Problems with Ace-Host.net. Is this normal?

S

soulshine

New member
Hi!

I was thinking of starting my hosting reseller biz, and after reviewing the prices of several providers I signed-up with Ace-Host.net with the initial purpose of getting familiar with hosting and testing the system. During 1 month that I have been with Ace-Host.net I have experienced 3 downtimes, the latest started yesterday and the server is still down (more than 24 hours).

My question to the experts: do you know Ace-Host and is this normal with them? Are there any better hosting providers?

This is the explanation I received from Ace-Host tech support:

"The server's Raid-10 configuration became corrupted, so we have swapped out the Raid-10 cage and are restoring all files now. As it is a Raid-10 server, the drive data is mirrored across all drives. Since one partition became corrupted, the data was corrupted across all drives and therefore unrecoverable. There will be no email or mysql loss and we are in the process of backing up all we can, but it appears the home directory which contains all of website data is unrecoverable. We have already been trying for the last couple hours to salvage what we could however it appears their is nothing recoverable for the /home partition.

We are currently working on an automatic backup script so that in such instances, we will have a copy of your website files (excluding media files) for your use in the event you do not have a local copy of your files. Currently Acenet does not maintain backups of website files and recommends that all customers maintain backups on their local machines. This new backup feature will come at no additional cost to you and will be a valued tool for such unexpected and unavoidable failures such as these.

We do apologize for the inconvenience, but be assured every possible action has been taken to get you back online as quickly as possible. We do not currently have an ETA for restoration.

Thanks for your patience and continued support."
 
During 1 month that I have been with Ace-Host.net I have experienced 3 downtimes, the latest started yesterday and the server is still down (more than 24 hours).
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It's safe to say downtime like that is not good at all. I can tell you that things do happen from time to time that are unavoidable, though. The backup situation is up to the host but ultimately it's a good thing to keep your own.
 
Although customers should always backup their own data, in my opinion it is fairly irresponsible for a host not to capture backups as well. RAID is a fantastic solution to add extra redundancy and try and prevent against downtime. It is certainly not a backup solution though and should most certainly not be used solely to protect against hard disk failures or data corruption. In addition to RAID mirroring, full backups to secondary disks and off-site locations should be used wherever possible.

Here is what I posted a while ago with regards to RAID when Artashes started a thread about our Premium Reseller Hosting plans which come with RAID5 -
Rochen said:
I think it is also important to point out that while RAID can certainly add redundancy in terms of service uptime in the case of a drive failure it is still very important that regular backups are captured too. RAID can not protect against things such as file corruption because the errors will be written to all of the disks in the array. Bottom line is, RAID is not a solution on its own.

Taking this into account, with our premium web hosting plans we make nightly backups to a another drive (which is not part of the RAID array) and capture off-site (not just off-server) backups twice-weekly. Between the RAID 5 disk arrays, nightly backups and twice-weekly off-site backups our customers' data should be pretty safe. Of course, we still stress the importance of customers making their own backups too.
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All the best with recovering your data! :)

- Chris
 
hello,

Any amount of downtime isn't good with a host. however incidents due occur such as harddrive failure that can create a prolonged period of downtime up to 24 hours sometimes. The best way to get an explanation is to email your host and find out what happened and what is being done to make sure it doesn't happen again.

If you are unsatisifed I wouldn't hesitate to look elsewhere as there are plenty of options for you.

best of luck with your website.
 
I have heard bad reviews of Ace-Host many times before. I don't recall if it was on here (HD) or somewhere else, but they seemed to have a downtime problem also. I thinnk they had a problem with the support as well. Are you still with them?
 
Yes, that is very odd and bad uptime.

Since we are speaking of uptime...what do you guys think about the rankings at hyperspin.com . Those can usually tell you which company has good uptime and which company does not. I think that it was a genius solution to include this with their services: http://www.hyperspin.com/ranking.php
 
Since we are speaking of uptime...what do you guys think about the rankings at hyperspin.com . Those can usually tell you which company has good uptime and which company does not. I think that it was a genius solution to include this with their services: http://www.hyperspin.com/ranking.php
Click to expand...
One server's uptime doesn't mean much when the company has hundreds. IMO the usefulness of that ranking is really limited.
 
I agree too, even RAID systems get corrupt somehow even though they look like fail-proof harddrive arrays. If this downtime doesn't happen frequently, it can be said as a reliable host. Because we know many hosts doesn't even use RAID arrays, which can lead to complete data loss if they don't backup data somewhere else...
 
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