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Prolonged Downtime


Ashoat

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Okay, so this problem was pretty complicated. Turns out that some system upgrade or something made it so when batch (not bash) scripts run, they don't show up in the process list. So that made one of our cron scripts, that checks if it's running already by checking the process list, basically start spawning off lots of copies. But it only did that when another conditional was met, which explains common recent downtimes.

 

However, it took the server down one morning, and I was forced to hard reset the server. This caused some data corruption. On boot, some mounted partitions would decide to set themselves to read-only, despite not being mounted as such. This would cause unexplainable errors that took a while to debug. Once I figured out the problem, I knew the fix was to run fsck before boot. This had some problems of its own, as apparently the standard fsck command broke, so I had to get the datacenter tech to run a command that wouldn't prompt the user.

 

Looks like everything's working now, though...

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hello DJBOB

 

thanks for getting us back in operation. but believe me, when the service was down, i was clueless about what was going on .. because both heliohost and helionet were both unavailable. this is very unnerving.

 

may i humbly suggest that you have a separate "face" -- in the form of, say, a blog on an independent server, like blogspot.com -- which (a) is unlikely to be affected by whatever is happening on your servers and ( b ) can act as a channel for distribution of news and status updates.

 

i know you are offering a free service and so i really cannot demand anything in terms of customer service ... but this is a simple, inexpensive solution that you can consider.

 

cheers and have a good day.

 

prithwis

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...

thanks for getting us back in operation. but believe me, when the service was down, i was clueless about what was going on .. because both heliohost and helionet were both unavailable. this is very unnerving.

 

may i humbly suggest that you have a separate "face" -- in the form of, say, a blog on an independent server, like blogspot.com -- which (a) is unlikely to be affected by whatever is happening on your servers and ( b ) can act as a channel for distribution of news and status updates.

 

i know you are offering a free service and so i really cannot demand anything in terms of customer service ... but this is a simple, inexpensive solution that you can consider.

...

 

Actually, I sent an email to DJBob regarding this during the downtime. (Not sure if it made it to you because I sent it to the Helionet admin email that kept sending me forum notifications, if you want me to send it elsewhere with my ideas just let me know).

 

And this is what kills many small, free hosts. Communication is king in today's world and if people don't get the information they are looking for they pack up and move on.

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Okay, so this problem was pretty complicated. Turns out that some system upgrade or something made it so when batch (not bash) scripts run, they don't show up in the process list. So that made one of our cron scripts, that checks if it's running already by checking the process list, basically start spawning off lots of copies. But it only did that when another conditional was met, which explains common recent downtimes.

 

However, it took the server down one morning, and I was forced to hard reset the server. This caused some data corruption. On boot, some mounted partitions would decide to set themselves to read-only, despite not being mounted as such. This would cause unexplainable errors that took a while to debug. Once I figured out the problem, I knew the fix was to run fsck before boot. This had some problems of its own, as apparently the standard fsck command broke, so I had to get the datacenter tech to run a command that wouldn't prompt the user.

 

Looks like everything's working now, though...

 

What matters in the end is that server is up and running again :)

BTW, just a suggestion. Can we have helionet moved to a different server than heliohost? That way we'll have a way to get some insights into what's happening in the back-end while the server is out for some reasons. This time I was anxious coz neither of the sites were available. :(

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As soon as our new server (Charlie) is up and running, we'll have HelioHost and HelioNet on an isolated virtual machine.

 

Actually, I sent an email to DJBob regarding this during the downtime. (Not sure if it made it to you because I sent it to the Helionet admin email that kept sending me forum notifications, if you want me to send it elsewhere with my ideas just let me know).
I got the email. The admin team is considering your offer and we'll get back to you once we've come to a consensus :)
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Guest Geoff
As soon as our new server (Charlie) is up and running, we'll have HelioHost and HelioNet on an isolated virtual machine.

 

Ok, thats good because I was considering suggesting moving to VPS to reduce downtime.

 

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Free service or not, people using it require proper service. This was the last straw with me because I just lost 2 clients. Thanks for nothing.

 

If it was just free - great. But look at the first page:

 

"Professional-grade web hosting... with a twist

 

You know that old saying: "You get what you pay for?" Well, HelioHost is changing that around. Our feature set beats out most professional web hosts, yet we come without a price tag."

 

Guess what: Helio isn't changing anything, and we ARE getting what we pay for. Which pisses me off because it's false advertising.

 

Good luck with your future endeavors, but I will be moving to a new host by the end of the week.

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i know you's are saying everything is fixed, but i cant access my site through my url. My account has been cancelled because i can still log into cpanel and i cant think of anything else being wrong since here is working.

 

Punctured-drum.com however throws me an error message saying the site is unavailable.

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you need to have two servers to minimize the load...

 

i'm a CEO of a hosting but my private website is here because i think that heliohost bis better than my host..... (in: cpanel and disk space, but not in speed uptime and ftp speed)

 

www.galaticohost.0lx.net

 

but i think that Heliohost is better and i will kep my site here in heliohost.

 

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