For the past few months my web site has been going down frequently. When I noticed the constant outages, I wrote a program in Revolution to monitor my site. It would check my site every minute, keep a log, and notify me via TXT Messaging when the site was down.
This was also very useful to my Father, as he hosted numerous web sites with the same provider. Not only did I monitor my site, but I also monitored his. We contacted our hosting provider at that time, and they said the outages were due to "a bug in the firewall". They also said that the firewall would be "fixed by next week". That was in August, and the outages only got worse. Through September worked my monitoring software even more to take care of bugs and other errors. I eventually took an old 333 Mhz PC and loaded my monitoring software on it. It now sits behind me, monitoring all of our web sites 24/7, sending out notifications when necessary. Works wonderfully! Then October happened. The entire server went down for hours instead of minutes. That's over 120 domains with about 30 active shopping carts. After numerous trouble tickets with support over the course of a week I moved my site to a new server. My father hung in there, hoping to avoid having to move 119 domains. The troubled provider was now saying that the outages were due to "our overuse of the Sendmail program" and that we would have to upgrade for $40 more a month to resolve the problem. According to server logs, our use of Sendmail for the last 12 months was less than half as much as it was for the year before that. With an explanation like that, we couldn't help but wonder if someone else on the server was over-using Sendmail. Our providers response was the "as we told you before..." kind of message. So my site was finally back online around October 8th. My online store, however, wouldn't work with the new host (encrypted/hard-coded). I decided to try out my own PHP based store, but later decided against it as it was too far away from being and complete store. I then started searching for a cart/store that was cookie-less, simple, and was compatible with GnuPG. I eventually found one, and around the 19th of October I was up and running again. Well, almost, it took about a week before the orders started coming in. At the beginning of this week I started helping my father move his domain names to the provider I am now using. We've moved about 40 so far, and I've completed replacing 3 online stores. The new provider is wonderful. Free PHP Module Installation, Secure SSL, Excellent Technical Support (seriously!), and they're 1/2 the price of the old provider. Today we received a message from our old provider explaining the cause of the outages. Apparently someone *else* on the server is SPAMMING, and the amount of spam is taking down the server. Who would have thought?! It only took them 3 months to figure that one out. No matter though, we already decided that it was time to give another company the chance to host our sites. Derek Bump Dreamscape Software http://www.dreamscapesoftware.com _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
