And two of their affiliates are gone too! This is not funny! Anybody know anything?

Ev

They're back up now. They were down for 20-25 minutes. How common is this, should I be concerned and contact them?

Ev

Probably just routine updating, backing up type stuff. I haven't looked at <snip> but the term 'maker' suggests an online site builder?

If so avoid and learn how to do it properly. I made the mistake of building my first site with such a thing, freebies it was - then they wanted $20 a month just for hosting. No problem, just change hosts right?

Nope, cos needed their service to run that site. I'm curious, lemme have a look...

Yep, you NEED them to run your site, judging by the buttons..

and they're slow as all heck anyway, still loading..

Well if it would hurry up and load I'd look at the price, then compare that to the cost of Dreamweaver, Sitespinner or the ultra easy Coolpage, ie software to build your own site and host it anywhere you want.

Still hasn't loaded.

Ah, there it is. oh look, $20 a month.

You DO realise you could buy something like Sitespinner for $50, a domain name for $10 and half-decent hosting for $50 a year, right?

You only need the software once, after that it's just hosting and the domain. You can get cheaper than $50+$10 but if you were willing to spend $200 on hosting you could pick and choose pretty much any virtual host you want. Sticky me for an $80 recommendation.

If you're serious about your website you need more control. Yeah they're back now but suppose they weren't? Suppose they put it up to $50 a month? $100 a month?

$1000 a month?

To get all the features you'd need to buy additional software but at least you get to choose just what. Seriously, for long term development you need to create a site you can really alter, tweak - and if necessary change hosts.

Those services are great for hobby sites, newbies, or to see if a site is worth having for your business or if you're really into the whole idea. But if you are and the site has potential, build a real one.

Again feel free to sticky me for some ideas.

P.

[edited by: trillianjedi at 9:04 am (utc) on Sep. 2, 2006]
[edit reason]
[1][edit reason] No specifics please as per TOS [/edit] [/edit][/1]

They are denying that it was server not found for 20 minutes. I checked many of the sites they hosted and their home page and it was definitely server not found.

Yeah. I know about these template services now, I've been building the site for over a year, gradually.

So how hard would it be to switch from <my host> to my own set up on another host?

I know how to do all of the coding now, I know html, I can use Joomla, NVU, Gimp, Rapid Weaver, etc..(on a mac) I could build and maintain the site on my own, no problem now. I did set up my own domain name instead of using <my host>'s default, so I could just have it transfered. It's the server side stuff that I have had nightmares with before and this has been real easy in that regard.

Would transferring the domain effect search engine ranking, the directories I'm in, Press releases, etc?

Can anyone give me advice on transferring my domain?

Thanks,
Ev

[edited by: Ev_olution at 2:57 pm (utc) on Sep. 2, 2006]

[edited by: jatar_k at 2:29 am (utc) on Sep. 6, 2006]
[edit reason] no hostnames thanks [/edit]

I am suspecting some major internet backbone or hub problems or something over the past few hours.

Late last night and early this morning I found a lot of my usual sites that I check almost daily would not come up, and few - if any, are related. Even some of the major sites - like some of Microsoft - was getting similar errors for an hour or so.

Just a follow up - I am still seeing many outages, not only from the host in question, but from other sites that seem to use the same main hub, so it appears that someone somewhere has a major problem.

Just a follow up - Earthlink/Covad (their main carrier) is "having issues" connecting to some places, and one of the major ones in that IP range is lunar pages, which hosts thousands of sites...

Not looking good for Earthlink - they promised a "less than 24 hours" fix, and now into it's 30th hour.

How common is this?

It happens. My hosting company has an alternate message board that always has information when ever they get a DOS attack or whatever.

25 minutes isn't that much. I wouldn't change hosting unless there have been other problems.

<my host> is back down today and they say it's my ISP. I've had friends from all over the country check their hosted sites and they get the same server not found.

How do you find out if <my host> is on a certain backbone?

Ev

[edited by: jatar_k at 2:30 am (utc) on Sep. 6, 2006]

Quote <It happens. My hosting company has an alternate message board that always has information when ever they get a DOS attack or whatever.

25 minutes isn't that much. I wouldn't change hosting unless there have been other problems.>

But my host is denying that anything happened. They are saying it's my ISP, which is silly, I can pull up every other site I try. If I cannot access any of their hosted sites, other subscribers must have complained and they are acting like I am being unreasonable.

I've never had one of my sites down twice in one week for over twenty minutes. It's the acting like nothing is happening and being defensive that makes me suspicious.If it was me, I would want to help my client figure it out.

I think it's Joomla time with another host!

Ev

<my host> is back up, they were down for over 30 minutes. That's twice in one week that I know of.

I just emailed them to try to get a straight answer. I'm posting this experience to document it, in case other people have problems in the future and because they will not give me a reasonable answer.

To cover all bases, can anyone tell me the different ways that a site could come up "server not found". Could it really be my ISP? If other people on other ISP's could not access it? Don't think so. If it's a backbone problem, then why didn't they acknowledge that? Then all of their clients would of been effected, could I be the only one that noticed?

I'm just really bummed I have to recreate my whole site (I used their templates) and move it to another host.

Ev

[edited by: jatar_k at 2:30 am (utc) on Sep. 6, 2006]

Why are you editing out the name of the host? What's the point of a forum if you edit out the name of the one of the parties involved? I'll invite them to respond, how about that?

Ev

[edited by: Ev_olution at 3:31 pm (utc) on Sep. 5, 2006]

It can get extremely frustating I know but it's too easy for the forum to get flooded with spam if such names can be mentioned.

Happily software products can be mentioned, just not domain names.

Ironically this is probably the one place you shouldn't really mention your business. Too many astute eyes looking for things to exploit, copy, scrape etc.

P.

But my host is denying that anything happened. They are saying it's my ISP, which is silly, I can pull up every other site I try. If I cannot access any of their hosted sites, other subscribers must have complained and they are acting like I am being unreasonable...

The fact that you can get to it from another computer means little if your provider is screwed up, as Earthlink has been now for 5+ days.

I finally got *sort of* an answer out of Earthlink on our issue, and it seems that Covad-phoenix91 is "trashing some DNS lookups" (what the tech said, not me).

The easy way to find out if there is a DNS resolving problem or something is to try something like opendns dot com. After all the problems we have had with Covad/Earthlink, in all my looking around I am finding that DNS server errors from some pretty high profile providers are somewhat rare, but can make a real mess and be hard to figure out (apparently).

are you trace routing when your down?

OK, man I'm sorry for being so naive and naming the host.

The host is still saying that it is my ISP that is having problems accessing the hosts server? How is getting a "server not found" error the result of the querying ISP? Is that possible?

This is the first problem I have had in the year the site has been up.

How do I trace route and what is it?

The reason I use this host is I want to spend my time running my business not doing programming and code. They automate the whole process through templates. It worked great until this week.

Ev

[edited by: Ev_olution at 7:46 pm (utc) on Sep. 5, 2006]