As some people might have noticed for the last two months, this site has gone through some pretty severe outages.  I have been in touch with the provider about this, and they’ve assured me that they’re done messing about with things they don’t understand (if only they said it that way, though), so that means that the site shouldn’t go down again unless Chicago goes dark like San Fransisco a few weeks back.

What upsets me the most about these outages is the effect of my Google SERP rankings and, by extension, my visitors.  In an average day there are about 120 visitors from around the world that come to this site.  While this number is not huge by any stretch of the imagination, I’m glad that I can offer a little bit of info to these people in the brief amount of time they might visit.

However, my host has been performing some server work since August 1st, and in that time j2fi.net has gone down for a sum of 3 days … hardly the 99.9% uptime I was promised in January, as this would equate to 36 hours of downtime per year.  Since January, I’ve calculated that this site has been down for approximately 391 hours.  This was done by checking gaps in my bandwidth logs.  Even when the site is not being visited by people or bots, there is a minimal amount of network traffic that is recorded.  When this traffic is 0 for more than 10 minutes, then I know the site’s gone dark.

Yesterday I had received yet another email for the trouble tickets I had created, and the admins have assured me that these hiccups are now complete.  When I inquired about some kind of compensation for all the downtime (they promised to refund my money should they not keep up with 99.9% uptime), the idea was quickly squashed.  Apparently, refunds are only done when the shared server fails, and my site is not restored within 36 hours.  Server upgrades, planned maintenance, power failures, “upstream internet connection” failures and Acts of God are not included in the promise.

*siGh*

I’ve considered jumping ship to another host, but I’ve paid for the services until January 2009.  There’s little chance of any refund, and I can’t stand wasting money.  That, and if I change hosts, I’ll be charged $24.95 USD for the domain name registration that was part of my initial signing.  It’s not a huge cost, but I’m not willing to pay even more money to people that can’t even keep servers online for more than a few hours at a time.

I’ve worked with system administrators that couldn’t keep machines running, and those who feel that when a server isn’t working properly it’s best to replace it than to find the problem and fix it.  At the end of the day, nothing I say or do will change their competencies.  Perhaps it was a mistake to give up the under-powered private server I once used to host this page….