Allpar serious downtime

As you might have noticed, the site has gone down for LONG periods of time. This is just about the most aggravating thing that can happen to a webmaster, and it’s been happening despite assurances like:

“We apologize for this, there was emergency hardware replacement which took place on our edge routers, this issue is now resolved. Typically we like to send out a notice prior to maintenance, however the nature of the issue which was discovered require immediate attention to prevent a larger issue as the day went on. … We certainly have the reliability of the service in mind when such things are performed and I can assure you that at this point there should not be any reason for further service disruption stemming from this.”

And then the next day, we get a 60-minute outage during the busiest part of the day.

And of course the nice people at Hostrocket now have voice-over-IP so the phones go down along with their service. And their site goes down, too. No, they don’t have a $60/year account somewhere else “just in case.”

I am considering failover possibilities, including going to managed DNS via a service like EasyDNS, where I can quickly repoint the IP address to a backup server at 1and1. At the moment the DNS system is based on the server itself which seemed to make sense (single point of failure instead of two) but that doesn’t make sense now. The problem with this is caching; it can take up to 20 minutes for the IP address to change. Still, that’s better than an hour or, if Hostrocket folds up their tents without warning (some of us had this experience in the past), a few days.

The backup site can’t be mirrored effectively wtih the forums and all, but it can provide a “90%” solution. If I rented a second dedicated server just for these times, it would be easier than using a 1and1 VPS - there’s be more bandwidth and such for daily mirroring.

Or I could just get a better hosting service. That’s really the best solution. So I’m taking recommendations now. We are currently paying about $245 for a setup with 700 GB transfer limit, 80 GB hard drive, 4 GB RAM, 2.8 GHz dual-core Xeon processor, daily backup to hard drive array, and WHM/Cpanel. That includes tech support, supposedly. If you know of something really reliable and reputable, let me know.