John Chow’s Website is down

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Yesterday I tried going to John Chow and it was down. Again I tried and it was still down. This is not good for any one making a living off of their web site. Here is what John had to say about it “Wow! My blog is still down. This is taking way too long. I guess the server admins don’t work on Sunday.” I think this is bad for any webhosting company because John Chow is one of the biggest bloggers on the internet. This makes them look bad. I hope John Chow has some good backups if the server took a hit. His webhosting provider is www.bluefur.com.

This goes in saying you should be making some backups just incase something bad happens to the server that you are on. If you are on a shared hosting, or a VPS account you are still on a hosted server and should be making backups of your data. It wouldn’t be fun paying for your webhost to backup your data for you.

Update

John Chow finallly got his site back up. It took the web hosting company Bluefur a long time to get the website back up. In one of John’s Tweets he said “ETA for John Chow dot Com to be back online is 4 hours”. John Chow also said “It seems the server boot files have corrupted. @BlueFur is doing a new OS reload. Hopefully, the blog will be back toady”. I would think the web hosting company would have someone on call 24/7 if a server goes down, but I guess not.

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July 27, 2009 | Filed Under Internet

11 Comments

Comments

11 Responses to “John Chow’s Website is down”

Extreme John on July 27th, 2009 12:28 pm

It’s never any fun when hosting providers go down, than their service stinks on top of it.

At the end of 2008 my web hosting provider vanished, leaving all of my dedicated servers (like 100 of them) not only did I have a bunch of down time but I also lost probably $100,000+ worth of equipment and storage devices, etc.
.-= Extreme John´s last blog ..Sunday Smash: Twitter Stuff and Hot Blog Articles =-.
Hispanic Dating on July 28th, 2009 4:25 am

I’m usually devastated when it happens to my sites. It will be a great loss of daily traffic.
MLDina on July 28th, 2009 9:05 pm

I’ve seen this quite a bit recently, for both superbloggers and new bloggers. It can be a pain and expensive to have a backup or a dedicated server, but weigh the cost v. the benefits. It’s better it happened on a slower day, but you don’t want it to effect your revenue, especially if you’re just getting started.
Gary Jones :: BlueFur.com on July 29th, 2009 11:50 am

Sorry but we had staff working on John’s server for the entire time it was down to try and recover it and when it was not possible we reinstalled it.

We did everything as fast as possible.

I am not sure where we failed. We did not make his server die it happens. We were communicative to John and he understood what the issues were.

I would suggest those that don’t know anything about hosting should really keep there comments in check.
.-= Gary Jones :: BlueFur.com´s last blog ..Everything PHP: SQL: UPDATE =-.
Greg Ellison on July 29th, 2009 5:29 pm

Hey Gary,

I was going by what John was Tweeting about. Shit happens I know that. I am glade he made backups of everything so you guys can get him going as fast as possible on a new server. Sometimes hardware does fail. It sucks that it happened but that’s life.

Greg
Gary Jones :: BlueFur.com on July 29th, 2009 5:55 pm

The sad thing is your post paints our service in a bad light.

Getting a server fixed can take time.

Installing the Os, cPanel and restoring files did take 4 hours which is not a long time in my opinion.

We tried every other solution prior to doing a reload which also takes time.

Note we backup everything for John everyday.
.-= Gary Jones :: BlueFur.com´s last blog ..WordPress Wednesday: WP Change Template =-.
Greg Ellison on July 29th, 2009 10:52 pm

Gary,

I work in IT and I am in the trenches as you are. I think John is at fault also. He should invest more in his servers. He needs a more redundant system. His system probably has redundant hardware like NICS, and RAID system. His site is worth millions and he only has one server. That server could probably handle the one website, but Can he handle being down for the weekend and on a Monday? He is loosing out on a lot of money. I know he talked about doing some kind of load balancing on his site which is good. I guess John thinks your service is bad because of the different kinds of tweets he was doing when his site was down. I didn’t come up with the Tweets that I quoted from Twitter.

Greg
Jayce on July 29th, 2009 11:43 pm

My hosting was down around 2 hours on CentOS 4->5 upgrade. Luckily it is only a short period but they did the upgrade without inform me. That’s the problem.
.-= Jayce´s last blog ..Cheng Hoon Teng Temple, Malacca =-.
Greg Ellison on July 30th, 2009 6:15 am

They should tell you if they are doing upgrades or forums where they are going to announce upgrades and downtime. Greg
CAMPBELL on August 15th, 2009 7:46 am

Super-Duper site! I am loving it!! Will come back again, Thanks.
GM Baker on January 16th, 2010 3:52 pm

I agree with Greg. I can’t believe in 2009 a site like his wasn’t on a redundant RAID system of some kind. I kind of get the feeling maybe he tried something out that corrupted his system rather than trying out on a test server too. If I screwed up like that I’d probably be nonchalant too.

Idk, I have a tiny site comparatively and when it’s down for 20 min at 2:30 am (when I blog my best!) I’m blowing up the phones.

Also ever consider the amount of affiliate $$ he may lose (residual wise) if he talked bad about the hosting company and everyone switched? It would probably be A LOT more than the $$ he lost while the site was down.

Maybe a lot of success, a good size money mattress and a lil bit of good ole zen chillaxed John out.

Just saying if we have no idea either way and we MUST assume or guess, let’s make it the more positive guess. I like smiling more anyway.
.-= GM Baker´s last blog ..What A Geek Would Ask From A Genie? =-.