website outage yesterday.

I wanted to apologize for the long website outage yesterday. The server that hosts our site was running a file system check for a few hours and there wasn't anything we could do. If anyone is ever curious, we're on rhodope, from Site 5: http://www.site5.com/support/

Thanks for the heads-up, I'll make sure to avoid them in the future.

One beni for me was that the DNS servers or something must have been updated so now I can log on at work again.

Oops! Did I say that? JK, Psyche, NOT!

Actually Site5 is pretty good, it's just that the Arduino site has really grown beyond the point where it makes sense to have it on a shared hosting plan. For personal web pages and the like, they can be a good value.

Actually Site5 is pretty good

Site5 would seem to very somewhere between "barely passable" and "what a deal" depending on your server.
From the support forum's outage announcements, It's obvious some servers are down much more often then others.
Rhodope for instance has seen service pretty much every week while (for instance) enki (or lithium) has seen an outage every few months while it rebooted.

What concerns me though, are the number of instances of "server came up read-only, we're fscking and hopefully everything will magically be better".

Over the years I have used everything from Doteasy to $50/month managed hosting. Places mentioned above like Site 5 and are bad news unless you're running a tiny website, as they cram 200 to 400 sites onto each server, and don't really offer any performance guarantee. On top of that the business model for big shared hosting companies like site5 and Doteasy is to raise your account level and charges every time you exceed their limits. Additionally, these places are renowned for their lousy service, as this is part of how they make money: cram as many sites on a server as possible, with as much automated support as possible and as little real live people support as possible.

That said, the best I have found in response to the above general situation with web hosting comes from two places:

This is good for just setting up a site on the spur of the moment. One account lets you set up as amny domains as you like. Domains are billed by bandwidth and storage. Freeduino.org lives there, and costs about $1.50 a month. This is sort of programmer's heaven for web hosting, as you can get into the nuts and bolts of the site config very easily, or set up hosting and SQL for for a new site literally in minutes. it would be the perfect host if they had better uptime, which I would guess is between 98-99.5% a month. Not a good place for Arduino.cc, but worth mentioning in general.

http://www.fusednetwork.com
This place is simply unbelievable. They have shared or dedicated hosting, and I think it is possible to get something in between, i.e the service is scaleable, both up and down, by request. Their support is the same as I used to get with managed hosting- i.e. your emails go to the network admin's Blackberry. You always get a response within the hour, often within minutes. Uptime ratio is something like 99.99%. Speed is excellent, as is the service. If you put arduino.cc here, you will not be disappointed.

D

I currently use ServerAxis, they have dedicated and virtual servers. I run a company website, commerce and email server from a $60/mo virtual server which is ~1/5 of a quad-core server 80GB RAID 10 storage. You receive an SSH login and a base install of the Linux OS of your choice, you configure the server and install everything you need such as Apache and Postfix. There was one required reboot after they updated the virtualization core (warned three days in advance, scheduled during off-peak hours), and I've needed to reboot a couple times when updating the kernel. Otherwise no downtime.

I have accounts with TotalChoiceHosting and Dreamhost for personal website and email stuff. I'd recommend TotalChoice for something decently reliable for home use, and Dreamhost for playing around with multiple sites you don't care too much about.

gloooooops,
file system check for several hours.... this looks more than strange!
Does it means that they have only one server available ? Are data replicated somewhere ?
What happens if the server disk crash, the complete Arduino web site is lost (forever) ?
Why not miroring the Web site on some other servers ?
Olivier

Arduino.cc server "reseller" is Site5, but the site itself is hosted by "ThePlanet Internet Services". Clients of "The Planet" also include "Hostgator".

We lease a dedicated server from Hostgator, and they lease the server off "ThePlanet".

"ThePlanet" give Hostgator and Site5 bulk rates for servers, so its cheaper using one or the other, rather than using "ThePlanet" direct.

Whatever deal your on at Site5, you'll get a better price from Hostgator for "the same server" but better service. Hostgator have 3 or 4 times the volume of clients than Site5, so their prices are more competitive.

You guys might also look at updating the forum software from Yabb, which uses flat files and has endless vulnerabilities, to something a bit more "this century" like SMF that has a php/mySql backend.

Arduino.cc server "reseller" is Site5, but the site itself is hosted by "ThePlanet Internet Services". Clients of "The Planet" also include "Hostgator".

We lease a dedicated server from Hostgator, and they lease the server off "ThePlanet".

ThePlanet is local to me, and they are huge. Most of the affordable hosters you'll deal with are re-selling from people like the planet, navisite, and hostway. (to name the three biggest I can think of.)

As an interesting aside, in the picture one theplanet's home page that shows their HQ from outside, you can see the building hosting Internap's Houston datacenter.

As John points out, the more volume the reseller handles, the better price-break you'll get. However, a better price doesn't always indicate better value. A lot of the resellers are very small shops, and communication breakdowns between the actual operate of the DC, the reseller, and the customer are common. I would choose a reseller with a dedicated support staff that has a lot of sites running similar software for best results. (For various reasons, I'm not able to offer a recommendation of one over another.)

!c