Hostgator failure forces postponement of Vincentian Virtual meeting
My deepest apologies to those who were looking forward to the Vincentian Family virtual meeting “Matthew 25 in a digital age”
I never imagined that a commercial service could not repair a failed piece of equipment in more than 24 hours!
Hostgator, the commercial service we use, has revealed how ill prepared they are for inevitable emergencies. They apparently do not have any redundancy built in and insufficient personnel to handle replacement of failed equipment.
Our event will be rescheduled to next week and we will try to get the word out through the multiple channels we used to spread the word.
Tags: Mt. 25
Hello, I’m the owner of hostgator and am very sorry for the issues you had recently. Your site is on a dedicated server that experienced a failing hard drive. It only takes a few minutes to swap a hard drive out, but unfortunately it take hours for a new OS to load along with cpanel to be installed. Once this is done it takes hours more to copy and restore all your data off the failing drive. A huge part of the delay here was the datacenter making a mistake on the original os reload and us having to start the entire process over again. This mistake should have never of happened! Every hard drive in the world is going to fail at some point, there’s just no way around this. On our shared servers we run a raid10 setup that allows for drives to be replaced quickly and easily when one is failing. If you’re worried about future drive failures I’d highly recommend you upgrade to this type of hardware setup since this is what we do on all of our shared boxes and would allow for the entire swap / process to be done in about an hour. If you have any questions please reach out to me at brent@hostgator.com I very much appreciate your response and explanation. I for my part take responsibility for venting my frustration so publicly. I also appreciate the constructive advice to minimize the impact of inevitable failures in the future. We are currently reviewing these issues. Again, thank you for reaching out.2 Comments
As I am sure you can appreciate, this came at the end of a six week long discussion which was to be capped with the event on Saturday.
Hello,
I’m the owner of hostgator and am very sorry for the issues you had recently. Your site is on a dedicated server that experienced a failing hard drive.
It only takes a few minutes to swap a hard drive out, but unfortunately it take hours for a new OS to load along with cpanel to be installed. Once this is done it takes hours more to copy and restore all your data off the failing drive.
A huge part of the delay here was the datacenter making a mistake on the original os reload and us having to start the entire process over again. This mistake should have never of happened!
Every hard drive in the world is going to fail at some point, there’s just no way around this. On our shared servers we run a raid10 setup that allows for drives to be replaced quickly and easily when one is failing. If you’re worried about future drive failures I’d highly recommend you upgrade to this type of hardware setup since this is what we do on all of our shared boxes and would allow for the entire swap / process to be done in about an hour.
If you have any questions please reach out to me at brent@hostgator.com
I very much appreciate your response and explanation.
I for my part take responsibility for venting my frustration so publicly.
As I am sure you can appreciate, this came at the end of a six week long discussion which was to be capped with the event on Saturday.
I also appreciate the constructive advice to minimize the impact of inevitable failures in the future. We are currently reviewing these issues.
Again, thank you for reaching out.