if these inter-linking web sites are hosted on the same IP address or IP address range. If the web sites are in the same IP address range, it is highly likely that they are operated by the same individual. Search engines devalue links from web sites pointing to other web sites hosted on the same IP address range.
Conversely, search engines value links from web sites hosted on different IP addresses. An effective search engine optimizer would go further than hosting inter-linking web sites on different IP addresses. They would host the web sites on completely different class C network addresses. They would make sure that all of their domains were registered with different registrars under different names. They would not use the same template on more than one web site. They would erase all traces that their sites are operated by the same individual. They would go through all of this trouble with one goal in mind - to game the search engines in order to bring in more organic traffic.
For most web sites, having a dedicated unique IP address will have little to no effect on search engine rankings. Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Webspam team, stated:
"If you are an average webmaster and just running a few sites, I wouldn't worry about them being on the same IP address and I definitely wouldn't worry about them being on the same server. That's something that everybody does."
Concerning web site filtering
With so many sites sharing IP addresses, IP-based filtering efforts are bound to produce "overblocking", which is the accidental denial of access to web sites that abide by the stated filtering rules. Overblocking occurs when a single website containing some form of adult or explicit content is blocked by its IP address. If this happens, all other sites hosted on that IP address, regardless of their content, will be blocked as well. Unfortunately, research has indicated that it is not atypical for a single web server to host a mixture of sites that are sexually explicit and sites that are not.
Overblocking is a problem known to affect filtering in China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and other countries that employ government-mandated country-wide web filtering policies. Additionally, research has indicated that IP address filtering is used by many commercial web filters installed in libraries and schools in the United States. Sometimes Internet services providers are legally required to implement IP address level filtering. For example, under 2002 law, the Attorney General of Pennsylvania ordered Internet service providers in Pennsylvania to disable access to sites found to offer child pornography. Most providers receiving such orders reportedly use router-level filtering to disable access to the affected IP addresses, even though those IP addresses host scores of additional web sites without child pornography.
Solution
To avoid any of the potential problems related with IP address sharing, it is best to acquire a unique IP address for your web site. Contact your web host and tell them you would like your own unique IP address. Be sure to let them know you would like a fresh IP address, not a recycled one. Web hosts will often reuse IP addresses that spammers have previously blacklisted. You may need to speak with several individuals until you can find a technician who can understand your request. Acquiring a unique IP address for your web site can cost anywhere from $25 to $100 for an initial setup fee, and $2 to $25 per month thereafter.