Sorry for the long 8 hour downtime today. The host was extremely slow to respond to this issue, as it occurred on a Sunday afternoon. Anyway, we’re back online and no harm was done.
Geeky explanation: There was a kernel panic and subsequent failure to boot due to a suspended LVM volume on the host system.
That being said, this is the last straw. I’ll be migrating BLF to a new host during the next few days. Sorry for the hassle. I really did carefully research our current host before switching a few months ago. And I was convinced that the initial month of constant downtime was due to some misconfiguration on my part. But now I’m realizing that a large number of the initial failures were due to glitches and ineptitude on the host’s end, not my configuration. It’s painfully obvious that the host has serious technical and human resource issues, and most of the excellent reviews were apparently empty hype by people that never used the service for a relatively intensive and high-traffic site like BLF. So, I will be switching hosts again, this time to the second option that I didn’t choose during my initial research. I think you’ll enjoy it once I finish.
Meanwhile, thanks to everyone for your patience and understanding.
Glad it’s back up SB, at least now you can retrieve the data.
I do understand that the more problems from the host the more harder your job becomes. So I don’t blame you for moving.
Wish you luck in getting the new host setup.
Thanks SB, really appreciate the hard work. Glad to be back. Was left wandering in perpetual darkness that my MT-G2 could not penetrate. But 2 MT-G2’s and 3 5A XM-L2’s sure caused a ruckus!
Most hosts are poor at best. I have tried many of the "top hosts" over the years and every one of them ended up being poor at best and terrible at worst. Slow load times, downtime, issues unresolved, etc.
Good luck finding a better one and thanks to you for being our admin, still, after all these years.
BLF has been on three different hosts so far. The first was good enough until we “got big” and had heavier load. It was also quite restrictive in terms of what I could install and configure, and their support started going downhill. The second host was a lot more flexible, and quite fast. But then they installed a new system to prevent unfair resource usage, and it turns out we had been using more than our fair share according to their setup. So I dropped them and migrated to our current host. There are some good people in this company with a lot of innovative ideas and it offers some really nice perks, but it’s just been glutted with problems, both technical and human.
The next host I’m currently working on configuring and migrating to has been around for a long time and has a very loyal user base. It really does seem to be a quality provider. I’ve played around with it a bit in the past, but now I’m going to switch to it.
Sorry to hear about your difficulties with the host. These down time events are part of life in an ever changing and increasingly complex technology-based world. Thank you for all you do to keep this forum running so smoothly.
Im sorry that you have to go through another painful migration so soon. Please dont forget to put yourself first this time around. We all know you’ll have us back up and running in a day or two. Thanks for trying so hard for us.
But 2 MT-G2’s and 3 5A XM-L2’s sure caused a ruckus! 