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Hostwinds servers went down (P202 Rec. Provider)... is this normal? (8)

03-07-2014 09:10 PM #1 bjmaks (Member)
Hostwinds servers went down (P202 Rec. Provider)... is this normal?

Ive had a hostwinds account for Prosper202 for about 5 days. They were one of the recommended VPS providers from Prosper202.
Just went in to check stats in p202, and not only is my server down, but their primary domain (hostwinds.com) is down too. (both are now back online)

How much downtime do you guys experience generally? It seems like ANY downtime would be pretty unacceptable... but being noob i really dont know what to expect

Maybe I just have bad timing, but this is reason enough for me to switch... I probably only lost a couple bucks in ad spend, but Im sure some guys could have lost thousands.

Probably going to create a new droplet on DigitalOcean and install P202 myself... It would be cheaper anyway.

03-08-2014 01:59 PM #2 caurmen (Administrator)

No hosting company will ever manage to be up 24/7 forever. If they were just down for an hour or so, and this is the first time it's happened, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

If, however, it happens again in the near future, that's the time to start considering a switch.

03-08-2014 04:25 PM #3 Mr Baffoe (Veteran Member)

Hostwinds is our new partner, I've been talking with Peter the founder for some time and they are in a trial phase right now. If they take care of Prosper202 users and provide excellent service, I will continue to recommend them, however if not I will have to drop them.

Downtime sucks but like Caurmen said, 24/7 uptime is difficult/impossible. The important thing is how they deal with downtime:

Did they communicate well with you about the downtime? e.g. Cause, duration, and what has been done (if applicable) to make sure this doesn't happen?
How long was the downtime?

They have a stated 99.9% uptime which comes out to 43.8 minutes of downtime a month. If you want close to 100% you will have to do something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BDOmOOtWvU

AND be willing to pay for that uptime since it's not cheap. (Multiple servers are needed, plus the tech knowhow to maintain it all)

PS: We've had a long history with BeyondHosting, from previous chats with Tyler if you have the funds they can get you setup for greater uptime.

03-08-2014 06:37 PM #4 phlong (Member)

Wow, you actually partner up with them? In my point of view they're not a serious business.
I'm hosting my blackhat stuff on there and they usually don't know why my VPS is offline. I once ordered an Extra IP and it didn't work out. I contacted them and they told me that I have to ask another company.
Hostwind's basically a reseller that sells itself as a big hoster. They're successful though.

03-08-2014 07:10 PM #5 bjmaks (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by Mr Baffoe View Post
Hostwinds is our new partner, I've been talking with Peter the founder for some time and they are in a trial phase right now. If they take care of Prosper202 users and provide excellent service, I will continue to recommend them, however if not I will have to drop them.

Downtime sucks but like Caurmen said, 24/7 uptime is difficult/impossible. The important thing is how they deal with downtime:

Did they communicate well with you about the downtime? e.g. Cause, duration, and what has been done (if applicable) to make sure this doesn't happen?
How long was the downtime?

They have a stated 99.9% uptime which comes out to 43.8 minutes of downtime a month. If you want close to 100% you will have to do something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BDOmOOtWvU

AND be willing to pay for that uptime since it's not cheap. (Multiple servers are needed, plus the tech knowhow to maintain it all)

PS: We've had a long history with BeyondHosting, from previous chats with Tyler if you have the funds they can get you setup for greater uptime.
I was only disappointed because I had only been using them for less than a week, and was already experiencing downtime, it may have just been bad timing. I have many sites on shared hosting (hostgator) so I am used to a little downtime, and understand it is inevitable. The downtime was less than an hour, but I didnt have uptime monitoring setup yet so i dont know exactly how long it was down. Could have been 10 min, could have been an hour.
After the outage I was chatting with one of their reps on their site and they apologized and gave an explanation to the best of their knowledge (data center went down).

Im just starting out with paid traffic, and I am on a budget - which was the primary factor in choosing them ($17/month with an almost free trial).

Definitely wont be jumping ship yet unless this happens often, or when I have time to setup tracking on a digital ocean VPS for the cost savings (at $5/month starting out, that leaves an extra $12 for ad spend... I know its pennies, but at this stage every little bit helps.).

Thanks for the replies

03-08-2014 09:52 PM #6 swissfactor (Member)

Hostwinds:
Well... if you want to get cheap hosting then you get cheap hosting (translated: shitty support, uptime is an accident, etc.).

I've asked them what was the issues and they said it has never happened before and still when I search online then I'm seeing unhappy customers because they're more offline than online.
(The support I was writing to wasn't really answering my questions.)

Hosting is as important as tracking. It's wrong to try to save on these two parts - they're too important.

About the right setup & prosper202:
If you want to go for high volume then PHP itself is a joke unless you're using php as a frontend language only. The developers who are building software in php must be very disciplined to write clean, maintainable code and to be honest the code of cpvlab & prosper is a big mess and far away from proper software engineering. I'm even wondering how they are able to maintain such a big mess, sorry! I assume that prosper (such as cpvlab) has never been coded to handle high volume. Same counts for wordpress. ;-)

03-09-2014 12:26 AM #7 shakedown (Member)

Dude, Switch NOW and don't look back. Hostwinds is the worst hosting provider I have ever tried in my life. For the purposes of this thread, I checked UptimeRobot and they have been down 22 times from February 1-21st (that is more than 1 outtage a day). After the February 21st, I switched hosting providers so I don't have data after that. Sometimes the outages last all day or for several hours. They are down a lot more than 43 minutes a month (which is still unacceptable). I was only hosting some client sites but If I was hosting a tracker, I would be screwed. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw prosper had teamed up with them.

Sorry for the rant, but I wanted to make sure not a single person on STM signed up with that joke of a hosting provider.

09-16-2014 05:41 AM #8 redrummr (Member)

I can't believe UptimeRobot is free. Thanks for the tip ims!

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