[The Mean Fish]

I can just imagine the number of people who were planning on doing random mods this weekend who are now crying because that site is down Stu.

[Whobeme]

I just started going back to Stu's site this week. I visited it a few times in the past when I had my YJ, but have been Jeepless for a year. I just got a '97 TJ this week and Stu's site has already been a ton of help. Hope to see things go smooth with the change over.

[msavard]

Originally Posted by matt3liv

Do you EVER work? ,S.

Hey man.. I'm a good multi-tasker.

[Stu Olson]

Originally Posted by The Mean Fish

I can just imagine the number of people who were planning on doing random mods this weekend who are now crying because that site is down Stu.

It wasn't done on purpose, that I can guarantee.

ipowerweb.com was OK until something broke....then they started making the movie "3 Stooges Do Web Hosting".

I hear its due out by Labor Day....catch it at a theatre near you!

[Materdaddy]

Originally Posted by Stu Olson

It wasn't done on purpose, that I can guarantee.

ipowerweb.com was OK until something broke....then they started making the movie "3 Stooges Do Web Hosting".

I hear its due out by Labor Day....catch it at a theatre near you!

What happened to their 99.9% uptime guarantee? Are they compensating you? Did that policy go when the "web" went from the name? I wonder why it's "iPower" now and not "iPowerWeb" anymore?

[Dogman]

Originally Posted by Materdaddy

DANGIT!!! Just when my Air switch came in from 4x4 mods, and I wanted to get it wired up... The York OBA page on your site is what I was going to use! Oh well... Good luck with your move... I recently switched hosts and registrars of my domain. It was a lengthy 2 month process and I got the run-around from wayyyy too many people. Hope you have better results!

Ouch, just did a whois (after seeing a vDeck error on your page) and saw that you have iPower and Tucows... that's who I just left, and boy was it a pain in the butt. If I can recommend something to you... keep Tucows as your registrar, just move the hosting! That's going to save you a lot of headache, unless tucows does a better job releasing your domain. I didn't get any confirmation e-mails to allow the domain transfer, and after 30 days, they put it into "redemption period" which they wanted close to $200 to get out of. Needless to say, I let it expire just to have it snatched up by some domain poacher. They dumped it rather quickly as my domain isn't a traffic/revenue maker. Anyways, good luck, just wanted to vent on my crappy experiences with iPower/Tucows (mostly Tucows).

Also, i'd mirror your site if you want!

Google cache may be your friend if you can find the page...

[Materdaddy]

Originally Posted by dogman

Google cache may be your friend if you can find the page...

Why didn't i think of that??? THANK YOU!!!

Edit: Can only get up to page 7 cached, and no pictures (obviously). I think the switch install is on page 7... oh well, I guess I'll have to do other steps first, i.e. the "york preperation" one.

[kizer]

Problem with said company is they seem to forget that you pay their salary and when you complain you want service not excuses. Tis why I left.

Good idea to move. I could slander a few more hosts, but it takes a few moves to figure out who good and who pretends to be good.

Good luck Stu we all are waiting.

[Stu Olson]

A little background since a number of you have been down this road (sounds like it from the comments).

On June 6th, the FrontPage (FP) server extensions apparently corrupted for my web site. I was getting some error each time I tried to publish pages to the site. I initiated an incident report. Regular users could access the site as always.

They removed and reinstalled FP extensions. (I've come to find that if you use the word FrontPage in any statement to them, the fix is to ALWAYS remove and reinstall the FP server extensions).

It took a day or two and I was then able to publish to my site, but a couple of common FP objects, such as the hit counter, refused to work.

I initiated another incident report.

They removed and reinstalled FP extensions and proclaimed it working.

Of course, the hit counter still would not increment past 1.

For the next 3 weeks, this was tossed back and forth via several more incident reports. I also found that if I got a bit sarcastic (yeah, I know, hard to image, right? ), they just stopped responding. OK...I learned my lesson on those.

About a week into this, a support representative told me that their system administrators reported the same problem happening on several domains on the same server I was hosted on. (ah....I wasn't on cheap drugs after all!)

It took me another week to convince them that I did not want to use an alternate hit counter......although this was what I was told I MUST do.

Another issue with the FP extensions came up and I again could not upload updates to the site (but I could upload new pages). Another incident report filed.

They removed and reinstalled FP extensions. (I've come to find that if you use the word FrontPage in any statement to them, the fix is to ALWAYS remove and reinstall the FP server extensions).

It took a day or two and I was then able to publish to my site, but a couple of common FP objects, such as the hit counter, refused to work.

I initiated another incident report.

They removed and reinstalled FP extensions and proclaimed it working.

Of course, the hit counter was still broke....but I could again upload.

Several days later, their server learned a new trick. If the file I was uploading was more than about 75KB in size, it would time out their server and abort the transfer.

I initiated another incident report.

They removed and reinstalled FP extensions and claimed victory because they could log into my site as an administrator.

When I told them that the login process was not the issue and that transfering files was the glitch, I was told to go get an FTP application and use that instead of FrontPage.

Several days ago, I suggested they move my domain to another server as their network admins had still not fixed the FP hit counter issue on their server. I told them I could be glad to upload the entire 1.2 GB to a new server.

Last night, I went to check a page on my server (to respond to an e-mail about LED flashers) and found I had NO pages at all in my web site. Tech support, without notifying me, had renamed the root folder of my web site and created another one that was empty.

I guess making a new empty folder was as close to getting to a new server as I was going to see.

Obviously, I started to upload the 1.2 GB of data (by the way, I've yet to receive an e-mail from them stating they cleared out my site) to my "new" site folder.

You guessed it.....their server timed out on any file larger than about 75KB.....and it appeared they were throttling my inbound traffic.....or their server was just going down in flames.

So.....that was the straw that broke the camel's back and prompted the move to a new host.

Once my domain name is unlocked and transfered, I'll get into it with the billing department to see about refunding the remaining 6 months of the hosting agreement.

If I actually get a refund, I'll probably have a stroke.....I'm sure Larry, Moe, and Curly have something written into the hosting agreement that says screw you.


Edit: Here is a good one.....some time spent reading Google searches has taught me that you NEVER FTP files to a web site that has FP server extensions enabled. In doing so, you are very likely to corrupt the server extensions.

I find it ironic that THEIR suggestion to me to use an FTP application to transfer my files was their best attempt at fixing the problem. One a bunch of stooges!

[Materdaddy]

Originally Posted by Stu Olson

They removed and reinstalled FP extensions. (I've come to find that if you use the word FrontPage in any statement to them, the fix is to ALWAYS remove and reinstall the FP server extensions).

They might be on to something... that's the Micro$oft way, something goes wrong, reboot... reboot f'n reboot.... that's why I haven't used windows in a couple years. My machine here at work has been up for 113 days now, almost 3 months without a reboot! (Last time I rebooted was to upgrade my kernel, the time before that was a power outage... man I love linux!)

mmrosko@fuel ~ $ uptime
13:09:17 up 113 days, 15:45, 16 users, load average: 0.10, 0.11, 0.09

On another note, the reason I left iPower had more to do with no "SSH" access, which is how I chose to do most web page editing!

Again, good luck Stu!

[logem]

So what host did you decide to use now, and do you know that they are going to be reliable?

I ask this because I have a VERY reliable host, but their pricing is quite high for the amount of server space and traffic that I am allowed. Oherwise, they are flawless. I'm always considering a move, but am afraid to leave an entirely reliable hosting service for a less expensive one, and then encounter problems.

M.L.

[mingoglia]

Originally Posted by Materdaddy

They might be on to something... that's the Micro$oft way, something goes wrong, reboot... reboot f'n reboot.... that's why I haven't used windows in a couple years. My machine here at work has been up for 113 days now, almost 3 months without a reboot! (Last time I rebooted was to upgrade my kernel, the time before that was a power outage... man I love linux!)

mmrosko@fuel ~ $ uptime
13:09:17 up 113 days, 15:45, 16 users, load average: 0.10, 0.11, 0.09

On another note, the reason I left iPower had more to do with no "SSH" access, which is how I chose to do most web page editing!

Again, good luck Stu!

Yep, I just checked. 3 of my servers (FreeBSD have 692 hours of uptime). A couple of my MS servers have reasonable uptime but I usually can't get much more than 100-150 days...sometimes more. My other Freebsd server at my colo has 147 days of uptime... it was rebooted last because of a hardware failure (it's a cheap $80/mo box). My 3 servers with 692 hours of uptime only went down once since 2002, and that was 692 days ago when we had our power go out for longer than the 20 minutes my UPS can support my racks. Other than that, they haven't been down since I moved into this facility. Gotta love UNIX.

MY BSD workstation had in the 200 day range until a few weeks ago when I decided to do something in x windows that it didn't like. Libraries got outta sync, junk stopped working.... I lost my patience and decided this might be a good time to reinstall the new version as I was running a 4.x version and 6.x is now out.

[Materdaddy]

Originally Posted by logem

So what host did you decide to use now, and do you know that they are going to be reliable?

I ask this because I have a VERY reliable host, but their pricing is quite high for the amount of server space and traffic that I am allowed. Oherwise, they are flawless. I'm always considering a move, but am afraid to leave an entirely reliable hosting service for a less expensive one, and then encounter problems.

M.L.

I presume you're asking Stu, but I moved to midPhase, and so far, so good. It seems as though their hardware is slower than iPower's, but it's reliable, and I can SSH to my server and make changes and everything. Much more simple than trying to keep 2 copies in sync w/o using something that helps out like FrontPage.

Originally Posted by mingoglia

Yep, I just checked. 3 of my servers (FreeBSD have 692 hours of uptime). A couple of my MS servers have reasonable uptime but I usually can't get much more than 100-150 days...sometimes more. My other Freebsd server at my colo has 147 days of uptime... it was rebooted last because of a hardware failure (it's a cheap $80/mo box). My 3 servers with 692 hours of uptime only went down once since 2002, and that was 692 days ago when we had our power go out for longer than the 20 minutes my UPS can support my racks. Other than that, they haven't been down since I moved into this facility. Gotta love UNIX.

MY BSD workstation had in the 200 day range until a few weeks ago when I decided to do something in x windows that it didn't like. Libraries got outta sync, junk stopped working.... I lost my patience and decided this might be a good time to reinstall the new version as I was running a 4.x version and 6.x is now out.

Awesome! In college, they pushed us away from M$, and for some of us it stuck, others it didn't. Now I'm as big of a windows hater as they come!

Anyways, we're becoming so maybe we should get back to Stu, and the problem at hand!

[phydeaux]

I can't offer any solutions but I'd like to just jump in here and say I just recently started accessing Stu's site and found it a wealth of knowledge and recommended it to all my Jeep friends. Great site, Stu. Good luck. Would hate to lose that one.

[TheDuke05]

We have 2 huge servers at work and the only time they go down is when the windows boxes connected to them freak out. The servers run Irix and 20 workstations run Unix, the 3 windows boxes bring down the network every few weeks. My Unix terminal hs been up for 11 months.