3

Update: As of Oct 21, 8AM EST, it's still down. I'll call Rackspace again

My web server is hosted by Rackspace Mycloud and today Oct 20, 2015 there is an unexpected outage. I have Rackspace's $11/month option. All my files are on that server, which I can't access. So there is not much I can do right now for the downtime this time. What can I do to keep my website up for my users when my server hosting is down again in the future?

Should I duplicate my web directory into another hosting company? Should I buy something in Rackspace that doesn't have downtime? Something that doesn't cost a lot of money would be the best because it's a small site. This is my first time encountering this problem so please let me know all the different options. Thanks!

Btw, I called and Rackspace says that they're working on live upgrades for everyone in the future so that there won't be problems like this in the future when live upgrade is set up for me as well. Some people already have it so they don't experience this downtime. Unfortunately I'm not one of them yet.

This is from status.rackspace.com:

Cloud Servers (First Generation) Issues

Tuesday Oct 20, 2015

Resolved: Cloud Servers | FirstGen to NextGen Migration Connectivity Issues | ORD 03:38 PM EDT 10/20/15 Our Cloud engineers have continued monitoring the environment, and confirmed impact is resolved from this issue. A small subset of customers with custom configurations may continue to experience network degradation. Customers that remain impacted by this issue are advised to contact our support teams for further assistance.

We appreciate your patience as we worked to resolve this issue. If you have any further questions, please contact a member of your support team. 11:28 AM EDT 10/20/15 Cloud engineers have resolved impact to a significant portion of customer instances affected by this issue. Teams are investigating a subset of customers experiencing residual impact, and are identifying a path moving forward to remediate impact to the remaining instances. During this time, a small subset of customers may continue to experience network connectivity degradation or failures.

We appreciate your patience as we work to resolve this issue. If you have any further questions, please contact a member of your support team. 10:19 AM EDT 10/20/15 Cloud engineers are continuing work to resolve network connectivity issues for a subset of recently migrated customers in ORD1. During this time, a subset of customers migrated from FirstGen to NextGen Cloud Servers may experience a loss of network connectivity. The next update will be provided at 10:30 CDT or sooner if significant changes occur. 08:25 AM EDT 10/20/15 Cloud engineers are continuing to troubleshoot network connectivity issues on a small subset of affected instances at this time. During this time, a portion of migrated FirstGen Cloud Servers in the ORD region will continue to experience a loss of network connectivity. Additional updates will be provided as new information becomes available.If you have further questions, please contact a member of your support team. 04:56 AM EDT 10/20/15 Cloud engineers are continuing to deploy the fix for this issue to a subset of affected hosts at this time. During this time, a portion of migrated FirstGen Cloud Servers in the ORD region will continue to experience a loss of network connectivity. Additional updates will be provided as new information becomes available.If you have further questions, please contact a member of your support team.

Improve this question
2
  • 1
    I would get on the horn and complain loudly. Rackspace is (or was) a top tier provider and this should not happen. Depending on how long your site has been down and how often, I would be looking for another host. For the record, this is the first complaint I have ever heard about Rackspace so this may be just a frustrating glitch (for both of you). Who knows?
    – closetnoc
    Oct 21, 2015 at 0:03
  • About as much as you do when Google Docs is down... Nice to know that Google shares something in common with Rackspace. Both had outages this month.
    – Fiasco Labs
    Oct 21, 2015 at 2:30

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
1

Generally the answer to this is redundancy - if you only have your site running on one server you will eventually be hit with this problem, no server is going to run 24/7 forever - there will be issues with network infrastructure, power lines disk drives or just general operating system/application updates.

You may be prepared to have some downtime on your site when you're updating files yourself, but if you really want reliable up-time you need to look into multiple servers, ideally on separate infrastructure - (i.e. one in ORD and one in DFW).

If your site or files are relatively static, you might want to consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which would cache your content and can also serve it from nodes more local to your end-users.

That being said, they do offer their 100% Network Uptime and Power Uptime guarantees, so you should be able to get some compensation from them for the outage as it sounds like it was indeed network related.

I see they are also still reporting issues with CloudFiles and CloudSites (although these are $150/m not $11/m) on the ORD infrastructure.

Improve this answer
0

Aside from choosing a decent hosting provider one if the things you may use is Cloudflare's dns caching service to minimize your downtime.

Improve this answer

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.