Whirlpool

Wow these guys just don't learn, again another meltdown, affecting most of their customers & ALL of their services, including the own site.

This should never happen, and their is all these technologies,such as load balancers, clustered servers, redundant pipes, etc, etc and they still don't manage to keep it as stable as thier marketing arm would have you beleive.

Worse still thier emergency after hours no would be great if it worked, esp if they responded b4 the disaster was over....hmmm

Lets hope MYOB will change the way things are handled there, from poor to ordinary to average.

Every time this happens it chips away at the creditability of us as suppliers, and risks loosing our customers, time for review i think.

These guys don't deserve creditability when the same things happen time n time again.

Yes.. All my sites are down as well as hosted email.

It appears to be a routing issue with their network.. Faulty hardware maybe... ?

Tracing route to www.ilisys.com.au [203.202.10.201]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms home.gateway [192.168.254.2]
2 18 ms 19 ms 16 ms lns3.mel6.internode.on.net [150.101.212.45]
3 18 ms 19 ms 37 ms gi1-3.cor1.mel6.internode.on.net [150.101.212.15
8]
4 45 ms 93 ms 19 ms gi2.cor2.mel4.internode.on.net [150.101.212.135]

5 35 ms 32 ms 41 ms vlan355.33bhc76f000.optus.net.au [59.154.44.33]

6 77 ms 76 ms 75 ms 61.88.226.115
7 * MagicMoments.o6ssC76fe.optus.net.a­ u [61.88.163.34] reports: Desti
nation net unreachable.

Trace complete.

Tekmann writes...

This should never happen, and their is all these technologies,such as load balancers, clustered servers, redundant pipes, etc, etc and they still don't manage to keep it as stable as thier marketing arm would have you beleive.

Well said. We don't pay higher prices for nothing. Our site on Jumba has started taking over on stability levels and I hate Jumba because we used to have so many problems with them!

Just rang them again, and thier staff are not only reading their standing script out their "servers will may be up in 1hr", but do so raising their voices. needless to say very very poor when the only time when customers want peace of mind, and minimise loosing our customers.

Also goes on to say they don't know when they will be up, even could be some time today, when I suggested the last consultant said it would be 1hr ago 1h20m ago.

Go figure.

Thanks for this thread Tekmann...

Impossibly frustrating when web and email disappears and you can't even get through to talk to them.

I checked out their Status website too and found this bit of glorious understatement:

"There is currently an issue with slow connectivity to all services at the moment."

Yeah, slow as in too slow for browsers and mail clients to connect to.

Tekmann writes...

This should never happen, and their is all these technologies,such as load balancers, clustered servers, redundant pipes, etc, etc and they still don't manage to keep it as stable as thier marketing arm would have you beleive.

+1 as stated above, very well said.

I'm getting phone calls left, right centre and from our customers and I can't even reach their support lines or even sales line..

very frustrating!

LOL Washpaw & Welcome 2 WP.

Shame I can't offer more advice on your first post, as I'm in the same boat as you and all thier other thousands of customers.

I do appreciate these things happen, but don't appreciate when they are repeated, or misleading uptimes coming from rude representatives.

Enjoy WP, as just about everything you could want is on here.

Cheers
Tekmann

This doesn't sound normal for ILISYS at all.

Perhaps they are in the process of making a couple of changes due to the recent MYOB buyout, and as can happen with this sort of thing, something hasn't gone to plan.

How many other outages has ILISYS had recently compared to other companies who charge similar amounts?? I think you will find that ILISYS still has better uptime then most and you'll be hard pressed to find a bad word said about them.

CJ.

-CJ- writes...

How many other outages has ILISYS had recently compared to other companies who charge similar amounts??

I used to think the same when I experienced their first outage. However, they kept coming.

November their mysql servers were down all our clients were affected due to database connectivity errors.

I had clients complaining about slow webmail for the last two months. I can confirm that this is true, because I use webmail on the weekends.

Earlier this month they got their PHP session configuration wrong and again all our websites were affected as PHP couldn't properly write the sessions on the shared cluster. I had to go through and change all the sites one by one so that PHP uses a local session management rather than relying on the server..

-CJ- writes...

This doesn't sound normal for ILISYS at all.

This is not the first major outage they're had in recent times, and not sure how your customers are taking it, not having business EMAIL during this late morning business day, but some of mine remember all the other times hosting/email has been down. always the way.

Technical issues aside, not being able to get through to thier phones, continued misleading/inaccurate uptimes, rudeness from managers is appauling.

I'm guessin you don't have many customers with Ilisys CJ, all callin you this morning, and being powerless to service them, and havin absolute no indication what time, day or month it will back up....as 3 uptime estimates have already been missed.

seems to be back up and working now? It's now fine here in QLD.

Confirmed....@ 11.22am

Tekmann writes...

I'm guessin you don't have many customers with Ilisys CJ, all callin you this morning, and being powerless to service them, and havin absolute no indication what time, day or month it will back up....as 3 uptime estimates have already been missed.

Your right.. I don't have customers calling me, but I do understand what its like (being the former General Manager fo 2 large hosting companies), but understand that it is probably more frustrating from their end.

As I said, take a look at history and see how many complaints you can see in the last 2-3 years. I can tell you now there are not that many, compared to say WebCentral.

From what I understand everything is now back online and I am certain that they will be investigating the matter to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Technical issues aside, not being able to get through to thier phones, continued misleading/inaccurate uptimes, rudeness from managers is appauling.

Once everything is resolve technically, drop them an email or call and ask to speak to a manager and air your frustrations with them. You'll be doing them a favour by letting them know how you're feeling.

CJ.

OK, so now Ilisys is back online again.. can I ask other users, what changes you are going to make, or procedures put in place to prepare for such downtimes??

I explain to my customers, when choosing a plan, what 99% uptime basically means... and if they want a 100% uptime SLA, it will cost them more $$$.

I can see from the page on their website, www.ilisys.com.au/explore/sla
that this situation looks like it is covered by their SLA. Explaining this to my customers obviously doesn't seem to help, first thing on a Monday morning when they cant check email.. but its happened now... so, Im wondering if any other user have any constructive feedback to help me deal with this going forward, cheers.

phpuck writes...

so, Im wondering if any other user have any constructive feedback to help me deal with this going forward, cheers.

Explain to them that it's the nature of web hosting, and anything online in general.

Technical faults can and will happen, sometimes it's the fault of the provider, sometimes it's upstream, but unless the client is prepared to pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month for a multi-tier globally redundant system then they should expect the odd downtime here and there.

You should also probably note to your customers that your provider is now under the financial control and management of a much larger multi-national company, who are very customer focussed and are no doubt committed to maintaining and improving their new investment.

That should be enough to placate them and I'm sure they'll be pleased to get back on with today's business.

CJ.

For something as catastrophic as a major hardware component failing, Ilisys seem to have responded quickly and resolved the issue in a timely manner. I reckon if this sort of issue occurred with most other hosts, it would have taken them a lot longer to fix.

I think some resellers are setting unrealistic expectations with their customers and/or badly handling the customer calls when such events occur. Regardless of who the host is, there will always be some unscheduled downtime. The real test of the host is how quickly they get things back up again.

I agree with some earlier posts. There is NO, i repeat, NO hosting solution that will offer you or any of your clients 100% uptime. Your kidding yourself to assume that there is.

If your clients need such a high uptime then your obviously not offering them the right solution which would be hosting their own Mail Server which nowadays can be done for the cost of some basic hardware only.

Sure, Ilsys has had an outage but compare this to others who have 5 times or even more in the same given amount of time.

We’ve been catching up with our clients throughout the day, and wanted to provide you with an update.

Just before 08:00 AEDT this morning, we experienced a fault in a network device within our system. At first, this manifested as slow speeds but the whole network quickly became inaccessible as Monday morning traffic increased.

While we have spare hardware on site, it took our techs time to identify and remedy the issue and we brought the network online just before 11:15.

We’ll review the incident in full and put a report on our status page (status.ilisys.com.au) later this week. In the meantime, we apologise to those of you who were affected by the outage this morning.

Thanks for your patience,
The Ilisys Team

Tekmann writes...

Just rang them again, and thier staff are not only reading their standing script out their "servers will may be up in 1hr"

Yeah funny that.....

We just called once , couldnt get through. concluded there was an outage and they already knew about it, and would be running about frantically getting it fixed.

Email is critical for our business, our remote appliances report their data to us by email every 15 mins or so. So we ran blind for a few hours.

We thought about jumping out the window, and ending it all, but figured it wasnt worth topping ourselves over, and besides, its a ground level building anyway.

TheFamilyMan writes...

If your clients need such a high uptime then your obviously not offering them the right solution which would be hosting their own Mail Server which nowadays can be done for the cost of some basic hardware only.

So, what you're saying is that a small business without the relevant skills has a better chance of achieving higher uptimes than a dedicated hosting company?

I think you might want to check that.

What you meant to say was: No company or internal provider will guarantee you 100% uptime, if you want to aim for 99.99999% then you'll need to speak with a company that offers managed hosting solutions such as Telstra. It won't be cheap.

Heliotic writes...

So, what you're saying is that a small business without the relevant skills has a better chance of achieving higher uptimes than a dedicated hosting company?

You need to think outside the square for a moment. If a business approaches another organisation to setup hosted email then they clearly don't have the skills required to even to do this in the first place so whats your point exactley?

If the client says to the provider i want very high uptimes then the provider should be able to supply and manage a mail server for them, in house, not to mention capitalize on the additional revenue for server maintenance etc.

Yay...their secure server's gone down again. Something that they don't advise is not clustered.

I've been with Ilisys for 4 years and I'm sick of the excuses. Yesterday afternoon they made a change to my oscommerce shop which they did not even test... yup that's right my store cannot receive orders...That's around 10k down the drain this weekend.

Enough is enough.

I actually went elsewhere....mainly due to costs...

since my site...is a novice site...and I make no money off it I could not justify the cost.

I want to support Aussie web hosters..but none are cheap enough for me.

There were times when it went down.

I haven't "touch wood" experienced such things with my new hoster...yet.

Wow gotta love Whirlpool. Got some good insights via whims and email on some potential good Aussie hosts! Thank you for making the search easier :)

Mr.Gadget writes...

Wow gotta love Whirlpool. Got some good insights via whims and email on some potential good Aussie hosts! Thank you for making the search easier :)

Were they hosting companies who Whim'ed you? Who was it, because it is against the Rep Code of Conduct.

Jesse M. writes...

Were they hosting companies who Whim'ed you? Who was it, because it is against the Rep Code of Conduct.

I didn't get spammed by Whims (thankfully). The Whim I received was from a company that I was already talking to last week who happened to see this thread. All the rest have been email.

I still waiting 1-2 week for reply's from Ilisys staff that have been there for over 5 years now, and should know better.

Thier PR dept will try to smooth it all over and play it down, but another poorly handled mail disaster recently confirms they haven't got the professionals running this company.

Shame MYOB hasn't got a clue what clients have to deal with.

MrGadget, would like to see the credible links to other hosts that you been referred to.

Cheers
Tekmann

Tekmann writes...

MrGadget, would like to see the credible links to other hosts that you been referred to.

In talks with AussieHQ, Ausweb and HightekHosting at the moment.

Lot more expensive than U.S. counterparts but latency seems to be worth it...I think...

Tekmann writes...

Thier PR dept will try to smooth it all over and play it down, but another poorly handled mail disaster recently confirms they haven't got the professionals running this company.

A disaster?, how long was the outage?

Zed Strange writes...

A disaster?, how long was the outage?

I'm guessin you or your clients wern't around the second round of their mail outages during core business hours.

This comes after their marathorn system wide failure...

The status pages don't seem to reflect the correct failure times, and refer to some of these as "mail delays" rather than "mail failure" which clients receive bounce backs or undelerivable.

Complex hosting solutions have complex failures...

Sounds like they have lost some talent from their sys-admin team and the left overs are struggling to keep it up.

I could be a good time to review your options & contact them about rebates.

Paul D writes...

Sounds like they have lost some talent from their sys-admin team and the left overs are struggling to keep it up.

You may be right Paul, though I guess we will never know as they're struggling to keep things afloat.

I could be a good time to review your options & contact them about rebates.

For me it's never been about the money, and I think most would be happy to pay what they ask...

It's all about Professionalisn, Transparency, Communication & Honesty.

Tekmann

Tekmann writes...

I'm guessin you or your clients wern't around the second round of their mail outages during core business hours.

Bad guess, unless you consider after 5.45pm on a friday night is inside core business hours.

So how long was the outage?

Zed Strange writes...

So how long was the outage?

The outage was during core business hours on a Monday morning 8:00 - 11:15 AEDT.

This is not a Friday night like are implying.

The reason:

"...caused by a fault within a piece of network equipment. While we have spare hardware onsite, it took our technicians time to identify and remedy the issue..."

Above notification came at 2:58pm.

Mr.Gadget writes...

This is not a Friday night like are implying.

There was a mail issue friday afternoon, however it seemed rather insignificant and of a short period, compared to something else bothering me at that time.

And that was the outage that started this discussion.

As for a Monday outage, gee i missed that one, must be lucky i guess.

Zed Strange writes...

As for a Monday outage, gee i missed that one, must be lucky i guess.

Zed, this thread was initially about the outage that happened on the morning of Monday 31st of March, 2008. See the very first post.

I think we're all just getting confused about some of the few outages Ilisys have had as of late.

Speaking of which, has anyone noticed that their Ilisys hosted sites run faster after 10pm? Just from my observations, queries are blazing fast. However come core business hours, performance is inconsistent? I think it's probably load balancing issues...

I will say in the past, that I have had some excellent service from Ilisys. In particular there were two guys who were always on the ball : Paul and Sam.

Shame MYOB hasn't got a clue what clients have to deal with.

MrGadget, would like to see the credible links to other hosts that you been referred to

Im not happy with Ilisys of late and also agree that MYOB are clueless.

Time to move elsewhere.

Mr.Gadget writes...

Zed, this thread was initially about the outage that happened on the morning of Monday 31st of March, 2008. See the very first post.

and the thread died on the 1st April....

I think we're all just getting confused about some of the few outages Ilisys have had as of late

And the thread started again on Friday night, whats that 6-7 weeks later, because of a small issue.

Yay it's gone down again. Including their status page. Their SLAs obviously mean SFA.

Anyone else having trouble connecting to the ilisys mail server this morning? We are failing to connect to mail.ilisys.com.au port 25, from multiple locations.

bollard writes...

We are failing to connect to mail.ilisys.com.au port 25, from multiple locations.

This company has annoyed me so much I am glad I have left them. They always seem to have ongoing problems.

As a previous customer of theirs I would not recommend them.

They (ilisys) have been very helpful this morning, as it turns out. I'm happy with them anyway. You didn't say what the problems where, making it hard to take anything away from that.

Problem was the DNS was returning some completely wrong IP address. Haven't figured out where its getting it yet. flushdns and router reboot not fixing it. Have put right IP into mail server for now.

Edit: ipconfig /flushdns did not work on our SBS 2003 box. Had to go into the MMC and right-click Flush Cache on the node to clear it.

Is Anyone geting through to them this afternoon, but their voicemail, or trainee handling the whole of support and he says rest of staff are sick, day off and out to lunch...???

Don't these Guys Learn from their recent mistakes....???

Tekmann writes...

This should never happen, and their is all these technologies,such as load balancers, clustered servers, redundant pipes, etc, etc and they still don't manage to keep it as stable as thier marketing arm would have you beleive.

Seems like they never had any of those technologies and I was considering signing up with them.

bollard writes...

Anyone else having trouble connecting to the ilisys mail server this morning? We are failing to connect to mail.ilisys.com.au port 25, from multiple locations.

Nope. and my business uses email for data exchange from scores of remote sites, an ilisys outage of a period longer than a cup of coffee would have red frigging lights flashing all over the place on my network monitor

Mr.Gadget writes...

Lot more expensive than U.S. counterparts but latency seems to be worth it...I think...

The latency is very tiny....if your a high bandwidth user the US based server is a good idea.

Who's fault is it when I get this HTML message:

500 Server Error

----------------------------------------------
Server Error
The following error occurred:

[code=SERVER_RESPONSE_CLOSE] The server closed the connection while reading the response. Contact your system administrator.

----------------------------------------------

Just got this on my Ilisys hosted website 9:50am.

Mr.Gadget writes...

Who's fault is it
Generally it's going to be a server-side error, but assigning the fault to somebody is a bit more complicated because it could be your application (/website) doing something bad that causes the problem (such as exceeding running time/memory/cpu limits). Alternatively a server could be overloaded, or a SQL server unavailable......lots of things can cause the error, and working out exactly whose fault it is is very difficult – especially if it's not easily reproducable.