I have 10 ecommerce sites hosted on my simple helix account and half of them are clients that make a living off of their websites. Should I feel good about Simple Helix when I get an email that says this:?
Hello Jeremy,
We are sorry, but the server you are on has suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure. Despite having Raid-10, despite extra monitoring, and despite all our best efforts, this server still managed to suffer a hard drive failure and corruption that requires we restore the whole server from our back-ups. These back-ups are from 2pm yesterday, and at the rate the restore is going, it may take more than 24hrs. At this point there is two options,
1) Hang tight and wait for the restore of the whole server to complete, or
2) Submit a ticket letting us know you would like a fresh login and you can restore your site from your own back-ups.Once again we are very sorry for this issue and we can assure you that this is our top priority. Thank you for your patience.
Regards
Kenneth Green
SimpleHelix.com – Support Team
Just like that…
He forgot to say that despite all of the claims on the SH home page, they are all full of crap and you can count on your site being down 90% of the time because they really don’t have the equipment they claim to have.
Do not host your site on Simple Helix…This is a response to only one of the emails out of like 50 this month that I have sent them regarding my site and my clients sites being down.
Hey Simple Helix! You suck! Stop it!
Update:
Hello Jeremy,
We tried to recover the data from the degraded RAID array, but unfortunately this data is unusable. We will now have to restore the data from the full system backup taken by our CDP software from 2 PM yesterday.
It turns out that the CDP software we use for disaster scenarios like this has a bug to where it will not successfully restore a volume that exceeds a 100,000 files. We are working with the software manufacturer to work around this problem right now.
This is our current plan for getting the server restored:
1)Rebuild the entire RAID array to a blank volume using all new hard drives
2)Boot from a special CD provided by the manufacturer of the CDP backup software which will resolve the bug encountered earlier
3)Restore the backup from the backup server to the newly rebuilt RAID array using the software on the bootable CD (This process will probably run overnight and we hope to have it completed by morning)
Step 3 assumes that the CDP software on the bootable CD will work properly in restoring the data. Based on our previous experience with CDP and its manufacturer, we also know that this bootable CD workaround may not restore the volume as planned. We are already making preparations for this scenario which will require using a third server as a staging area for restoration and then copying these files over to the rebuilt server. This second option is undesirable because based on our throughput tests, the restore would take around 24 hours. This is why we are going to try the bootable CD option first, as the software manufacturer claims that this is a quicker and simpler restoration option.
I understand the extremely difficult situation we have put you in by our server going down for such an extended amount of time I assure you that we have our entire staff working to resolve this problem. Thank you for your patience.
Regards
Kenneth Green
SimpleHelix.com – Support Team
Another Update: What a freaking joke.
We were able to load the CDP software provided on a bootable CD and are now restoring from our latest backup, which is from 5/12/2009 around 2 PM. I assure you that we did exhaust every method possible in order to get a more up to date backup restored, be we were unsuccessful in our attempts.
The restore now stands at 5% and will likely be running for the next several hours. If everything goes as planned, the server will come back up after rebooting when the restore is complete. If we experience any further problems with this we will let you know. However, we believe we are in the final stages of this restoration.
Thank you for your continued patience.
Paul Clark
SimpleHelix.com – Support Team
And a day after:
Hello Jeremy,
The restoration of files is still in progress. I will keep you posted.
Regards,
David Hill
SimpleHelix.com – Support Team
Update:
To rectify the solution, the people at Simple Helix provided everyone a whole free month of more crappy hosting! My sites ended up being down from last Monday night till this Wednesday afternoon. Simply unacceptable.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
You’re not alone! I noticed my site was down this morning and it took a few hours for them to reply to me with that email. They better be very careful because I could see then being slapped with a class action over this. My site experiences constant downtime and never an explination even when I request one repeatidly
I guess I’m glad to know that I’m not alone…this just sucks for everybody.
My site is still down, has been all day. It’s currently 3:57 PM. A class action definitely wouldn’t be uncalled for. Uptime is money…for a lot of people.
Our site finally went up today. I received the same emails that you got. I also told them that this is a class action law suit waiting to happen. Our site was down on five occasions during the last two months. If that isn’t negligence, I don’t know what is. Just be happy these guys aren’t in the airline business!
Our site finally went up just barely also.
One of my clients is super pissed because he obviously lost tons of money over the last couple of days. This is a total joke.
Mine is up again also – finally.
My advice guys, do what Im doing.
Back up EVERYTHING and GTFO ASAP.
Exactly what I plan on doing!
Good luck, fellas.
Wow. That’s all I can say.
I wonder – I know that a lot of simple helix’s speed comes from the hardware, but I know that have optimized PHP settings as well. Do any of you SH hosted sites have a copy of your phpinfo? I would like to try to get the speed of SH, but leave the downtime. I have a VPS with Rochen and would like to implement SH’s optimized PHP settings.
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My sites are down again – have you moved or were you stupid like me and kept them there? if youve moved let me know where and what you think of your new host.
Hey Freddy,
Sorry to hear that your sites are down again. Yep. I moved! Couldn’t handle Simple Helix any longer. Thanks for coming back to let me know they are still sucking and validating my decision to move my sites.
I moved to WiredTree and wrote about them in this post: http://eliteeternity.com/elite-referrals/a-magento-webhosting-company-worth-my-time-to-write-about/.
If you end up going with WiredTree, let me know how it goes for you. I’ve been nothing but happy with them for the last (probably 6) months. They don’t provide as extensive support with Magento itself, but they will work hard to help you figure out any issues you may be having. After all – I’m paying for hosting and support on that hosting – that’s what I’m getting.
Good luck man!
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