Status@QuickOnlineTips

Testing Mail2Blogger: Blogging by Email

2010-03-10T22:58:00.000+05:30

In an emergency, there can be an urgent need to get the message across
to our readers. Lacking access to the blogger post interface, and a
computer with live internet connection, the Mail2Blogger is a cool
option which I can use to post via my mobile phone via a secret email
address. If you can read this on the blog, the email post just worked.

Editor, Quick Online Tips
http://quickonlinetips.com/
http://www.twitter.com/qot

New Custom Domain - Status.Quickonlinetips.Com

2010-03-10T22:44:00.003+05:30

Well this status blog is now at a new url http://status.quickonlinetips.com/

This is due to nifty Blogger feature called Custom Domains. Simply changed the CNAME setting in my domain DNS settings to ghs.google.com. and the site url has changed from quickonlinetips.blogspot.com to status.quickonlinetips.com

Knownhost is the Best Hosting Ever

2009-07-11T22:49:00.000+05:30

Since we migrated to Knownhost, we are amazed by the amazing technical support. Knownhost comes with a lifetime hosting promo code and here are some tips to choose the right hosting package.

Migrated to Knownhost VPS Hosting

2009-06-20T22:41:00.000+05:30

QOT successfully migrated from Dreamhost shared hosting to Knownhost managed VPS hosting today. Their excellent tech support has continued over the last few days with an incredible response time and is a major reason we are back online…

Moving from Dreamhost to Knownhost

2009-06-20T13:16:00.004+05:30

QOT has had a longer downtime than expected. Dreamhost disabled our account without warning for TOS violation. We are still trying to figure how we violated the TOS, and would have done all to fix any issue we were unaware of.

We searched for a new managed VPS hosting service and were recommended Knownhost by many Twitter friends. So we are migrating to Knownhost and this has given us an opportunity to spread our wings on a VPS server, which will help QOT to grow beyond the restraints of shared web hosting. It costs more, but is worth the money.

The site has been down now for 4 days, in efforts to get our account back, get backups, find a new host, setup a new VPS, set up new private nameservers and now the site is in place and undergoing DNS propagation for over 24 hours. I hope Google gets our traffic back when we get back online.

We hope to be back online soon with tech tricks and blogging tips. We learnt a lot from this experience and cannot wait to share it with our readers. Lets wait and see all goes well...

Site Offline: Dreamhost Server Fails

2009-04-19T17:11:00.009+05:30

The site is down over the last 2 days. Dreamhost points out that it is due to a server issue on which our site is hosted.

The web server, bulger, is having issues with its raid and attempts to move the drives over to a new server have also failed. We’re currently bringing up a new server and restoring it from backups… More information to come!

Update: Further hardware disaster with this machine has extended downtime, unfortunately. We are still working on it and we hope to have it back up soon. We are very sorry for the inconvenience.

Update 06:35 PDT: The machine is back up now but is still restoring from backups and some configurations are still running on the server. Websites should be up for the most part but if they’re not, don’t fret as we’re still working on it! We’ll post more updates as they come in!

Update 8:11 PM PDT: The server is still restoring from backups but sites should be online. You will notice a bit of instability meanwhile all the backups are restored but this is only temporary and subside once everything is restored. We’ll post the all clear once everything is good to go!

Well the site did come back online for a few hours over the last 2 days but it is still down. I emailed Dreamhost support and they inform us that

Thanks for writing in! I am *VERY* sorry for the inconvenience! The server that you are on, bulger, has been having a few problems as of yesterday. I'll go ahead and explain what happened. Basically, bulger was having issues with its RAID setup and the server was going up and down intermittently. Our network admins went ahead and decided that we needed to fail the existing hardware over to new hardware in order to restore functionally to the server! The new hardware has been installed and the server is running BUT the I/O from the rsync of backup data is causing problems for people on the server. I don't have an ETA for when the rsync will be done but we'll get this squared away as soon as possible! I really do apologize for the inconvenience and I totally understand how frustrating a server being up and down is. That is why our network admin team is working hard to bring it up now.

Well with no time frame in sight, lets see how long before the site comes back online.

I Fixed Site Back Online after 36 Hours Downtime

2008-05-25T23:21:00.007+05:30

There was still no response from Dreamhost for over 36 hours to any support ticket. Then a friendly DH tech support on DH forums called rlparker offered to help on a personal basis offering the most amazing and in depth tech support advice I have ever got.

As a result I read a lot and learnt a lot about SSH, its clients and how to fix directory permissions which they had disabled from the root. I was also able to identify Googlebot as the culprit which was hammering the server with thousands of visits.

I was able to renable my sites after chmod'ing the permissions and blocking Googleblot via .htaccess. Things are fine and rlparker, the angel who dropped by the DH forums unofficially saved the day. I wish DH official support was more helpful.

Dreamhost Blocks Site for CPU Minutes Overuse

2008-05-24T22:59:00.006+05:30

Just as traffic started pouring in over the weekend for our 9rules entry and a huge stumbleupon traffic for our managing domain names post, Dreamhost disabled the site with an email mentioning our CPU usage stats were high. Now all you get are 403 Forbidden errors sitewide.

A normal user utilizes under 75 CP, a heavy user utilizes 75-100 CP, and normally problematic users utilize 100-150 CP. You, are utilizing well over double CP minutes as a problematic user would.

It looks like your site(s) have outgrown the shared hosting environment. You should look into upgrading to a Private Server (http://www.dreamhostps.com ) ASAP. Or if possibly find out what is making your code over utilize so much resources (http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Finding_Causes_of_Heavy_Usage ) and put this to a stop before re-enabling your sites.

Please respond to me in regards to this issue, so I can verify that you're taking a pro-active approach to solving this problem. If you re-enable your sites without writing back, you may be in danger of forcing me to disabling your hosting account.

At this moment several support requests are pending to activate the site, but there is no response yet though the site is down for over 17 hours.

Once they enable the site, I can have a look and track what scripts are causing the problem. I need to reduce the php calls by removing some plugins and widgets, slow down or block Googlebot (But you cannot change the crawl rate as the site get unverified when down), and now try to get in wp-supercache to start serving purely html pages and reduce the server load (remember how wp-cache 2 freezed our site, and we had to deactivate the plugin)

I hope some of these measures will reduce server load and CPU usage and let us continue on the same package. Or else we will need to get a private server to keep the site going which will cost an extra $30 per month for 300MB/300Mhz usage if nothing works.

Downtime Lasted 8 Hours: Dreamhost Cluster Move Still On

2008-03-22T19:32:00.003+05:30

Well the site is back online after 8 hours and our server is now on a new datacenter. As per Dreamhost status, Spunky is still coming up (as per the planned 12 hours downtime), and they are dealing with a couple of machines that didn’t survive the move and some more cleanup stuff. Now back to fixing things up.

Dreamhost Huge Server Moves to New DataCenter: 12 Hour Downtime

2008-03-22T10:19:00.006+05:30

Dreamhost is busy moving lots of servers, all central DreamHost functions and the “spunky” cluster to newer data centers starting Friday, March 21st, at 9PM PDT, and is expected to last up to 12 hours, until Saturday, March 22nd, 9AM PDT (due to continued space and power constraints in the primary data center)

Central services include panel.dreamhost.com, dreamhost.com, dreambook.com, files.dreamhost.com, media.dreamhost.com, wiki.dreamhost.com, discussion.dreamhost.com, basically everything but secondary DNS and this status blog. Primary and tertiary DNS will be going down as well, but will have a more limited downtime window of only 2-3 hours. For spunky, all web servers, mail servers, file servers, and MySQL servers in the spunky cluster will be unreachable.

Our site is down for the next 12 hours since we are unfortunately hosted on the Spunky cluster too. So thats a loss of traffic, revenue and blogging time today. Fortunately its Holi in India and everyone will be busy playing with lots of colors. They has warned of the move a week before, but I had no idea (note to self: subscribe their status feed)

I can keep you posted with updates from this status blog, on twitter and grab this opportunity to check out our tumblelog at Quick.Notes and enjoy some cool pics and videos. Don't forget to subscribe its full feed.

The good feature about Feedburner is that I can change the source feed, mash up these feeds with Yahoo Pipes and send updates to all my readers from the status blog and tumblelog.

Internal Server Errors and File Server Issues

2008-02-08T23:38:00.000+05:30

Site down due to File Server Issues for the last hour or so. Some Dreamhost updates -

Update 9:50 a.m. PDT: The file server had hung on a thread and decided to throw a kernel panic. Right now it’s saving crash data and then should boot up. After it boots up I’ll need to soothe the servers that are hurting because of the broken mount. We should be back up and running within a half an hour, but I’ll post again if something else goes wrong.

Update 9:56 a.m. PDT: The file server was still not happy and died again. We are still working on resuscitating it.

Update 10:08 a.m. PDT: We found the problem. A bad drive was completely hosing the file server. We replaced the drive and it booted just fine. I’ll be massaging servers that still hurt now.

How was this post made? This QOT status blog is hosted on Blogger.
The main QOT blog is down but you can still browse around our Linkblog Notes@QOT, which is hosted on our subdomain and powered by tumblr (feed). Some advantages of multiple hosting options and expanding the network.

Upgrading to Wordpress 2.3

2007-10-06T20:57:00.000+05:30

I expect some limited downtime of 20-30 minutes while upgrade the main QOT blog to the new Wordpress 2.3. The tumblelog upgrade went without any error. Visit Buzz@QOT while be get back.

When I went back to activate the plugins, I was instantly notified of newer versions of wordpress plugins. That reminded me that the Wordpress 2.3 has started...

Wordpress Upgrade Done with Zero Downtime!

2007-09-09T18:52:00.000+05:30

I recently upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress 2.2.3 - a necessary security upgrade. The great feature they have started is linking to the changed files. I simply updated the changed files in few minutes and all wordpress upgrades were done with zero downtime. I tried this superfast way to upgrade earlier also. This was even better than maintenence mode.

Since this was a minor update, this was possible, Otherwise I always go the usual way.

Caching server is offline…

2007-09-01T23:27:00.000+05:30

Well our site is down right now because the Dreamhost caching server is offline…
It says the severity is low. I hope so.

QOT Buzz: Our Tumblelog

2007-08-31T23:18:00.000+05:30

QOT Buzz is a collection of short tips, quotes, links, videos and pics and other interesting stuff we like.

Bookmark the url
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/buzz/

Even DreamHostStatus.com was Down!

2007-08-26T18:19:00.000+05:30

DreamHostStatus.com is the source where Dreamhost posts all announcements, outages and server issues. This time when the huge DNS outage occured, even the Dreamhost Status was down and no one had an idea what was happening.

"The secondary network DreamHostStatus.com (this site!) is hosted on was saturated due to a large increase in DNS traffic. After working with our provider for a few hours we’ve got it back up and we’re working to make sure the network saturation does not return."

Then they too decided to host an alternative Dreamhost Status on Blogger, but it did not work out.

"It's embarrassing to use Google, and Blogger won't let us do things like put a severity or "resolve" posts... I don't think? It DEFINITELY won't let us do a cool thing with our RSS feed to only show people posts that affect them.

But we will probably move it to somewhere totally different from everything else in our system. Maybe just a dedicated server provider on the east coast or some such nonsense."

Why is QOT Status on Blogger?

2007-08-26T18:05:00.000+05:30

This was the first question a friend asked me when I told them I has started a status blog on Blogger. The answer is when Dreamhost shared hosting goes down, you need another reliable source to post a notice. And I cannot find a better place than Blogger - Its easy, free and its downtime is rare...

Why I Chose Dreamhost Webhosting

2007-08-26T18:02:00.000+05:30

When I switched from Blogger to Wordpress, it was difficult to decide which Web Hosting service to choose. Here are some reasons why I like Dreamhost. Till now Dreamhost has been providing professional web hosting and I have no need to look elsewhere...

Check Web Host Uptime by Hourly Traffic Statistics

2007-08-26T17:55:00.000+05:30

I use the Hourly Traffic Statistics method to exactly see when the site went down. I check it everyday on Sitemeter and get a quick idea of sudden traffic drops which would suggest server downtimes.

Lessons Learnt from Previous Downtimes

2007-08-26T17:47:00.000+05:30

How I fixed Internal server errors and Server 500 Errors on every page when the site was down for 36 hours... find what the cause was!

Errors with .htaccess brought the site down with 403 forbidden errors. Trying to pacify Googlebot...

Even a Status Blog Can Have Outage!

2007-08-22T23:20:00.000+05:30

The idea of this blog was to convey information during times of outage. But even Blogger had an outage and this blog was offline for over an hour.

"Blogger and Blog*Spot had an unexpected outage for an hour this morning, starting around 7AM PDT. As of 8AM, all but a few blogs are working properly again. We apologize profusely for this interruption in service."

I hope both Blogger and Dreamhost never go offline together...

Huge Dreamhost DNS Outage!

2007-08-17T23:34:00.000+05:30

QOT went offline for past few hours due to a DNS outage...

Dreamhost has this to say...

"We have identified a runaway process that has been erroneously eating domain DNS records and that has been killed. The missing DNS data is being restored as quickly as possible now so any domains still down should be restored in the next couple of hours. We have already pushed out new software with safeguards against this situation happening again."

BTW what is a runaway process that eats away domain DNS records!

Welcome to QOT Status

2007-08-15T21:14:00.000+05:30

This blog is created as placeholder to provide information for the Quick Online Tips blog readers when the site is not accessible due to server / hosting issues, hacked, getting a wordpress upgrade or any other reason.