On 02/28/2011 09:51 AM, ew wrote:
It has come to my attention that my VPS is not reliable. I went the
cheap way out, now I have realized "I got what I paid for". I started
with a small company FiveBean, which was bought out by BlueMile. Most
likely, I'll end up going back to Linode.
I'm seeking a few bits of advice.
1. What tools can I use to monitor my VPS, such as DNS reliability, and
other downtime possibilities?
2. How should I approach my current provider with my issue? Using
Google hit information and my logs, I should be able to pinpoint certain
days/times which server was not responding to DNS requests.
3. If the issue is purely DNS related, can I implement some sort of
fail-over or backup DNS?
4. Do you folks think my provider should be accountable for the loss?
Typically server hosting contracts are written so that they are at most
liable to give you back some percentage portion of your costs with them.
So if you can prove that they are down 10% of the time, you may be
able to get creditted for 10% of your cost with them, i.e. $1. But then
again, they might have written your agreement so they aren't liable for
anything.
When it comes to monitoring you can either do it yourself, by installing
something like nagios in an environment you are pretty sure is going to
be always up. Otherwise there are some services like
http://mon.itor.us/index.jsp which provide a way to do basic monitoring
for free (more extensive for pay). Typically you want to independantly
monitor
* whether your host responds to pings
* whether your host responds to http traffic
* whether your host responds to ssh
* whether the network router in front of your host responds to pings
That will help you figure out if an outage is your app, your server, the
machine your vm is on, or the network is the root cause of our outage.
One last thing I'll say. DNS is easy to replicate in a highly available
way. If your for pay service can't manage to do that right, I would be
very skeptical that they are doing a lot of other things right in their
shop.
If you do go back to linode, consider signing up via my referer code -
http://www.linode.com/?r=99184ccc44a801885850695388452f74115f3f82 that
will help defray the costs of running the lug infrastructure, which sits
on my linode.
-Sean
--
Sean Dague Learn about the Universe with the
sean at dague dot net Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association
http://dague.net http://midhudsonastro.org
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