Today achille.name was down: hosting has become a challange !

Many of you were fast asleep while I went thru hell this morning my time because our DSL went down and so did all our Clients’ web sites – including achille.name along with my blog … what a way to start the week.

Everything happened within a split second this morning just before 12 o’clock, we were suddenly off line. There have been a number of interruptions over the past few weeks so I was very upset when it happened yet again.

Within seconds I was on the phone with the helpdesk. They gave me a ticket, put down the phone, and then all I could do was wait … meanwile the phone started ringing.

I won’t go into details as to WHO the connectivity provider is but I will tell you what happened. Nornally interruptions occur, I tell my SEO hosting Clients that networks are built by people and act just like them: They have good days and bad ones.

But there was something sinister about todays down indicent and Raimondo, my systems partner had a bad feeling about what was happening.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the interrupted spidering activites and possible consequences our down time could have on search engine positioning of Clients.

Hours went by one after another waiting for a call back from the helpdesk or a signal from the virtual world. Nothing happened.

I know there are threshold frequencies above which you trigger shut down mode in the helpdesk operators, so I avoid calling often. But after nearly 4 hours the time was right.

The technician identified my DSL and ran a quick check. The circuit was up and running … he told me everything was fine and there were no problems on the line and that someone would have to come out to our office and check the router and frame relay apparatus they installed. He told me one of them was probably playing up and had to be replaced. That would mean at least another day in hell with all our web sites down and people calling every 5 minutes.

I kept the discussion going and asked a few questions just to make sure what he was saying was true. I’m not a network expert but 10 years of hosting and a great guy like raimondo can provide significant insight on what is happening. I asked if he would kindly run a few more tests and he agreed to check the additional parameters I suggested. There was something strange going on … and we discovered it !

For some strange reason the public network IPs had been switched away from our DSL and were pointing nowhere, nowhere at all, and all packets were dropped in limbo. Sounds incredible ? It can happen to you too – hosting is a vital part of your web site.

That’s why we prefer to keep this segment of the business running and do many things ourselves, providing hosting services to a small number of web sites with dedicated IPs and specific SEO needs.

It was a rough monday people, I hate mondays …