I am a little concerned...

[Jacob]

Hi,

I am a little concerned about the amount of downtime that has been occuring recently. I speak as someone who has a reseller account and whos business domain and consequently whos emails are with catalyst2. Is the amount of downtime likely to decrease or is this going to be about average. I do not believe this is me being difficult, and I would be interested to hear if other users feel the same or whether or not it just me being difficult / expecting to much.

Kind Regards,

Jacob

[paulredpath]

Todays downtime was planned, you should have recieved an email about it.

I do agree that as of late (i.e. last week) we have had a resonable bit of downtime, the cisco engineer messing up the new firewall install caused most of the downtime im sure you are refering to.

We have taken steps to stablising our network and the rack move completed today is the last stage of these upgrades. You should notice a faster, more reliable service in the coming weeks.

Also keep an eye on our uptime forum wher we post 3rd party stats of how we have performed.

[gummylick]

What about recent bouts of slowness? My site has been randomly slowed down thru out the past couple of days.

[Jenny]

Hmm....I have to say something in favour of Paul.
I had to complain in the past about the web, the FTP server, the eMail and the MSSQL server. But everything is fixed and faster than ever. Today C2 is top-notch for me.

(that's why I have switched to yearly payment)

Maybe it was just your ISP, or someone did something very complex and demanding things for a fraction of a second with the CPU? If you want 100% CPU performance around the day for yourself than a dedicated server could meet your requirements

Jenny

[fbridge]

I think you miss the point. Whilst I have also seen excellent service and responses from Paul I fell that downtime has been rather high of late. The stoppage this afternoon for over an hour was indeed planned but 24 hours notice is very short. I can only think that C2's unprecedented growth over the last couple of months has led to these upgrades and as such could be acknowledged by all parties. Paul?
Frank

[webscript]

Yes there has been too much downtime.

You have a female image but your name is Frank?

[henry]

I saw a 83.33% uptime over the past week (06/09-12/09) and see and average of 80-95% uptime week in week out.

[paulredpath]

None of our servers have had an uptime less than 95% lately, we monitor them all and the results are posted in the uptime forum. So if you are getting 83% i suggest you use a decent uptime monitor.

Fbridge, we have grown significantly over the past 6-9 months, the downtime we have experienced of late thou was not due to this. Last weeks downtime with the firewall was not our fault, rather an engineer who didnt seem to know as much as he let on.

Now we have upgraded our network and moved racks everyone will see a more conistant service. Obviously there are always problems you can't forsee but over the past 6 months we have invested over £15,000 in our network and servers to help provide a top notch service.

Again i apologise for the sporadic downtime of late but things will inmorve in the coming weeks.

[henry]

I currently use 2 seperate uptime stats monitors one is paid for and the other is a free (internetseer)

Both are reporting for the weeks;

For September 6, 2003 - September 12, 2003
83.33%

For August 30, 2003 - September 5, 2003
100%

For August 23, 2003 - August 29, 2003
99.54%

For August 16, 2003 - August 22, 2003
95.09%

For July 19, 2003 - July 25, 2003
86.36%

For July 12, 2003 - July 18, 2003
98.54%

For July 5, 2003 - July 11, 2003
96.56%

I dont mind that there is scheduled downtime etc, that normal problems which arrive, or even if its down suddenly. Im not complaining, I'm simply posting my results.

[henry]

Just to add... As you were saying in a previous post
click here
lemon is being replaced, and you are to start monitoring sometime soon (10th sept?) So is there any chance you can post some of the current uptime stats so I can compare.

[airrav]

I have been having problems as well, for the last year the site has been very good for the most part... These last couple of changes have been more for the worse than the better imo.

My biggest concern is support has not contacted me regarding my issues at all in the last 3 days. Are they on vacation?

[paulredpath]

We are a bit behind atm, im catching up tonight :P

[webscript]

Also rather lately I have noticed a decrease in page requesting time, and image loading speed.

Things are starting to go pack to normal, I think.

Because overall you have to be one of the best hosts with asp.net for only $35NZD / year!

Good Work C2,

Adam.

[DMF]

The story of NUL.

A year ago I purchased hosting here on C2, the first emails were unhelpful and erratic at best; fortunately, a cool head prevailed and after many emails (which took almost a month from start to finish) I finally had the details with which to use my webspace.

The webspace was fine till 6 months ago - then the whole things seemed to run through treacle .... S L O W was most certainly the order of the day; and it got slower, and s l o w e r and s l o w e r.

Then, a few weeks back ...... BOOM Gateway errors 403.1 all over the place. Despite a month of emails to C2, moving our data to a *nix server from the w2k one, chamnges to the account and firewall, despite support emails from Sweden, USA and Denmark all showing these errors, C2 has been unable to resolve the issues at hand and I have asked for (and been provided with) a refund from my recent renewal.

IMHO, the service has gone from good, to bad, to worse to.... well... pointless. What good is it having webspace that nobody can access. I had the data checked out on another server and it's working perfectly well and a good speed.

So the point of all this ?

Paul had told me that they host 1500 accounts, and none were encountering any problems - reading this forum tonight I can see that that is not the entire truth. Paul blamed the Yabb BBS, but the yabb ppl have proved otherwise. He blamed my ISP - a tough one to back-up when we have users from 12 countries accessing our data and all experiencing the same problem. In addition, I also use InternetSeer among others and I also show a marked % uptime less than 90%.

I seriously doubt the honesty and integrity of C2, I also doubt their skills with server setups and support. I gave up making tickets ages ago as they never got answered, and instead used straight email.

Let me assure you good folks, I am NOT any kind of newbie at this. My business features Webdesign, Media Design & Concept Art, T-Shirt Design & Printing, Forum Support and High-Value Prize Game Tournaments, Multi-Game Multi-Clan support, Protography, PC Repair and Modding, Electrical and Audio Engineering and Games Creation Programming.

Speaking as business, that requires a good hosting service... Im sorry to say this, but I do NOT and at no point in the future will, suggest Catalyst 2 as a viable business hosting solution. Yesterday I told Paul I was sorry to leave, today after seeing the speed my websites are getting elsewhere for a similar price, I fervantly retract that statement. Its like going from 56k modem to ADSL again.

Sorry Paul, but C2 IS a below standard service, despite your good willed efforts and expensive hardware. Downtime HAS been excessive and support has been ..... shall we say .... minimalist in explanation at times. Please take all this as constructive, and take the time to look long and hard at your setup. Suggesting that people use better software is bad, mainly because you can monitor "from base" which will ALWAYS mean a better ratio than from "the web", which, lets face it, is where the rest of us access it from.

Yours
Andrew.

[Jacob]

As the person who started this thread, I feel I ought to be the one to respond to DMF’s post. Whilst I was a little concerned about the amount of downtime recently (which now appears to have got better), I have to say the customer support I have received from Paul from the very moment I started looking into C2 until now has been exemplary. Cetainly not “unhelpful and erratic at best”. It does appear that you have been very unlucky. As they say, the exception proves the rule and I feel in this case, you are the exception. As you read through the various parts of the forum, Paul is there to respond to the problems that arise and sort them out.

I wish you well with your new host.

Regards,

Jacob