Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


WebSound repeated outages
New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.

All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.

WebSound repeated outages

About two months ago, I put in a good word for WebSound. While the box is still decent when it's up and normal, since then there came several long outages. They failed to live up to their "99.9% uptime guarantee" and seems indifferent to that matter. Their "99.9% uptime guaranteed" turned short of 99% (that is, over 7.2 hours of downtime per month) which rendered it unsuitable for any serious hosting.

There was a downtime on Sep 2nd (I thought it was accidental and didn't track how long), and on Sep 19th there was another 3 hours of downtime. On Oct 6th, the node went down another time for about 4 hours, and this time Callum claimed that they've identified the cause and have replaced the faulty hardware.

However, just a day later, on Oct 7th the node went down again for another 4 hours. They said they were still investigating the root of this issue. On Oct 28th, another 4 hours of downtime, still investigating. Today, it went down for another 8 hours (it's up now) and apparently they remained clueless.

There were also periods (as long as 10 hours) right before some outages when the node's performance severely degraded such that it was effectively useless (can't even load the Virtualizor panel). They thought it was due to some users abusing resources which I doubt.

I have created a ticket on each occasion. Some occurred in the midnight (for GMT) and the respond time was longer, but it is still reasonable. It is also understandable that some hardware problems may be difficult to track down, but I am fed up with this "let's put the faulty node back online and see when it bricks again" attitude. Outages have happened too many times.

Comments

  • deankdeank Member, Troll

    Well, while you have a valid point, let's think of this way.

    When a guy proposes to a girl and she says yes, the guy generally swears in his mind or out loud that he will make her happy.

    It's an oath that is similar to a guarantee.

    Does it ever work out though? 99% of time no.

    My point is that take "guarantees" with a grain of WSS.

    Thanked by 3eol Gatto Janevski
  • What did they say when you asked them about the 99.9% guarantee?

  • WSCallumWSCallum Member
    edited November 2018

    We’re aware of issues affecting a particular node and i’m surprised your downtime is as significant, as we’ve only recorded between 15 and 30 minutes downtime each time, this has happened twice in october which would put us within our guarantee, admittedly due to the shutdown it kills Virtualizor but VPS should be online regardless of Virtualizor being down - Does your VPS require manual boot up each time?

    It’s not at all a case of put it back online and wait to see when it topples next, we identified a hardware issue which we thought was the cause but sadly not, and we’ve investigated this since, we currently have a 3rd party audit going through the node as we’re clearly missing something - I’m hoping to have the cause identified this weekend and have a resolution in place additionally.

    If you would like to be migrated to another node please open a ticket and we will do so.

    As ever I apologise that these issues have happened.

    Thanked by 1jtk
  • WSCallum said: We’re aware of issues affecting a particular node and i’m surprised your downtime is as significant, as we’ve only recorded between 15 and 30 minutes downtime each time, this has happened twice in october which would put us within our guarantee, admittedly due to the shutdown it kills Virtualizor but VPS should be online regardless of Virtualizor being down - Does your VPS require manual boot up each time?

    Yes, it does require manual reboot from Virtualizor each time. I can tell from the syslog that after each downtime the VPS indeed booted up much sooner automatically, but the OS won't find any network interfaces and thus remained offline. I don't know why and won't bother debugging, but in short I have to manually reboot it from Virtualizor before the network goes back to normal.

    WSCallum said: If you would like to be migrated to another node please open a ticket and we will do so.

    Thanks, but that won't be necessary.

  • @jtk said:
    What did they say when you asked them about the 99.9% guarantee?

    I asked them once about the 99.9% guarantee, and they said "We pride ourselves in our 99.9% uptime, unfortunately, though sometimes issues can arise and we cannot prevent them. It's very rare we drop below our 99.9% uptime guarantee." And, "as a goodwill gesture," they extended the VPS for three days...

  • @psb777 said:

    WSCallum said: We’re aware of issues affecting a particular node and i’m surprised your downtime is as significant, as we’ve only recorded between 15 and 30 minutes downtime each time, this has happened twice in october which would put us within our guarantee, admittedly due to the shutdown it kills Virtualizor but VPS should be online regardless of Virtualizor being down - Does your VPS require manual boot up each time?

    Yes, it does require manual reboot from Virtualizor each time. I can tell from the syslog that after each downtime the VPS indeed booted up much sooner automatically, but the OS won't find any network interfaces and thus remained offline. I don't know why and won't bother debugging, but in short I have to manually reboot it from Virtualizor before the network goes back to normal.

    WSCallum said: If you would like to be migrated to another node please open a ticket and we will do so.

    Thanks, but that won't be necessary.

    The VPS should come back online automatically so yes, unfortunately such extensive downtime could have been avoided if the network was automatically coming online as it should do.

    @psb777 said:

    @jtk said:
    What did they say when you asked them about the 99.9% guarantee?

    I asked them once about the 99.9% guarantee, and they said "We pride ourselves in our 99.9% uptime, unfortunately, though sometimes issues can arise and we cannot prevent them. It's very rare we drop below our 99.9% uptime guarantee." And, "as a goodwill gesture," they extended the VPS for three days...

    For a 20 minute downtime this extends beyond out 99.9% uptime guarantee and we'd review this on a case by case basis depending on the severity and cause of the downtime, such extension would only be a reflection of that one downtime and not of all downtimes but again, the node itself has been offline for around 20 minutes each time which keeps us within our guarantee - The downtime still isn't acceptable, but this is being worked on as we speak and a resolution is being sought.

    Thanked by 1jtk
  • FHRFHR Member, Host Rep

    @psb777 said:

    @jtk said:
    What did they say when you asked them about the 99.9% guarantee?

    I asked them once about the 99.9% guarantee, and they said "We pride ourselves in our 99.9% uptime, unfortunately, though sometimes issues can arise and we cannot prevent them. It's very rare we drop below our 99.9% uptime guarantee." And, "as a goodwill gesture," they extended the VPS for three days...

    "Uptime guarantee"/SLA just means you get a compensation in case of excessive downtime, not that the thing absolutely will not go down.

    An SLA is obviously good for the customer though - while it cannot prevent downtime (nothing can - everything goes down once in a while), it encourages the provider to fix any issues as quickly as possible.

    Thanked by 1WSCallum
  • @WSCallum said:

    @psb777 said:

    WSCallum said: We’re aware of issues affecting a particular node and i’m surprised your downtime is as significant, as we’ve only recorded between 15 and 30 minutes downtime each time, this has happened twice in october which would put us within our guarantee, admittedly due to the shutdown it kills Virtualizor but VPS should be online regardless of Virtualizor being down - Does your VPS require manual boot up each time?

    Yes, it does require manual reboot from Virtualizor each time. I can tell from the syslog that after each downtime the VPS indeed booted up much sooner automatically, but the OS won't find any network interfaces and thus remained offline. I don't know why and won't bother debugging, but in short I have to manually reboot it from Virtualizor before the network goes back to normal.

    WSCallum said: If you would like to be migrated to another node please open a ticket and we will do so.

    Thanks, but that won't be necessary.

    The VPS should come back online automatically so yes, unfortunately such extensive downtime could have been avoided if the network was automatically coming online as it should do.

    You're right, the extended downtime could have been avoided if the network were automatically up and running. But there were no eth0 or any other network interfaces detected by the guest OS. I don't think it's my OS' fault because when it is (re)booted from the Virtualizor panel it works without any problems. I think it might be a quirk of your KVM setup, but I can't debug that and host reboots should happen very rarely in the first place.

    It could also have been avoided if Virtualizor comes back automatically after reboot and let me reboot it manually - I don't know why that's not the case.

  • @psb777 said:

    @WSCallum said:

    @psb777 said:

    WSCallum said: We’re aware of issues affecting a particular node and i’m surprised your downtime is as significant, as we’ve only recorded between 15 and 30 minutes downtime each time, this has happened twice in october which would put us within our guarantee, admittedly due to the shutdown it kills Virtualizor but VPS should be online regardless of Virtualizor being down - Does your VPS require manual boot up each time?

    Yes, it does require manual reboot from Virtualizor each time. I can tell from the syslog that after each downtime the VPS indeed booted up much sooner automatically, but the OS won't find any network interfaces and thus remained offline. I don't know why and won't bother debugging, but in short I have to manually reboot it from Virtualizor before the network goes back to normal.

    WSCallum said: If you would like to be migrated to another node please open a ticket and we will do so.

    Thanks, but that won't be necessary.

    The VPS should come back online automatically so yes, unfortunately such extensive downtime could have been avoided if the network was automatically coming online as it should do.

    You're right, the extended downtime could have been avoided if the network were automatically up and running. But there were no eth0 or any other network interfaces detected by the guest OS. I don't think it's my OS' fault because when it is (re)booted from the Virtualizor panel it works without any problems. I think it might be a quirk of your KVM setup, but I can't debug that and host reboots should happen very rarely in the first place.

    It could also have been avoided if Virtualizor comes back automatically after reboot and let me reboot it manually - I don't know why that's not the case.

    Unfortunately due to the type of shutdown occurring Virtualizor is not being killed correctly and requires manual intervention to bring it back online.

  • @psb777 said:
    About two months ago, I put in a good word for WebSound. While the box is still decent when it's up and normal, since then there came several long outages. They failed to live up to their "99.9% uptime guarantee" and seems indifferent to that matter. Their "99.9% uptime guaranteed" turned short of 99% (that is, over 7.2 hours of downtime per month) which rendered it unsuitable for any serious hosting.

    There was a downtime on Sep 2nd (I thought it was accidental and didn't track how long), and on Sep 19th there was another 3 hours of downtime. On Oct 6th, the node went down another time for about 4 hours, and this time Callum claimed that they've identified the cause and have replaced the faulty hardware.

    However, just a day later, on Oct 7th the node went down again for another 4 hours. They said they were still investigating the root of this issue. On Oct 28th, another 4 hours of downtime, still investigating. Today, it went down for another 8 hours (it's up now) and apparently they remained clueless.

    There were also periods (as long as 10 hours) right before some outages when the node's performance severely degraded such that it was effectively useless (can't even load the Virtualizor panel). They thought it was due to some users abusing resources which I doubt.

    I have created a ticket on each occasion. Some occurred in the midnight (for GMT) and the respond time was longer, but it is still reasonable. It is also understandable that some hardware problems may be difficult to track down, but I am fed up with this "let's put the faulty node back online and see when it bricks again" attitude. Outages have happened too many times.

    You pay for what you get in my eyes, they offer affordable plans not a premium service.

    If you want something more solid go with a premium provider, it sounds like they've had a few issues and are working on getting it resolved which is perfectly reasonable. Just be patient or take the offer up of being moved to another node.

    Rant over.

  • deank said: When a guy proposes to a girl and she says yes, the guy generally swears in his mind or out loud that he will make her happy.

    Soooo, that's why they call them swear words...

  • @Janevski said:

    deank said: When a guy proposes to a girl and she says yes, the guy generally swears in his mind or out loud that he will make her happy.

    Soooo, that's why they call them swear words...

  • 7 hours downtime per month is really ridiculous. I would always check uptime SLA conditions. You can get better uptime even if you would hosted on your own computer.

  • SLA is such overpowered term. a Provider can easily offer 100% SLA and goes into 30 days of Downtime. All it needs is just extend the service for more 30 days all is forgiven.

    Thanked by 1MikeA
  • ClouviderClouvider Member, Patron Provider

    @yokowasis said:
    SLA is such overpowered term. a Provider can easily offer 100% SLA and goes into 30 days of Downtime. All it needs is just extend the service for more 30 days all is forgiven.

    Erm, the compensation depends on the contract surely?

  • FHRFHR Member, Host Rep

    @Clouvider said:

    @yokowasis said:
    SLA is such overpowered term. a Provider can easily offer 100% SLA and goes into 30 days of Downtime. All it needs is just extend the service for more 30 days all is forgiven.

    Erm, the compensation depends on the contract surely?

    Yep.

  • @FHR said:

    @Clouvider said:

    @yokowasis said:
    SLA is such overpowered term. a Provider can easily offer 100% SLA and goes into 30 days of Downtime. All it needs is just extend the service for more 30 days all is forgiven.

    Erm, the compensation depends on the contract surely?

    Yep.

    What contract ? If the provider go below the SLA they will refund no question asked ?

    Most provider will just refund for the remaining days of contract. Most of them doesn't give a shit about the damage of the downtime, or the time spent on setup the server.

    At least that what I see on most drama on LET.

    A provider fail to uphold their SLA : here is some days extension.

    Too many downtime and failed to deliver : here is a refund for your remaining contract.

    They don't account the time the customer spent on setup the server , or the damaged brand. Perhaps the customer hire a sysadmin to setup his server , does the provider take that into account ? I don't think so.

    TL;DR. Provider should have more responsibility about their SLA. Not just : "I am sorry we can't uphold our SLA, here is your cookies for compensation"

  • FHRFHR Member, Host Rep

    yokowasis said: They don't account the time the customer spent on setup the server , or the damaged brand. Perhaps the customer hire a sysadmin to setup his server , does the provider take that into account ? I don't think so.

    You'd have to pay slightly more than $7 - in fact, several thousand times more.

    TL;DR. Provider should have more responsibility about their SLA. Not just : "I am sorry we can't uphold our SLA, here is your cookies for compensation"

    But that's what SLA is all about. "We couldn't manage to be online, here's your compensation"

  • @proxie said:

    @psb777 said:
    About two months ago, I put in a good word for WebSound. While the box is still decent when it's up and normal, since then there came several long outages. They failed to live up to their "99.9% uptime guarantee" and seems indifferent to that matter. Their "99.9% uptime guaranteed" turned short of 99% (that is, over 7.2 hours of downtime per month) which rendered it unsuitable for any serious hosting.

    There was a downtime on Sep 2nd (I thought it was accidental and didn't track how long), and on Sep 19th there was another 3 hours of downtime. On Oct 6th, the node went down another time for about 4 hours, and this time Callum claimed that they've identified the cause and have replaced the faulty hardware.

    However, just a day later, on Oct 7th the node went down again for another 4 hours. They said they were still investigating the root of this issue. On Oct 28th, another 4 hours of downtime, still investigating. Today, it went down for another 8 hours (it's up now) and apparently they remained clueless.

    There were also periods (as long as 10 hours) right before some outages when the node's performance severely degraded such that it was effectively useless (can't even load the Virtualizor panel). They thought it was due to some users abusing resources which I doubt.

    I have created a ticket on each occasion. Some occurred in the midnight (for GMT) and the respond time was longer, but it is still reasonable. It is also understandable that some hardware problems may be difficult to track down, but I am fed up with this "let's put the faulty node back online and see when it bricks again" attitude. Outages have happened too many times.

    You pay for what you get in my eyes, they offer affordable plans not a premium service.

    If you want something more solid go with a premium provider, it sounds like they've had a few issues and are working on getting it resolved which is perfectly reasonable. Just be patient or take the offer up of being moved to another node.

    Rant over.

    This is wrong. If a provider can't provide a premium SLA , it shouldn't advertise as having one.

    "You pay what you get" doesn't apply when contract involved.

Sign In or Register to comment.