Server Downtime, Assistance Required

[eponymous2]

Hi,

I am on a VPS (or semi-dedicated server) and have experienced downtime recently. I know that my service has been interrupted because our Google sitemaps are consistently reporting errors indicating that their bots can't reach our server.

Also, several of our emails have been returned to us with the following error message:

"This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
A message that you sent has not yet been delivered to one or more of its
recipients after more than 24 hours on the queue on server7013.eukhost.com."

We are in no doubt that our server has experienced downtime, and this February it has happened too frequently.

We are also aware from these forums that other eUKhost customers have experienced downtime.

However, when we have contacted eUK technical staff online or via ticket support they have denied there has been any downtime.

This denial isn't helpful. We need a constructive explanation of why we have experienced server downtime.

We believe that our sales have been negatively impacted by these downtimes, so we are anxious to receive a credible explanation about this downtime and what will be done to remedy the situation.

Thank you for all forthcoming help.

James

[eponymous2]

And just after starting the above thread, my server went down for a further 20 seconds...

[eUKShane]

Hello,

Apologise for this inconvenience.

One of our senior VPS admin will go though all your issues and will update to your ticket accordingly.

Also, it would be great if you will reply to the ticket with the exact explanation of the downtime you have faced and the domain name for which you are facing mails problem. This will help us to investigate in a better way.

[eUKhost.com]

And just after starting the above thread, my server went down for a further 20 seconds...

Hi James,

I have asked one of our Network Administrator to add your server in our monitoring system. You will receive automated email notification if your server goes offline.

You can subscribe to the Hyperspin remote monitoring service to get downtime notifications from a reliable 3rd party monitoring system.

None of the services were restarted on your server from last couple of days and the uptime we can see for your server is 70 days.

[eponymous2]

I keep hearing from eUK staff that my server has received uptime for 70 days.

This contradicts my experience. There also seem to be other customers of a similar IP address experiencing downtime. [there is another thread of a similar nature, but I can't link to because I'm not allowed to post URLs...]

My problems are ongoing. Google is still reporting server errors when it tries to crawl my site and emails are reportedly held upon in a queue. Here is such a report:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
A message that you sent has not yet been delivered to one or more of its
recipients after more than 24 hours on the queue on server7013.eukhost.com.

I note that a previous reply says I will now receive messages when my site goes offline. I haven't received any messages, but my server hasn't been reachable to Google bots and emails are being held in a queue.

Is it possible, therefore, that there is not a problem with the site going "offline" per se, but there is nonetheless a problem with the server?

Anyway, I appreciate the time and effort eUK make with their customers. They have always been excellent at assisting us in the past.

I similarly hope eUK can help to resolve this current "issue" as it is negatively impacting business and I can't afford for this to go on too long.

Thanks.

[Rsync]

Hello James,

We have received update from our Network Engineers, that one of the switches with in the rack rebooted itself at the same time when face timeout for few sec and we really apologize for this inconvenience caused to you.

Regarding Email problem from your server, we have checked the email que of your VPS and all the mails are stucked in the mails que is for AOL email address and AOL won't accept emails if the RDNS record for the respected IP is not been setup.

We have set up the RDNS for VPS both IP address pointing to the domains hosted on your VPS respectively.

Also the hostname of your VPS is been set to default and not resolving, due to which some remote server wont accept emails, please provide us the hostname which we can set for your VPS from the main hardware node.

[eponymous2]

Date: 03/03/09

Server downtime problem has not been solved.

Every single sitemap we submitted to Google is having errors since yesterday:

URLs not accessible
When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot due to an HTTP status error. All accessible URLs will still be submitted.

We are extremely concerned about this issue. We can't afford to have a server which times out at random times on every single day. It has affected our Google ranking and trafffic enormously.

Please fix this problem immediately.

[Ryan]

Hello James,

Our VPS support techs are looking into this and they will post an update in this thread in a short while from now.

[eUK-Martin]

All the issues that you have been mentioning here points more to the DNS problems, I suppose and not to the entire server going down. One of the VPS admins we will give a close look to the problem. We cannot deny the uptime that your VPS has.

[eponymous2]

All the issues that you have been mentioning here points more to the DNS problems, I suppose and not to the entire server going down. One of the VPS admins we will give a close look to the problem. We cannot deny the uptime that your VPS has.

Our problems began on the 10th of February. Before then everything was fine. So, if there are DNS problems then something must have occurred since that date.

[eponymous2]

Further to my recent tickets/forum posts, my server is still having problems.

Namely, Google bots are still having trouble downloading sitemaps from the server.

I am told that this may be a DNS problem. Can I check if eUK have looked into this yet?

The problem has only occurred since the 10th of February.

I am hoping to get a definitive solution to the problem because most of our traffic comes through Google and we don't want Google thinking we are a defunct website because of these problems.

Thank you for your help.

[Scott]

Hi James,

We have checked dns resolvers and other dns setting on the vps. You are using third party dns server for all websites and just pointed dns "A" record to vps ip address. Other than that firewall is possibly creating the problem. We have now disabled CSF and iptables firewall on your vps.

[eponymous2]

Hi James,

We have checked dns resolvers and other dns setting on the vps. You are using third party dns server for all websites and just pointed dns "A" record to vps ip address.

We were advised by eUK staff to use this set-up at the start of our contract. This was prior to the 10th of February. Like I say, problems have only occurred since the 10th of Feb.

Thanks for your investigating the problem - much appreciated.

[Site]

Can I have a domain on the server to trace?