Thursday, 17 June 2010

A Hosting Fiasco... 4 days and 18 hours of downtime.

All Eirca clients and resellers (and the end users...) have witnessed and suffered a downtime of 4 days and 18 hours - from 11th to 16th of June 2010. Eirca was a highly appraised company and a secure choice, especially for H-Sphere reseller hosting and dedicated clusters. Unfortunately, service had gone downhill around 2009 and the above mentioned downtime was the icing on the cake.

No formal announcement has been made up to now by Eirca management. You can get a picture of the downtime at the following threads in Web Hosting Talk (the biggest hosting community in the world):
This blog was not made to bash Eirca (leave past behind). After all, everyone who stayed with this provider so long is totally responsible (since the service had dropped down many months ago). Once Eirca offered great service and we thank them for it. But, some (or many times in hosting industry) things fail for a number of reasons.

So, by creating this blog I would like to recommend you some H-Sphere Hosting Providers that have great reputation and above all: stability, proven uptime, proven customer service for many years.

Just one advice to all resellers: do not be cheap. Your customers deserve the best. Your precious time should be productive in order to make a profit, and not spend hours (and days) moving sites around hosts and reply to customer tickets because of your upstream provider's inability.

A quick list of H-Sphere resellers (very soon we will make a complete presentation):
  • CARTIKA (premium service, the most feature-rich provider, high quality, price friendly)
  • JODOHOST (very stable provider, price friendly)
  • STEADFAST (a really old webhost, price friendly, lite-speed powered clustered h-sphere platform)

3 comments:

  1. We started seeing the decline as early as Fall 2008, when service started dropping off, tickets were being ignored, and the move to SoftLayer resulted in underpowered servers.

    After MANY attempts to reconcile our myriad issues, we finally left in late 2009, and not a moment too soon. I feel sorry for anyone who stayed long enough to be affected by this most recent meltdown.

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  2. Posting this blog as a way to get more affiliate traffic to CartikaHosting is bad salesmanship. If Andrew and Cartika know about this, I'd be VERY surprised. Infact, I'd be willing to bet that they have no idea one of their affiliates is bashing a competitor (and yes, it is bashing, even if not meant to be) in order to sell their product.

    I am fine with someone posting their opinions, but doing it with multiple affiliate links conveniently placed is in bad taste and lends a lot less credence to the post.

    The EIRCA outage sucked, anyone with half a braincell would agree, but considering this is our ONLY big outage in over 8 years, I think we've done pretty well. That's not to say we haven't apologised (including, I believe, in one of your tickets) for the outage and aren't sympathetic to the clients affected. It really sucked and we did finally get everything back up and restored properly.

    By the numbers (in response to claims of "eirca refugees"):
    Clients lost in 2006: 7 (less than 0.001%)
    Clients lost in 2010: 13 (less than 0.001%)

    Those are literal stats from this year and four years ago. I don't like losing clients, but I can understand that sometimes people have to move on, whether because of an outage, or for other reasons. 0.001% client loss in a year hardly lays ground for calling those who have cancelled "refugees", though, I think you can agree.

    Like I said: The outage sucked for everyone (If you think we enjoyed being on outage status for four days, you're clearly not thinking straight).

    Good luck in the future, Antonis.

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  3. Hello Simon

    As I stated, there is no intention to bash from my part. I have seen similar refugee sites in the past (some host also provide coupons for related situations). And I am not promoting only Cartika, but any other quality H-sphere provider that has an affiliate system.

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