Web Hosting Archive

On Tuesday morning, hosting service Media Temple was out of service while the company dealt with a DNS resolution issue. Media Temple staff provided an overview of what happened in the comments section of my post.

Now today Amazon Web Services is down — actually only parts of the Amazon Web Services cloud computing offering is down. I use their S3 storage service and that is up and running. As of 9:00AM Eastern, the following message provides the current status related to the downtime, “6:09 AM PDT EBS API errors and volume latencies in the affected availability zone remain. We are continuing to work towards resolution.”

It’s interesting to watch bloggers including Martin Bryant and Mike Butcher only point to the same set of sites (Quora, Foursquare, Reddit and Hootsuite) that use Amazon’s EC2 and are down. There are plenty of other sites that are down including Easybib, a site run by a close friend of mine that is the largest online bibliography site in the world. And Easybib is just one example of time-critical services that are affected. So while it’s easy for us to look at a few social media services that are affected, just think about all of the business, professional and utility services that are also currently down.

Update 10am Eastern – it looks like the problems are expanding – here’s the latest update:

6:59 AM PDT There has been a moderate increase in error rates for CreateVolume. This may impact the launch of new EBS-backed EC2 instances in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Launches of instance store AMIs are currently unaffected. We are continuing to work on resolving this issue.
7:40 AM PDT In addition to the EBS volume latencies, EBS-backed instances in the US-EAST-1 region are failing at a high rate. This is due to a high error rate for creating new volumes in this region.

You can follow the updates around the Amazon EC2 issues on the Amazon Health Dashboard. As with all downtime, please feel free to report in the comments if your site is down due to the Amazon issue.

Earlier today Media Temple suffered some downtime and an outage due to a DNS issue with their DNS servers. The issue began around 7am Pacific – I noticed the issue shortly thereafter because I host the CloudContacts blog on Media Temple. From what I can tell, it looks like the sites are starting to return.

My feelings about downtime remain the same – every web service will have some amount of downtime, the key is how the company communicates with customers during and after the downtime that makes the difference. At least for today, I give Media Temple the “awesome” tag when it comes to how they have been communicating with all of us.

First, they posted on the status blog a number of real-time notes regarding the outage. It seems that their phone lines are all tied up (which is understandable) so they suggest using the status blog to monitor updates.
Continue reading “Media Temple Outage Issues This Morning – Awesome Communications” »

When I think of the “Go Daddy Girls”, the only thing that comes to mind were those Super Bowl commercials several years ago featuring Candice Michelle in the courtroom where they pushed you to the Web to see the final bits. Today GoDaddy is announcing the addition of fitness coach Jillian Michaels to the Go Daddy Girl lineup.

In addition to Michaels, the current Go Daddy Girl roster includes: Indy car racer Danica Patrick, model (?) Candice Michelle and Law Student/Team PokerStars Pro Vanessa Rousso.

Funny enough, the press release and email I received make it seem like CEO Bob Parsons “broke the news” on Twitter with a couple of tweets related to the Jillian Michaels announcement. This is smart – it may help Go Daddy get blog posts on those tech blogs that focus on Twitter-related news.

Last week there was a lot of discussion and speculation if Go Daddy was up for sale. Many outlets reported Go Daddy hiring Qatalyst Partners to assist with a sale and the company seeking a price over $1 billion.

Domain Name Wire noted, “Is Bob Parsons selling Go Daddy? Who knows. But I’m guessing if he does he’ll have a clause that allows him to continue managing the Go Daddy Girls.”

This evening Rackspace sent a notice to all current customers of the Rackspace Cloud service (formerly Mosso) about some changes to the pricing structure for their Rackspace Cloud service.

The big change is a 50% increase in the base price for all new accounts. The old pricing had a base of $100/month and the new pricing has a base of $149/month. Current customers will remain at the previous $100/month pricing.

Rackspace notes the reasoning for the increase, “Although the price for Cloud Sites has not been changed for over three years, the cost of managing the Cloud Sites platform has increased.  We felt it was necessary to update prices for new customers to reflect the value provided from the service, while still remaining very competitive versus other cloud platform as a service offerings.”

The reduction comes in a change to the overage charges which are now $0.22/GB which is a reduction from the $0.25/GB previously charged. Rackspace notes that this decrease is to align better with their other cloud service offerings.
Continue reading “Rackspace Raises Base Cloud Sites Pricing 50% and Reduces Overage Charges” »