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Beyond Hosting - Urgent Scheduled Maintenance Notice -- Friday, June 21st (4AM EDT) (19)

06-20-2013 12:45 PM #1 maveris (Member)
Beyond Hosting - Urgent Scheduled Maintenance Notice -- Friday, June 21st (4AM EDT)

For those of you who don't watch your email very closely and are on Beyond Hosting:

Urgent data center power maintenance has been scheduled for Friday, June 21st from 4AM EDT till 6AM EDT.

This maintenance will involving shutting down & re-feed an existing AC panel with new feed from alternate PDU source. This upgrade to our new power system will increase redundancy to 2N+1 and our battery and UPS system will now be fully 2N+1 compliant.

Beyond Hosting will begin shutting down customer dedicated servers from the operating system at 3:45 AM and monitor all systems as they go offline to a no power state. We expect to have power back online and all customer equipment back online by 6AM EDT or as soon as electrical contractors complete work.

During this window our network redundancy should remain intact and VPS/Semi-Dedicated and Hybrid customers should be unaffected. We STRONGLY recommend to ALL customers that any paid advertising that can be paused or shut off during this window is scheduled accordingly.

We truly understand your frustration that this scheduled maintenance will cause, but we can assure that you all steps possible to reduce the length of this outage have been taken and we will do our best to prevent further impact.

If your server requires any special service startups or scripts to be ran after boot please contact support and inform us of these post-boot configurations.

Regards,

Beyond Hosting

06-21-2013 08:48 AM #2 BeyondHosting-Tyler (Member)

Maintenance completed!! Only out for 30 minutes!

Sorry about that everyone, we promise you won't have to deal with that again!

If anyone has ANY Problems please contact support immediately!

06-21-2013 09:06 AM #3 gooddrewman (Member)

My server has been down for over an hour and is still down and so are the other people I know who are on your servers. :/

06-21-2013 09:31 AM #4 BeyondHosting-Tyler (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by gooddrewman View Post
My server has been down for over an hour and is still down and so are the other people I know who are on your servers. :/

They should contact support, we've only had 2 customers with a boot issue. These "so are other people" should contact us..

For the record, our maintenance window was 4am to 6, we finished 1 hour 30 minutes early.

06-21-2013 09:36 AM #5 gooddrewman (Member)

They where in contact with support throughout the whole outage and passing messages to me because I wasn't in front of a PC. I opened a ticket. I am up now, but 1h 22m downtime is pretty brutal.

06-21-2013 09:44 AM #6 BeyondHosting-Tyler (Member)

We've had a total of 2 people other than yourself in contact with support, both of which never made any reference to you or your service. So I'm not sure how 'they' could be passing messages to you. I'm not sure who *they are* I believe you have inadequate information.

The scheduled window was 2 hours, provided you prepare adequately 1 hr and 22 minutes for a 2 hour window should be considered good.

Thanks. Any customers with issues should contact us immediately.

06-21-2013 09:45 AM #7 fjk87 (Veteran Member)

Quote Originally Posted by gooddrewman View Post
They where in contact with support throughout the whole outage and passing messages to me because I wasn't in front of a PC. I opened a ticket. I am up now, but 1h 22m downtime is pretty brutal.
Didn't they send out an email with the downtime in it? I mean they told you in advance, don't see the problem where the 1h22m is a big problem, especially not since they sent out the mails well in advance. Downtime sucks, but if a provider is upgrading their network, this will happen with any company I think.

06-21-2013 09:50 AM #8 dragoshsd (Member)

Only 4 minutes downtime here!

I think the issue was that the email was sent a few days ago and people just didn't set a reminder to pause traffic. Another email right before the maintainance would've been good.

06-21-2013 09:52 AM #9 gooddrewman (Member)

1 hour 22 minutes is a lot longer then the 30 minutes you where claiming. Before you blast out on forums you should make sure your information is adequate and everyone is up

06-21-2013 09:59 AM #10 BeyondHosting-Tyler (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by gooddrewman View Post
1 hour 22 minutes is a lot longer then the 30 minutes you where claiming. Before you blast out on forums you should make sure your information is adequate and everyone is up
Everyone but you were online.. Guess the information was accurate for them. :-)

06-21-2013 10:00 AM #11 BeyondHosting-Tyler (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by dragoshsd View Post
Only 4 minutes downtime here!

I think the issue was that the email was sent a few days ago and people just didn't set a reminder to pause traffic. Another email right before the maintainance would've been good.

Hi, we sent a notice 1 hour before the maintenance as well. Please pm me your email on file so I can check it internally.

06-21-2013 10:03 AM #12 gooddrewman (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by BeyondHosting-Tyler View Post
Everyone but you were online.. Guess the information was accurate for them. :-)
Yup for them, but not for me. I as much as I pay you for a dedicated server I expect accurate information.

06-21-2013 10:08 AM #13 fjk87 (Veteran Member)

Quote Originally Posted by gooddrewman View Post
Yup for them, but not for me. I as much as I pay you for a dedicated server I expect accurate information.
I'm not related to beyond, but just check the facts:

1) They sent out an e-mail days before and 1h before the schedule
2) They informed about everything working smooth again including a clear statement to check if your stuff is up too. If not, they asked to contact you. I mean you can't expect them to really be able to see if 2 or 3 servers aren't up again. Given the volume they have, I'd say it's close to impossible.
3) You should have expected 2h downtime, so that shouldn't be any issue anyway.

Finally were reaching the point a downtime is less than expected and customers still complaining. I mean just pause for that 2h expected downtime and there's no issue / no problems at all for you involved. I mean if a TV provider claims to have an outage for 2hours and informs the clients after 1hour everything's running smooth, personally my reaction would be (given it doesn't work for me) just to call them / mail them and see why mines not working much rather than complaining about false infos...

06-21-2013 10:20 AM #14 maveris (Member)

I only ended up being down for two minutes according to Pingdom. I set my traffic sources to day part around the full maintenance window though!

Tyler, you guys should consider having an offsite colocation/DR service for those few people who seem to be unable to tolerate even the slightest downtime. Then you can offer that as a premium service and dump their stuff off site for these rare circumstances. Performance wouldn't be as great I'm sure as it'd all have to be virtual and you'd still lose some time in the transfer but then you'd have something to handle that particular objection at least.

Still though I've ran Pingdom at you guys ever since I started my subscription and you're definitely in five nines uptime territory.

06-21-2013 10:28 AM #15 gooddrewman (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by fjk87 View Post
I'm not related to beyond, but just check the facts:

1) They sent out an e-mail days before and 1h before the schedule
2) They informed about everything working smooth again including a clear statement to check if your stuff is up too. If not, they asked to contact you. I mean you can't expect them to really be able to see if 2 or 3 servers aren't up again. Given the volume they have, I'd say it's close to impossible.
3) You should have expected 2h downtime, so that shouldn't be any issue anyway.

Finally were reaching the point a downtime is less than expected and customers still complaining. I mean just pause for that 2h expected downtime and there's no issue / no problems at all for you involved. I mean if a TV provider claims to have an outage for 2hours and informs the clients after 1hour everything's running smooth, personally my reaction would be (given it doesn't work for me) just to call them / mail them and see why mines not working much rather than complaining about false infos...
I did open a ticket and I messaged on the forum to make sure things go taken care of fast. They charge a lot for a dedicated server. In my mind I think they should have some sort of backup in place so there is no downtime. Being that there was downtime they only sent the email two days ago and I never received an email 1 hour before. So that doesn't give me much time to prepare. I have to eat the cost on a lot of networks and it's not cool to lose money because of a server being down for almost an hour and a half. I have argued with Tyler many times in the past in support tickets. The customer is never right. There's always negative comments. It's probably time to move on.

06-21-2013 11:48 AM #16 fjk87 (Veteran Member)

Quote Originally Posted by gooddrewman View Post
I did open a ticket and I messaged on the forum to make sure things go taken care of fast. They charge a lot for a dedicated server. In my mind I think they should have some sort of backup in place so there is no downtime. Being that there was downtime they only sent the email two days ago and I never received an email 1 hour before. So that doesn't give me much time to prepare. I have to eat the cost on a lot of networks and it's not cool to lose money because of a server being down for almost an hour and a half. I have argued with Tyler many times in the past in support tickets. The customer is never right. There's always negative comments. It's probably time to move on.
Drop your illusion of a server that will be NEVER down. It just won't happen. Maintenances are happening everywhere, if they're scheduled and told in advance, what's your problem with pausing traffic for 2hours?

The definitely sent the email days before, if you don't manage to schedule a pause of traffic during 4 days, what to say... You get an email, you mark it red in your calendar, pause traffic during that period, happy camper.

You're basically mixing up a server being down with a scheduled maintenance - you cannot compare these two situations. Beside that, from my experience, their support is pretty friendly, nice and professional.

In that case, you should really move on, cause you'll experience same, if not worse, on other providers. Problem is, a customer like you, who's told in advance for maintenance, will still complain about a downtime that was shorter than expected and announced days before. No, you're not right. Honestly spoken, if you ever ran a business with subscribing customers, you'd see it from a pretty different position. A position that really shows in that case that there always will be customers that are never happy and always bitching around.

Let's just cut the discussion between us two here, you made your point very clear, so did I. Obviously both of us have different standards and opinions which I respect, but I honestly doubt you'll find a company that will serve your needs with a 'basic' dedicated server setup and for comparable fees.

06-21-2013 11:55 AM #17 gooddrewman (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by fjk87 View Post
Drop your illusion of a server that will be NEVER down. It just won't happen. Maintenances are happening everywhere, if they're scheduled and told in advance, what's your problem with pausing traffic for 2hours?

The definitely sent the email days before, if you don't manage to schedule a pause of traffic during 4 days, what to say... You get an email, you mark it red in your calendar, pause traffic during that period, happy camper.

You're basically mixing up a server being down with a scheduled maintenance - you cannot compare these two situations. Beside that, from my experience, their support is pretty friendly, nice and professional.

In that case, you should really move on, cause you'll experience same, if not worse, on other providers. Problem is, a customer like you, who's told in advance for maintenance, will still complain about a downtime that was shorter than expected and announced days before. No, you're not right. Honestly spoken, if you ever ran a business with subscribing customers, you'd see it from a pretty different position. A position that really shows in that case that there always will be customers that are never happy and always bitching around.

Let's just cut the discussion between us two here, you made your point very clear, so did I. Obviously both of us have different standards and opinions which I respect, but I honestly doubt you'll find a company that will serve your needs with a 'basic' dedicated server setup and for comparable fees.
I currently have another server provider. I don't experience these issues. :/ Also good guess about me and my experience dealing with subscribing customers. It was completely wrong, but at least you tried

06-21-2013 02:15 PM #18 keepitsimple (Member)

very minimal downtime for me as well, but if you don't like it, just switch to a different company, pretty easy

06-21-2013 05:04 PM #19 richardx (Member)

dammit..i thought the date is 24th
ps: i did not get the 1h email..

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