Peoria Pundit

It’s not just this blog, folks:

(2008-10-27) – (gs) Grid-Service Cluster.2 Availability
Incident Tracker status: HIGH view incidents »
UPDATE
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 7:09 pm

We had another service interruption at ~5:45PM which has now been corrected. We apologize for the recurrences we have seen throughout the day. We are continuing to provide data to our vendor whenever possible.

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UPDATE
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 12:42 pm

All services have been restored again as of ~11:30AM Pacific Time. We apologize for the intermittent issues we have been experiencing today thus far.

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UPDATE
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 12:16 pm

We had another recurrence at ~11:00AM that our engineers are now working on. We will provide an update once services have returned. Thank you.

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UPDATE
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 9:49 am

By 8:15AM our engineers successfully restored all services on Cluster.2. During this time some of our customers might have seen “403 – Forbidden” errors. This behavior is standard in some cases when restoring services.

Our engineers have also provided some “debugging” information to our storage vendor, which should provide some further insight into the isolated storage-related problems we have been addressing this week. This issue is a top priority for both us and them.

Posted in (2008-10-27) – (gs) Grid-Service Cluster.2 Availability | No Comments »
UPDATE
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 9:19 am

At ~8:00AM Pacific Time services became unavailable on Cluster.2. Our engineers are bringing the cluster back online at this time. We will update this page shortly with more details.

Posted in (2008-10-27) – (gs) Grid-Service Cluster.2 Availability | No Comments »

I got my bill from my host today. Actually, I didn’t get a bill. Apparently, they don’t send bills. They just charge your credit card without telling you.

$96.70.

For one month.

I am being billed for the regular hosting — which was supposed to be $20 per month. And they are charging me extra for a “container” to hold my dangerously massive data base. Plus, they are charging me extra for CPU usage.

I can buy get a virtual private server (VPS) for about $50 a month.

When you add up how much I have paid them for two months service, this nearly surpasses what I collected to pay them for one whole year in advance.

I picked mediatemple because they advertised their “grid service” as being able to handle the kind of high server loads that the Blog Peoria Network suffers from. Say what you want about the outages I suffered from under the old server company, they didn’t deduct a $100 bucks from my credit card at their whim, and they went me a bill every month and gave me a week or so to pay.

Needless to say, I’m going to be moving again, this time to a VPS. And I may put out the begging bowl again. Although I would much prefer to sell two $50/month 125×125 ads to cover the cost instead. Hint hint.

UPDATE: I notice that charged me $5.81 earlier this month for something else. I have no idea what it was.

Screw these guys.

And by the way: It’s sooooooo pretentious to not capitalize your name.

UPDATE 2: This is the ticket I just submitted to mediatemple:

My credit card was just charged $96.70.

Please send me an itemized bill for everything this $96.70 covers.

Thank you.

The screen indicated there was an estimated response time of 2 hours and 53 minutes. Mediatemple has NEVER responded to a trouble ticket within the time states without there being a corresponding phone call.

Well see.

This post isn’t about the media, or politics or anything else this blog is supposed to be about. So feel free to skip it. Read more »

I have been notified by my new host, mediatemple, that my databases are working fine and are no longer causing an undue strain on their servers.

That’s the good news.

Here’s the bad news:

Mediatemple was the victim of a denial of service attack today. It knocked down Blog Peoria and other sites hosted with (mt) today. There might be some lingering issues with DNS servers needing to propagate some changes. Depending on your ISP, that might take a while.

I do not have any details on what form the DDoS attack took, but I think my site was used in the effort. On Friday, I noticed I was getting a massive number of hits off a Yahoo Image search for a particular phrase, which I won’t repeat so as to NOT generate more of these hits. Things settled down a bit, but on Monday, the page views reached close to 65,000. Normally, I’m lucky if I get 5,000 (these figures are via Site Meter).

I stopped the hits by deleting the post in question and my renaming the image filename.

I submitted a ticket to mediatemple, and maybe a week from now I’ll get a reply.