...dump them, or give them another chance?

 

We're using an Australian based company called 'dotable.com' as our web host provider.  This is (was) a small company directly run by the owner ("Aussie Bob")  who put together a very good team.  They were acquired by "UK-2 Group" at the end of last year, Bob stayed on for a while, but left last December.

 

For Lime Tech, dotable has been very responsive, but one continuing problem has been bandwidth limits.  For that reason, and the recent outage, I'm probably going to be moving to another host next month - but this is about as fun, and as much work as doing taxes 

Dump them and rent a server from Leaseweb. Its an investment that will pay of in the end.

 

When you are one of many cusomers paying for a shared service you always get this problem. When you rent your own server you are one of one

 

 

...dump them, or give them another chance?

 

This is not the first time you've been down.. It's probably the longest, but certainly not the first.

I don't know what kind of a deal you are getting, from my perspective, it may be good pocket wise, but it is not all that good service wise.

 

I would look for a new home.

 

...dump them, or give them another chance?

 

We're using an Australian based company called 'dotable.com' as our web host provider.  This is (was) a small company directly run by the owner ("Aussie Bob")  who put together a very good team.  They were acquired by "UK-2 Group" at the end of last year, Bob stayed on for a while, but left last December.

 

For Lime Tech, dotable has been very responsive, but one continuing problem has been bandwidth limits.  For that reason, and the recent outage, I'm probably going to be moving to another host next month - but this is about as fun, and as much work as doing taxes 

 

As a customer and forum member, I have generally been satisfied by the "uptime" of the LimeTech site.  This past weekend's outage was pretty extreme, though, but perhaps there were extenuating circumstances that were explained to you.  I can't speak to bandwidth limits or other reasons you might want to change, but if this single outage is the main concern, I'd likely give them another chance.

I actually log onto this site everyday just to see what new postings there are.  Reading them gives me many ideas for what I want to do with my server.  From a business perspective I would probably change services because this forum is your number 1 method of tech support.  If I was a new customer I would definately think twice before buying a system because the site didn't even show a splash screen that the site was down.  I would have thought that the company was out of business.  If it is a serious pain to switch I would give them one more chance, but they have to have a method for showing the site is down like redirect the site to a splash screen going forward.  Just my 2 cents.

Or put another way.... a single lost sale cost more than a years dotable.com hosting.

 

Hosts are 10 a penny when your paying $5 a month you can expect a service to match. If they break you cant shout at them cause what do they care if they lose one $5 customer.

 

For a company whos entire business is based on an internet shop front, support and advertisement IMHO an appropriate investment would be a server dedicated to your service.

 

Or put another way... I have had 2 clients whos entire userbase were stolen from a shared host. Did wonders for their business that did.

Or put another way.... a single lost sale cost more than a years dotable.com hosting.

 

Hosts are 10 a penny when your paying $5 a month you can expect a service to match. If they break you cant shout at them cause what do they care if they lose one $5 customer.

 

For a company whos entire business is based on an internet shop front, support and advertisement IMHO an appropriate investment would be a server dedicated to your service.

 

Or put another way... I have had 2 clients whos entire userbase were stolen from a shared host. Did wonders for their business that did.

 

Completely agree... though not paying $5/month; actually spent a lot of time a year ago researching and emailing shared host providers before settling on dotable.  The cost was/is not a factor (within reason).  But I have to do something, have had to delay 4.5-beta5 posting because it will probably blow the bandwidth limit again.  I'm considering linode.

Just as an FYI

 

http://www.leaseweb.com/en/products/dedicated-servers/packages/34/

 

Server: EverCase ECR9130

Remote Power Management: Remote Power Management

Server Control Panel: None

Uplink Port: 1 x 100Mbps Full-Duplex

IP: 2

RAM: 512MB DDR2

OS: Debian

CPU: 1x AMD Sempron 3100+

Harddisk: 1 x 160GB SATA II

Volume Connectivity: 2000GB data traffic

Contract term: 12 months

 

 

€ 29,25 / month if paid 12 months in advance

 

If you need more data transfer i would look at server.lu. I have several from each and whilst LW is more reliable its really all degrees of the 99th percentile.

 

But I have to do something, have had to delay 4.5-beta5 posting because it will probably blow the bandwidth limit again.

 

You don't have to delay posting because of bandwidth limits.

There is always the bittorrent option. (especially for betas, and if you included the static version of ctorrent many people could participate)

 

http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?page=torrent-details&id=57da82b44cd733774d62d21b932c2546edf430b8

http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?page=peers&id=57da82b44cd733774d62d21b932c2546edf430b8

 

There is at least some traffic that you do not have to worry about.

 

 

 

 

Good idea. I can add a seed quickly that could handle the whole swarm by itself to help you out in the interim.

what about hosting and setting up on google and sourceforge

i say google more so cuz you can add change logs along with a nice forum to go along with it and a bug tracker

 

Completely agree... though not paying $5/month; actually spent a lot of time a year ago researching and emailing shared host providers before settling on dotable.  The cost was/is not a factor (within reason).  But I have to do something, have had to delay 4.5-beta5 posting because it will probably blow the bandwidth limit again.  I'm considering linode.

 

I've got a small hobby site of my own on linode (for about 18 months now) and can highly recommend them. They are very responsive to failures and are always working to improve their service.

 

Regards,

 

Stephen

 

what about hosting and setting up on google and sourceforge

i say google more so cuz you can add change logs along with a nice forum to go along with it and a bug tracker

 

I could be wrong but i think the end to end unRAID license being a mixed bag of GPL and non GPL prohibits this.

 

Also as a company Limetech should have a clear corporate space on the net since its a paid for product not a donate as its cool product.

 

 

Completely agree... though not paying $5/month; actually spent a lot of time a year ago researching and emailing shared host providers before settling on dotable.  The cost was/is not a factor (within reason).  But I have to do something, have had to delay 4.5-beta5 posting because it will probably blow the bandwidth limit again.  I'm considering linode.

 

I've got a small hobby site of my own on linode (for about 18 months now) and can highly recommend them. They are very responsive to failures and are always working to improve their service.

 

In 6 years have had to contact leaseweb once for an outage caused by a borked HDD. There has been one outage due to a massive DDoS but apart from that they dimply don't ever have outages.

 

Theres alot of advantages of renting a server that is completely yours in a fully redundant in every way NOC.

 

VPSs have their place but for the money your saving IMO they are rarely worth it

what about hosting and setting up on google and sourceforge

i say google more so cuz you can add change logs along with a nice forum to go along with it and a bug tracker

 

I could be wrong but i think the end to end unRAID license being a mixed bag of GPL and non GPL prohibits this.

 

Also as a company Limetech should have a clear corporate space on the net since its a paid for product not a donate as its cool product.

 

aww okay i guess that does make sense cuz i'm pretty sure that would have been done if it was the case

 

 

 

Im not saying its impossible, and as a source of free reliable bandwidth its a good idea for sure, just that the commercial components of unRAID may prohibit it.

 

But we have to remember that unRAID is at its heart a commercial product of Limetech LLC and a company no matter how small has money to invest when its core to their service that us as individuals would think twice about.

 

 

 

What are the bandwidth requirements of Limetech site? Have you checked?

 

You could host it locally too.

 

BTW, YES dump them. It was not the first nor the second time they screwed up.

 

 

But I have to do something, have had to delay 4.5-beta5 posting because it will probably blow the bandwidth limit again.  I'm considering linode.

 

A while back there was a push to download unRAID via torrent.  Seems like a good option, at least for betas.

I second that. Running your own torrent tracker is actually pretty simple. You dont need all the fancy web gui stuff just a couple of php pages and a torrent client to make the initial torrent and seed.

 

Using someone elses probably just as easy however i would allow direct download of the torrent file from here rather than requiring users to go to another website to collect it.

I second that. Running your own torrent tracker is actually pretty simple. You dont need all the fancy web gui stuff just a couple of php pages and a torrent client to make the initial torrent and seed.\

 

The only problem with running a tracker is that the stats(traffic) is continually updated while the torrents are seeded.

 

Using someone elses probably just as easy however i would allow direct download of the torrent file from here rather than requiring users to go to another website to collect it.

 

I agree here.

Including a statically compiled ctorrent in the unrAID distribution would make it even easier for users to download right into the unRAID box.

 

...dump them, or give them another chance?

 

For Lime Tech, dotable has been very responsive, but one continuing problem has been bandwidth limits.  For that reason, and the recent outage, I'm probably going to be moving to another host next month - but this is about as fun, and as much work as doing taxes 

 

Wait a second, you're poll was a bit deceiving there...you didn't mention BANDWIDTH LIMITS.  That's not the webhost being down...unless you're under a RESELLER and THEY ran out of bandwidth which means you've made a bad choice in hosting....so maybe I'm not understanding the whole situation...  what kinda bandwidth are you guys using?  I don't see why you'd be racking up THAT much bandwidth really...heck, I'd offer to host you but I don't trust myself

I'll throw in a vote for Torrent.  I can set an rtorrent up as a seed with gigabit connectivity for free for a bit if you're interested...keep it in mind, there are also other decent free file hosting options which may not look as professional but might be an option: MyBloop, and MediaFire are two that come to mind.

...dump them, or give them another chance?

 

For Lime Tech, dotable has been very responsive, but one continuing problem has been bandwidth limits.  For that reason, and the recent outage, I'm probably going to be moving to another host next month - but this is about as fun, and as much work as doing taxes 

 

Wait a second, you're poll was a bit deceiving there...you didn't mention BANDWIDTH LIMITS.  That's not the webhost being down...unless you're under a RESELLER and THEY ran out of bandwidth which means you've made a bad choice in hosting....so maybe I'm not understanding the whole situation...  what kinda bandwidth are you guys using?  I don't see why you'd be racking up THAT much bandwidth really...heck, I'd offer to host you but I don't trust myself

There have been two different issues...

 

Tom's site has exceeded its own bandwidth allocation several times in the past.  When that occurs, all we see is a default "Bandwidth Allocation Exceeded" page from his host until he pays for the excess needed for the remainder of the month.

 

Recently, when he was down for 3 days, I know I could not even get to his host's name servers... They were un-reachable.. Apparently, they lost their connectivity with the rest of the world.  (And I have no idea of the actual cause... it could have been a network outage upstream, or a data-center-meltdown, or a mis-configured router somewhere, or a tcp/ip attack flooding their network... it does not matter other than Tom seemed to mention it was not entirely under his web-host's control) 

 

Only Tom (and his web-host) know the full details.

 

Joe L.

 

DNS failures should not be a problem is hosted properly at separate geographical locations.  Usually you'll have your primary you keep up to date then have 2 slaves off somewhere else.  Hosting them ALL at the same provider is a 'no-no'.  They should be on different providers in different parts of the world.

Just checking DNS for Lime-technology.com it looks like they're both on the same /24.  Also some of the timeouts are pretty long:

 

WARNING: Your SOA REFRESH interval is : 86400 seconds. This seems high. You should consider decreasing this value to about 3600-7200 seconds (or higher, if using DNS NOTIFY). RFC1912 2.2 recommends a value between 1200 to 43200 seconds (20 minutes to 12 hours, with the longer time periods used for very slow Internet connections), and if you are using DNS NOTIFY the refresh value is not as important (RIPE recommend 86400 seconds if using DNS NOTIFY). This value determines how often secondary/slave nameservers check with the master for updates. A value that is too high will cause DNS changes to be in limbo for a long time.

 

WARNING: Your SOA EXPIRE time is : 3600000 seconds. This seems a bit high. You should consider decreasing this value to about 1209600 to 2419200 seconds (2 to 4 weeks). RFC1912 suggests 2-4 weeks. This is how long a secondary/slave nameserver will wait before considering its DNS data stale if it can't reach the primary nameserver.

 

Also on other issues looks like lime-technology.com doesn't have an SPF record and no abuse contact...just thought I'd throw those out there

The outage was caused by a physical server crashing with a hardware problem.  I think they eventually blamed it on a RAID card but who knows?

 

And yes, we are using a shared host which originally had a 40GB/month bandwidth limit.  But as the size of the unRAID OS zip file has increased, along with a steady monthly increase in the number of downloads, we would hit that limit once in a while.  So what I did was get two accounts at the same host: one for the website itself, and one to hold just the zip files.

 

Next the problem was that after switching to joomla for the main website, noticed a pretty big jump in the website bandwidth, and also still getting close to exceeding 40GB/month on the download account.  So... increased both to hosting limit of 100GB/month (so a total of 200GB/month).

 

This should tide us over until I can move to a different solution.