ArleyM.com

Good Hosting / Bad Hosting

September 19th, 2008 | Comment | RecentWork

In my experience there is no such thing as perfect hosting. No matter who the provider there can be problems. GoDaddy boasts 99.9% uptime (which technically isn’t perfect), but a quick Googling of “GoDaddy sucks” will reveal many an uphappy customers’ tale of woe.

While service is almost guaranteed to have an issue from time to time, it’s the service that should be looked at. I recently noticed that this site arleym.com was having intermittent downtime, usually lasting only a couple minutes. A quick live-chat with Brinkster revealed that they sometimes experience surges of traffic to another site on my server. This is no good, but I deeply appreciated the honesty. The woman then told me that they could transfer my site to another server for free, but that it would mean several hours of downtime and that I’d have to change some of my database connections. They started work immediately and here we are. This is an example of what I call Good Hosting (if you’re interested there’s a link to Brinkster in the footer of this site. I actually get a referral credit if you buy from that). I have dealt with Brinkster for over five years now and I find this to be the kind of service they usually give.

A client of mine has hosting from a company which shall remain unnamed (but are hearby called ABC (if that’s a real hosting company it’s only a coincidence)). This client has had frequent inexplicable outtages on sites and emails on the two dedicated servers they host with. While I have already stated that service outages can be expected, these are way too frequent. Still; let’s look at the service record. This is the editted version of a real ticket that started on July 2nd, 2008. I have cut out content that is needless to convey my point about bad service:

Ticket 730510 – First entry
Request on 7/2/2008 3:54:40 PM

Hello, (I started by giving our history with this host so they could understand how screwed-around we’ve been)

Early this morning I connect by FTP to find that the directory structure is totally different:
- My client-accessable FTP directories are gone.
- 99% of my domains in htdocs are gone.
- I cannot access my Virtual Host information in SMT.
- I cannot access my databases.
- What’s more, the existing directories have a time stamp of today. What happened here? When I did a follow up call I was told that your admins were restoring a back up. I was told this as though you’re doing me a favour. In the meantime people are losing money.

abcserver1 hosts 50 – 80 sites for our clients. Over the course of the last three months alone we have had to explain to clients about half a dozen times why their site / email is down. We sound as much like a broken record to them as you do to us. As our reliablitiy (the royal “our”, yours affects ours) diminishes our clients will move on.

I HAVE QUESTIONS:
- How have you addressed hardware issues in the past? Are these just recurring problems of the same nature?
- What happened to cause our sites to go down without notice?
- When will it be back up?

Arley McBlain

I followed this ticket up with a call. I was on hold for about 10 minutes before I left my number to be called back in the order of the cue that I was in. I was never called back.

Reply Sent on : 7/3/2008 10:31:00 AM

Thank you for your patience. This will be resolved shortly in ticket 730510.

Tiffany

Second Entry
Request on :7/3/2008 8:56:35 AM

Our abcserver server sites are down again, no FTP connections etc. My boss informs me that things have to change today.

Call me; let’s talk. In the mean time I am checking out GoDaddy & MediaTemple. I don’t want to change, but I will if I have to. I have to find a resolution for this now.

Let’s figure this out.

Reply Sent on : 7/3/2008 8:58:26 AM

Thank you for your patience. This will be resolved shortly in ticket 730510.

Tiffany

Third Entry
Request on :7/3/2008 7:54:09 AM

Hello,
I see this morning that our server abcserver.com is restored and that all seems to be as it was meant to be. We are greatful, thank you for fixing it.

However, no one has called me back (as I requested thrice), and the questions I asked in my ticket remained unanswered. For this reason I don*t see how this ticket can be called *closed*. I still need to promise my clients permanent resolution.

I received a notice that this ticket escalated to a Tier 2 manager. I would like to get the names of some of these managers that I could talk to. Names and phone numbers would be great.

For your conveinience I am restating my questions / request again here: I then restate the “I have questions – the chase” part from the First entry.

In summary I really really want my sites on another server one way or the other. The agency I work for has been around for over 20 years, and websites are becoming a bigger part of that business every day. In the next 20 years and beyond we need a reliable hosting solution.

Please help us to make this right for our clients.

Reply Sent on : 7/3/2008 9:49:01 AM

Per our conversation your server is resolving correctly. If you experience any issues please contact abc and reference to this ticket.

Sharonda

Fourth Entry
Request on :7/3/2008 10:07:04 AM

I followed this ticket up with a phone call to ABC. I told the woman on the phone that
a) No one is reading the ticket and they’re not addressing my concerns. She makes a note that my specific questions need to be answered
b) I ask to be called by a manager or someone who technically knows what is wrong.

No one ever calls.

Thanks restoring the failed server yet again.

But again I must REITERATE that this DOES NOT warrant closing this ticket. The purpose of this ticket is to answer SPECIFIC QUESTIONS and ADDRESS A SPECIFIC REQUEST

PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE POST – DO NOT CLOSE THIS TICKET UNTIL ABSOLUTELY ALL OF THE FOLLOWING HAVE BEEN ADDRESSED. This will be my sixth time requesting this information / requesting a call on this matter.

I*m frankly getting pissed-off here.

LET*S TRY THIS ONE MORE TIME:

For your conveinience I am restating my questions / request again (AGAIN) here: I then restate the “I have questions – the chase” part from the First entry.

RESTORING the data again will not warrant closing this ticket. Addressing one or two points will not warrant closing this ticket.

If the person reading this ticket does not have the authority to answer the questions / requests specifically, I will also accept you giving me the name and phone number of someone who can.

I ABSOLUTLEY MUST HAVE A PLAN TO MOVE FORWARD ON A NEW SERVER TODAY!!! I would like that to be moving from the abcserver.com to the abcserver2.ca server, but failing that I will have no choice but to find another hosting provider.

Please help me.

Reply Sent on : 7/3/2008 11:33:53 AM

Hello and thank you for hosting with ABC. The server is still active and has not died this morning. The most recent back up that we have is from Jun 19 and the fee for the back up is 100.00. This information was an update from the shift manager.

Adam

Fifth Entry
Request on :7/3/2008 11:05:38 AM

When the server went down again I had to start a different ticket…

It’s really hard to defend a service that refuses to work more than an hour at a time without failing.

The server is down again. I noticed again that this is just our abcserver1 server, the abcserver2 server is still up, and so is your site.

Speaking of your site; did you know it says all of this: I then pasted the “Core Values” off of their sites which describe how they are a superior company for not giving their users the hassles I was going through.

Where I want to go: I want someone to call me back and answer the questions and requests I posed three times in tickets.

So help me out here, I’m really trying to keep our business with you.

Reply Sent on : 7/3/2008 12:33:05 PM

We currently have a ticket pending for a contact from a manager. Please update that ticket if you have any further questions. The ticket number is 730510. We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for being a valued ABC Customer!

Adam

Sixth Friggin Entry
Request on :7/3/2008 11:58:32 AM

Holy crap, are you serious?! That*s the answer I*m getting?!

READ THIS: DON*T CLOSE THIS TICKET UNTIL ADDRESS MY CONCERNS!

That doesn*t tell me what caused the site to go down yesterday.
That doesn*t tell me why the site is down now.
That doesn*t tell me anything about porting sites over from abcserver.com to abcserver2.ca.

That didn*t tell me anything that I wanted to know. In previous posts on this ticket I specifically say that I am not a techy guy and you respond with a vague generic response and ftp client speak? Give me a break.

It*s also hilarious that you responded to this at a time when I can*t even access the email. HA.

Who can I speak to that is above the shift manager? Can they please read the whole ticket – as in ALL of the words – before he or she calls me? That would be great. Maybe that would prevent meaningless responses and wrongful ticket closures.

OR

If this is just a game to you, and we*re going to keep screwing around in this time-wasting fashion, close the ticket again with another blanket statement that says nothing. We can host elsewhere and make it plain to everyone that we aren*t “valued ABC Customers” anymore.

Reply Sent on : 7/5/2008 2:41:36 AM

Hello and thank you for hosting with ABC:

We apologize for the inconvenience. Our Administrators have resolved the issue and services are now restored.

Ali

Seventh Entry
Request on :7/4/2008 10:32:30 PM

Since ABC was likely closed on July 4th, I didn’t get a reply. I sent this along.

arg.

The server is down again. Do you keep count of how often each server fails? What’s the score? I want you to know that the frequency of our outages is simply unacceptable. It has been a very long week with many server failures and angry clients.

I have a client asking me “Does this mean I’m f***’d for the weekend too????????” He relies on his sites functionality to interact with his customers. The busy time is the weekend. Please fix this.

I have an open ticket requests moving sites like this and the associated email addresses and databases from the obviously flawed abcserver.com to the surprisingly stable abcserver2.ca.

This doesn’t seem like too tall of a request, I don’t know why I’m not getting anywhere with these questions. I know it’s your fourth of July today (happy holiday and all), but this ticket has been open for three days.

Reply 7/4/2008 11:49:16 PM

Hello,

Thank you for hosting with ABC. Your services have been restored and your Server is functioning properly. I am able to ping and navigate through your site.
PING RESULTS: (followed by more useless information)

Sam

Eighth Entry
Request on :7/7/2008 9:39:10 AM

You guys are losers.

What’s the matter with your disfunctional organization? I can’t think of any way I can more explicitly or simply ask you to read my tickets and address the specific questions and request that I have.

My problem:
1) You don’t read the ticket
2) You don’t call back

Your problem:
Most people aren’t ignorant on purpose. Are these true:
- You are in an oppressive work environment that prevents you from being thorough in your work. Must you crank out resolutions in a generic and fast way?

- Too many people handle the same account. I think I would be better served by one person who could know the situation.

I won’t ask my questions again, you have the old tickets.

SUMMARY
I wish I could say that was the end of it, but the ticket continued for a few more days. Today months later we still have sites on that server, though they are now in the “process” of doing my requested transfer. It has been over three months, and apparently we are waiting for a part to come in. What took Brinkster three hours for me is going to take over three months for my client. It’s a shame, but my client has no choice.

If you’re curious who the bad hosting company is, contact me and I’ll tell you.

The Computer

June 13th, 2008 | Comment | Tech

DI-700-SLI: Intel 700-class SLI workstation

- Case: 17 Inch Apevia X-Discovery case – black
- Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Conroe 2.67GHz x 2 Dual Core 1066MHz FSB 4MB cache
- ASUS P5N-T Deluxe 780I SLI LGA775 ATX DDR2 3PCI-E16 2PCI-E1 1PCI GBLAN
- DDR2 Memory: 4GB Dual-channel: 2 x 2GB DDR2 800MHz PC6400
- Hard Drive with Serial ATA interface: 150 GB SATA 10000 rpm Extreme Performance 16MB cache
- Hard Drive #2 with Serial ATA interface: 250GB 16MB cache 7200RPM SATA2 hard drive
- Hard Drive #3 with Serial ATA interface: 250GB 16MB cache 7200RPM SATA2 hard drive
- Serial ATA RAID: RAID Level 1 (mirroring)
- Optical Drive : 18x SATA Dual-Layer DVD±RW w/ Software
- Optical Drive : 18x SATA Dual-Layer DVD±RW with Software + Lightscribe
- Video Card (PCI Express x16): 2 x 7950GT 512MB in SLI
- Removable Storage Device(s): 7-IN-1 Floppy Drive and Flash Card Reader
- Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro w/ External I/O hub (not actually Vista compatible, I guess I’ll change this out for the mobo sound card)
- Network Card: Integrated LAN with 10/100/1000 Fast Ethernet Controller
- 2x Additional Case Fan: Extra case fan
- Power Supply: 700 Watt Crossfire/Quad-SLI ATX power supply with 120mm fan
- CPU Cooling: Level 3 upgrade: Aftermarket Heatsink with a 120mm fan
- Operating Systems (OS): Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition
- Surge Bar: Surge Bar 7-Outlet and Phone Line Surge Suppressor
- Warranty: 2-Year Limited Warranty
- Service: Assembling and Testing

How I almost made "the switch"

June 13th, 2008 | Comment | Personal

I have had a long colourful history with PCs, and I have always defended them. Sure they have caused me countless hours of grief, I’ve had viruses well over 20 times, and hardware-issues is my middle name; but this stuff is usually my fault if only in the smallest way.

Last year around this time I bought a computer the likes of which I have been dreaming of for three years. It’s got everything, it’s really fast, suped up and is in one of those lit-up mod cases. I got it from BuyDirectPC.com. This company is great, awesome products, even awesomer service. This computer worked great (with the exception of some hardware issues involving the RAID), for seven months – then it died.

This death took the form of many blue screens of death. Luckily no work was lost, but I had to send it in under warrantee. My MOBO and RAID drives were replaced, but when I got it back it only worked for six hours. The problem it seems is my Motherboard was incompatible with my hardware configuration. When I think of this computer I feel fairly confident that there is no other computer in the world set up this exact way. Dangit!

This issue wasn’t my fault, in fact I’m not sure whose it is. But I haven’t had my computer in over a third of a year. In the mean time I work on my mid-level laptop which chokes and crashes a couple times a day. My old faithful desktop also died this week. It’s been very hard and frustrating.

This is why I finally considered the Apple Mac Pro as a viable option for me. Why not? I’m a graphic designer. I gave it a serious look – all the things I have ever hated and used to refute this platform before are gone (except for snobbiness, but those users I think are getting a bit better).

The only thing holding me back is the pricetag. BDPC doesn’t do refunds after a year naturally, and I can’t just drop this kind of cash on a whim, so unless someone wants to buy my nightmare I guess I’m a PC guy for a couple more years anyways.

Google Fan Boy

June 9th, 2008 | Comment | Personal

I have been called a Google Fan boy before, but it’s hard not to admire a company whose unofficial motto is “don’t be evil” (seriously). It’s also so easy to endorse a company who has personally made my life a lot easier. As a result, when I setup client sites it’s no surprise that I rely on tools like Picasa, Calendar and Mail to make my clients site flow work seamlessly. We can sometimes take this company for granted. While writing this I forgot that the behind the scenes tools making this entry possible; Blogger, YouTube and Feedburner, are all a part of this company.

Here are some examples of how Google keeps things fresh for me daily.

Email: I’ve had too many email addresses for over ten years. I have always juggled and distinguished account through various mail clients and browser apps. None can hold a candle to Google’s Gmail (somehow still called a beta). It has all your standard mail features in a fast loading Ajax shell (that somehow has back button functionality). The real kicker for me though is the use of Labels. Labels work in the same way that folders do in other mail clients, but it also allows you to view All Mail – which distinguishes all mail chronologically regardless of Labels. I wish Outlook did that. Gmail won my loyalty the first (of a million) times I accidentally left a composition – best autosave hands-down.

Calendar: I remember the first time I was asked to make a working calendar of events tool for a website. It was 2004 and I was in over my head. I researched at length various ASP and PHP tools, most which sold a single licence for over $100 – after which reams of code were to be customized and made to inegrate with a database. These products were either to costly or time consuming time after time, and as a result clients would opt for a listing of events. Now enters Google. I can have a fully functional calendar embedded in a site by an iframe that a client can easily manage. When I think of the time this saves me I can rationalize almost any amount of goofing off during work hours.

I was going to write three, but I could go on for ages and this is getting long. That’s just a small taste from a great company that is making, and forever refining a lot of tools that we use all the time without even thinking about. Nevermind that it’s supposed to be the best place to work in the world. Those stories are actually a little annoying to those of us who don’t work there.

This low-blood sugar documentary was my buddy Matt and I today on IM (Google Talk no less). Sometimes it’s hard coming back from a weekend.

No More Spam Please

June 2nd, 2008 | 1 Comment | Personal

Everyday I get a couple hundred spam messages. This is maddening for two reasons:

1. People are sending spam
2. Some people must actually be acting on the spam, thus making it profitable.

I recently read some interesting statistics. Spam makes up over 75% of all email sent these days. Think of the bandwidth that must take! I also read that 90% of all spam comes from EIGHT sources!

I feel like with technology what it is we should be able to find these places and put a stop to this. I would love to find the people responsible and literally bury their houses in AOL CDs and Pizza coupons. Maybe we as Internet users can band together in some kind of grass roots operation like that whole Anonymous thing.

Can you imagine a spam free world? It would be so cool if you were issued an email address at birth that you could use for your entire life. You could find childhood friends so easily. There could be directories like phone books of people’s email addresses. The only thing stopping this is spam.

If you have ever bought anything through spam please don’t admit it to me, just stop. There are other places to get your viagra, replica watches and prescription medications.

Well that covers my thoughts about general spam. I thought it only fitting to include this Weezer video which montages some of the internet memes that have filled your inbox from friend related bulk mails.

10 Ways to save bandwidth Surfing

May 22nd, 2008 | Comment | Tech

Recently my brother found himself at a summer camp sharing a limited satillite internet connection with several other internet users armed with laptops. When the hourly allotment of bandwidth was exceeded the connection speed suffered huge. We started to think up ways to be byte-conscious.

When I started brainstorming ideas to save bandwidth I thought I would have like two or three points, but I guess I’m a lot nerdier than even I could have known.

1) Set auto Disconnects Control Panel > Internet Options > Connections > the settings for that conenction > advanced > Check “Disconnect if Idle for more than” maybe 5 min or so.

2) Turn off superflous media – Think about it, if someone’s home page is msn.com (which I think is default on IE installs), then they have to download all those images for every inane article about Tom Cruise and weight loss… Control Panel > Internet Options > Advanced > Multimedia > turn off animations, images and sounds… this sounds harsh, but you will see where image boxes are and I think you can right click > Show image. I would show your users how to do this, sometimes they may want the images on auto (or maybe there’s some way to toggle it per page, I dunno I’ve never used it). Multimedia is the biggest source of bandwidth on most pages. I hope that animation bit includes flash…

3) Avoid Unnecessary or Large downloads - No bittorrents / downloading of media / online gaming, discourage file sharing on IM

4) Avoid Streams - discourage media streaming, skype, youtube, imeem and other audio or webcam transmissions. If users have to upload some video / audio it might be a good idea to set up a schedule. Ie. AJ can be a media uploader from 6 – 7, Johnny from 7 – 8, etc. This is another huge source of bandwidth.

5) Send Smart Emails - there are other ways to make emailing more efficient. Maybe instead of emailing people one at a time to tell them the same stuff, group email (it means less responses though). As an email alternative set up twitter accounts and blogs and tell all your people they can track you from these. These can even be updated by SMS on your cell phones.

5.5) Receive Smart Emails - Tell people to stop sending attachments and forwards. Also, if you get them, don’t open them. If you don’t bring the email to browser that bandwidth isn’t eaten. Maybe create a new folder to check when there is more bandwidth. The video of the cat jumping into the wall will be just as funny and applicable when the internet rationing summer is over.

6) Clean Home page - set home pages to Google.ca – this is about the cleanest smallest page ever. Compare that to something like yahoo and you download a lot less stuff for the browser to read. Your home page is your most visited, it should be light (in your browser Tools > Internet options)

7) Almalgomate your web 2.0 pages - are you checking all of your online accounts ie. Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, twitter etc? Setting up something like Netvibes might help you combine these all in one place like this http://www.netvibes.com/axiomaudio

8) Better yet, start an RSS Reader - Most modern sites now have RSS feeds. You can follow your facebook news feed, digg news, weather, and blogs with RSS. For example, AJ has a blog at http://albertaaj.blogspot.com/- rather than view that and load all the images and page elements you can visit his RSS http://albertaaj.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default – but rather than read it here you can subscribe to it in an RSS reader. Do you have a Gmail account? If so then you already have Google Reader at your service (linked at the top left) Click the Add Subscrition and paste that feed into the feild. Presto. With RSS readers like this (and there are more, I think in-browser and Outlook are two other common examples) you can read your web content all in one place – and without unnecessary page elements taking up bandwidth.

9) Turn off System internet use where possible - Check out what processes are running in your taskbar and task manager (ctrl + alt + delete > processes). Turn off ones that search the internet for updates, turn off Windows auto update, close any widgets or sidebar items that are also getting web information. This also includes closing programs like email clients that automatically access the internet periodically. Just check it when you need it. If you’re not getting email attachments or downloads this means you can also update spyware and antivirus less often as you’re less vulnerable. (but I take no responsibility if your system bites it!)

10) Make sure you’re caching – make sure your system isn’t redownloading content every time you visit pages. Control Panel > Internet Options > Browsing History > settings > I would set it to automatically, but if you’re being a hero you could say never. I think you should increase your disk space for cache to the maximum recommended (250MB for me) and beef up your history say to 50 days.

These ten tips make good general sense, but sometimes you need to be able to go online and enjoy the things you miss most from home. I think this is where planning a schedule will help. Maybe each of you has a night of the week to do some of the bandwidth-heavy things that aren’t the best on shared and limited resources!

Have any ideas of your own? I’d love to hear more on this topic!

Come Home Soon

February 13th, 2008 | Comment | Personal

This week my computer died in an ironic way. Even reformatting was resulting in bsod’s. It hasn’t been all bad though. Working on the laptop means I can sit in the comfy living room and watch the giant snow flakes mess up my driveway. I miss my computer, but it hasn’t been all good to me. I was remembering that when I had to use my old slow XP machine I would do pushups when I waited for apps to open. I’m in better shape when I use slow computers.