Category Archives: Internet

Responsible web sites

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Most small websites on the ‘net sit on shared hosting of some kind or another  ((this is an educated guess)).  Shared hosting means that a small number of servers handle all the requests for a large number of web sites.  How that’s achieved varies, but the bottom line is that it’s a shared infrastructure.  It’s a bit like living in shared accommodation.  There’s a single door through which everyone gets into the building, then a number of apartments which have their own doors.  But they all share the same electricity supply and water and other utilities.

With shared web hosting, all the traffic comes into the same web host network and web server cluster, and is then handled by all the different web site configurations.  In the same way that there are people who would like to break into your apartment, there are people who’d like to break into your web site to steal stuff, deface it, or to try and gain further access to the shared infrastructure.

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Downtime

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My web host has just made me aware of some upcoming downtime.

Essential Maintenance
On Sunday 18th (January) we need to perform some maintenance in our data centre in London. This will cause some services to be stopped during the hours of 11am – 6pm. The services which will be affected are:

All VoIP customers on lon-pbx-1/2/3 will be unable to make and recieve calls from thier phones, including any huntgroupsetc, will be unavailable for a period of time during the window of maintenance.

All customers web services running on lon-file-3 (/home6) will be unavailable for a period of time during the window.

Other services may be affected during this time and we apologise for any inconvience caused.

That includes me.  So, no web service during those times (UK times).

Working again

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Gradwell finally read the ticket and fixed the issue (took 3 minutes from reading the ticket to fixing the issue, shame they took 12 hours to read the ticket).

It’s annoying that I really like the Gradwell setup for managing my domains / web sites and that moving anywhere else will be a serious and huge annoying pain (~10 domains, lots of mail forwarding rules, multiple sites on the domains, pretty flexible setup for controlling it all at Gradwell).  I don’t want a single domain web hosting solution, I don’t want a web hosting company to own my domains, I don’t necessarily want a ‘reseller’ account but I basically want the config flexibility that goes with reseller accounts.  The NearlyFreeSpeech.net setup is quite nice but they don’t naturally register / host UK domains.

I’d buy a dedicated server or VPS somewhere if I could be bothered to work out how to handle my DNS.

/sigh

So I’ll probably just continue to vacillate and moan about Gradwell (like I have for 3 years).  Better the devil you know …

So, what went wrong (or WordPress, Cron and Squid)

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Recently my web host (Gradwell) moved to a new hosting platform (Apache 2, php 5.2) to try and bring things up-to-date.  In general, the end result worked okay.  However, the load balancing they had in front of their web cluster was apparently sub-par.  This became entirely apparent when a single customer was able to bring the whole thing to a grinding halt with some kind of chess related website.

Now, I know it’s shared hosting, and you have to take the performance hits every now and then, but there’s a difference between ‘takes 2 or 3 seconds longer sometimes’ and ‘didn’t load’, ‘won’t load’, ‘took 8 minutes’.  I raised a ticket on the Friday when the problems got to their worst, but for reasons I’m not sure about, that didn’t get looked at by anyone technical until Monday.  So from Friday to Monday all my Gradwell sites were basically unusable between 1pm and 8pm UK time.

Gradwell made some changes on Monday and spoke to the owner of the other site, but it didn’t really fix the problem.  Eventually they decided to replace whatever load balancer they were using with a Squid reverse proxy, which had been running ‘fine’ in front of their php4 cluster.  They did this Tuesday night and since then the site has been a lot quicker.

However, it broke WordPress.  Let me explain.

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Grrr and sorry

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Sorry if your feed reader got about 20 test posts to my blog, but something’s broken.  The automated posting of scheduled posts isn’t working along with pings and a couple of other features.  It seems to be related to Gradwell putting squid in front of it’s shared hosting infrastructure, but I can’t work out where the issue is.  I was making lots of test posts to try and work out where the issue lay.

Sorry about that.

Sorry (again)

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Well, the site was basically down from 1pm until 8pm, and it’s still slow now.  Hopefully Gradwell will finally fix this issue tomorrow when they’re properly in the office, although it’s been going on for a few weeks on and off, but this weekend has been the worst.

Every now and then I take a half hearted look at new hosting, but I’ve got a lot of effort invested in Gradwell’s setup, and I’m not sure how much I can stomach moving quite a few domains somewhere else.  This period of broken-ness is the closest I’ve come to moving, and I may set something up on another host when I have some spare cash to compare services sometime in the near future.  I’m used to the Gradwell system, and I hate change.

It’s early and cold

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Been awake since 06:30 when the cats declared war under the bed and spent the next hour fighting it out to see who could be the most annoying.  Finally unable to cope at 07:30 when I got up and let them out.

Boy it’s cold this morning. Yeh I know, curious during winter.

Gradwell’s shared hosting seemed a little quicker yesterday, maybe someone fixed something, although they still haven’t updated my support ticket (technically they weren’t in the office after 1pm yesterday but it seemed to get a lot quicker after 4pm, I just wish they’d update the bloody ticket so I knew what was going on).

Sorry

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Sorry about the poor performance of this site over the last few days, you may have had timeouts or the page loading without any style sheets, or just taking an absolute age to actually show up.

My web host (Gradwell) is once again suffering major performance issues on it’s shared hosting platform and so far, hasn’t commented on the problem ticket I raised yesterday.

The poor performance is most apparent between 2pm and 7pm (UK time) so if you have trouble then, try again earlier or later and hopefully this will get resolved next week.

Thanks for your patience.

PC World price promise pointless

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I’m flirting with buying a blu-ray player (although frankly I have been for a long time) and I’ve had my eye on the Sony BDPS350.  It’s been as low as £158 on Amazon recently although it’s up to £169 now.  I like Amazon, but when buying expensive electronics sometimes it’s nice to be able to walk back into the store with the bits in your arms and say ‘it’s broke, make it work’, and obviously it’s difficult to do that with Amazon.

So I checked in PC World, and the same player was £230.  Being generous that’s about £60 more expensive.  Yes I understand PC World has to staff stores and pay rent, but still that’s a bit crazy.  However, PC World has a price promise, I quote,

Price Match Plus: We promise we won’t be beaten on price!

So I thought, maybe I should point PC World to the Amazon price and we could get the benefit of a good price and be able to pick it up in store.   So I read a bit further, and even this bit sounded ok,

We check our prices against major retailers and websites every day so you can buy with confidence.

Oh cool, they check websites, not just high street stores.

But then you check the rest of the page,

This applies to prices offered by retailers within 30 miles of your local PC World store.

The product must be identical, in stock and available for immediate home delivery in one of the retailers detailed below – single unit purchases only.

This price promise applies to:
Argos, Comet, Jessops, Tesco, John Lewis, Asda, B&Q, Game Gamestation, Halfords, HMV, Maplin, Staples, Toys R Us, Zavvi.

In other words, they can’t or won’t compete with the price that Amazon offers.  So the price promise is basically a statement which says, we’ll match the price of stores in your local area, who in turn are probably just matching our prices or those nearby, so in your area it doesn’t really matter who’s selling this item you’re going to pay out of the nose for it.

High street retailers complain that online shopping is destroying their business, I can’t believe PC World has to charge £60 more for a Blu-ray player to cover their store costs compared to Amazon’s costs, so I suggest it’s their overpricing which is destroying their business.

Of course, if you want truly crazy, Kays Catalog charge £269 for the very same player.  Now that is insane (especially since the higher spec BDPS550 is £238 on Amazon).