Yeah, there area couple of dodgy problems, and it seems to be related to the DDoS of earlier in the week. Ive never experienced downtime, apart from my site is currently only accessible by IP instead of the address due to waiting for an SSL Cert to be installed and the DNS is a bit iffy with the IP/name at the moment! Wish I just bought one when I first signed up!
Soldato
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Mine is fine as well.
As gutting as it is for a site to be down for an extended period of time, an outage of any type is rare on Vidahost and and outage of this length is almost unheard of.
http://forum.vidahost.com/index.php?threads/kenya.1810/#post-11395
http://forum.vidahost.com/index.php?threads/kenya.1810/#post-11395
You'd understand wrong then.
They come highly recommended around here for being cheap, and having reasonable customer support. If they don't make a whole lot of money, and spend much of what they do make on support staff, how does one suppose they'll afford the kind of networking infrastructure that'll survive a ddos?
The reality of the situation may well be they're the best of a bad bunch, but they still took your money and promised a service you haven't fully received. I'd go for a free month, and it's really a rare occurrence, stick with them - especially if they give the free month, most hosters have SLAs which actually promise nothing.
vidahost said:
I feel kinda sorry for them, but this kinda thing is worrying. Perhaps 99.9% of their customers do host their DNS with them, but I generally don't like providers messing with DNS I setup, nor do I always host that in the same place I host the site, meaning if I paid vida, my site would be down for an additional 8-24 hours for anyone whos name servers had this record? Seems an odd decision, but I guess it was that or leave everyone broken as that IP got hammered.
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Just to set the record straight (wearing my Vidahost hat for a minute), it was a very small subset of customers (in the region of 0.1%) who were affected. Of those customers, it was people on the shared IP of the Kenya server that were most affected - if you had an SSL disruption would have been minimal.
In terms of the DNS, the IP was only updated if it pointed to Kenya's shared IP. Custom records would have been unaffected and, whilst a few ISPs don't obey TTLs, most visitors would have been able to see the site on its new IP very quickly. There was no "messing with DNS" involved, it was a carefully planned and coordinated action.
As for not being able to afford network infrastructure, we may be a low cost provider but with almost 150,000 websites hosted, we're not short of money and not frightened of investing it in improving the services. We pride ourselves on excellent support but our infrastructure expenditure every month is vastly more than our wage bill.
aln, before you post things which are unfounded, I'd like to invite you to come for a tour of our facilities. I think "best of a bad bunch" does somewhat of a disservice to one of the most highly regarded and fastest growing hosting companies in the UK.
To anyone who is a client of Vidahost, let me express my personal apologies for the disruption.
In terms of the DNS, the IP was only updated if it pointed to Kenya's shared IP. Custom records would have been unaffected and, whilst a few ISPs don't obey TTLs, most visitors would have been able to see the site on its new IP very quickly. There was no "messing with DNS" involved, it was a carefully planned and coordinated action.
As for not being able to afford network infrastructure, we may be a low cost provider but with almost 150,000 websites hosted, we're not short of money and not frightened of investing it in improving the services. We pride ourselves on excellent support but our infrastructure expenditure every month is vastly more than our wage bill.
aln, before you post things which are unfounded, I'd like to invite you to come for a tour of our facilities. I think "best of a bad bunch" does somewhat of a disservice to one of the most highly regarded and fastest growing hosting companies in the UK.
To anyone who is a client of Vidahost, let me express my personal apologies for the disruption.
I used to work at a hosting company that hosted some "interesting websites" to say the least. One in particular would occasionally receive ransom notices warning of them to pay up of face being shut down. Sure enough, those DDoS attacks were easy enough to predict, just fairly impossible to stop.
I'm not a network admin so there are many better qualified than me to comment, but as I understand it they range between:
Killing a site
Killing a server
Killing a switch
Killing a router
Killing your network
Killing your transit link
The higher up the chain you get, the more likely the only fix is to tell the site who's being DDoS'd they can't host with you anymore.
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So if the IP of keyna is 10.0.0.1 and I host my DNS with overclockers.co.uk (yeah OK, I know) and you change the IP of the server to 10.0.0.2 because 10.0.0.1 is receiving far too much traffic, how does my site stay live?
I admit I may have not fully understood what you did, it wasn't explicitly stated afterall, but I gather my site would be broken?
You mean like virgin media?
I wasn't saying you skimped on it, just that you probably could do better if you had a gazillion pounds, and that you probably currently couldn't handle the biggest botnets in the world using you for target practice. This isn't a criticism of you, just trying to adjust the expectations of people who pay £3 for always up hosting in a world where it's cheaper to be the bad guys.
It was an explanation on the nature of the industry as a whole, as opposed to a personal criticism. I will rephrase it for your benefit though; you get what you pay for. If you pay for shared hosting, there will be downtime, almost certainly with anyone you host with. If your site is too important to be down, the only resolution is paying more in 99.9% of circumstances. I don't think thats unfounded, just that it is how things work.
For what it's worth, I already more or less said I wouldn't move hosts over such an event.
Don't toot your own horn. If you're any good, others will do it for you.
P.S. I'd actually like the tour, but it'd cost me too much to get down there. Thanks for the offer though.
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We only changed records which were pointing to the IP being DDoS'd to a new IP. If you had a record pointing somewhere else, it wouldn't have been touched. If you were using someone else's DNS, you would have needed to update it manually but your site would have already been down. We always advise clients to use the DNS service that we provide - there's no reason not to.
Our uptime is as close to 100% as I've seen from any hosting provider in any price bracket, as I'm sure our customers will agree. This was very much an isolated incident. Not only that but we run 2 completely separate ASs (separate routers, transits, IP ranges) in completely separate geographically diverse datacentres so that even a complete network or power outage, as unlikely as that is, would not affect all our services.
Of course nothing is perfect and we're always learning, growing and investing.
Our uptime is as close to 100% as I've seen from any hosting provider in any price bracket, as I'm sure our customers will agree. This was very much an isolated incident. Not only that but we run 2 completely separate ASs (separate routers, transits, IP ranges) in completely separate geographically diverse datacentres so that even a complete network or power outage, as unlikely as that is, would not affect all our services.
Of course nothing is perfect and we're always learning, growing and investing
.I point subdomains all over the shop, I can't let all my providers have my DNS, nor do I happen to be very trusting either.
I would agree that you were between a rock and a hard place, and you probably made the better decision. I assume you took a list of all sites, removed the ones with managed DNS and made efforts to contact those left, right?
Exactly - everyone got an email telling them to update the IP if using external DNS.
Obviously aln you're quite an advanced user but the majority of the Vidahost customer base are small/medium businesses and individuals who "just want their email to work". They have no interest in hosting their DNS externally, it's only a very small fraction that do and those people would have known exactly what to do when they got the email informing them of the new IP.
Obviously aln you're quite an advanced user but the majority of the Vidahost customer base are small/medium businesses and individuals who "just want their email to work". They have no interest in hosting their DNS externally, it's only a very small fraction that do and those people would have known exactly what to do when they got the email informing them of the new IP.