MySQL 5 Upgrade

[WN-Ali]

Dear WireNine clients,

We will begin upgrading MySQL from version 4.1 to 5.0 stable release on all servers starting March 1st, 2008, this upgrade will apply to all of our shared and reseller web hosting customers. We request all customers to download a backup of their mysql databases and also check with your script developers support to make sure all of your scripts are compatible with MySQL v5.

If you have any questions or concerns in regards to this upgrade, please feel free to contact us.

Thank you!

[daryllg]

Originally Posted by WN-Ali

Dear Customers,

We will be upgrading MySQL v4.1.22 to MySQL v5.x stable release on Saturday January 5th, 2008 on the Wire3 server, this only applies to semi-dedicated plan customers. We request all customers to download a backup of their mysql databases. Check with your script developers support to make sure all of your scripts are compatible with MySQL v5.

If you have any questions or concerns in regards to this upgrade, please feel free to contact us.

Thank you!

You upgrade the MySQL component today, the same day in which you suspend our website for using too much Mysql usage. The website has been suspended for most of the day, we have sent you message asking for it to unsuspended so we can correct any issues. You ignore us. I find it highly interesting that you choose today of all days to suspend our site.

The Semi-Dedicated package is advertised as "Best for high-traffic or high-resource web sites.", which we are. What you dont say is how much resources we have to use before you try and force us into going dedicated by turning off our site. Poor show really.

I dont expect you'll allow this message to remain. I've spoke highly of Wirenine on webhostingtalk, perhaps it's time to allow others to know what to expect. We haven't been on this server for even a month and we're almost being told buy dedicated or we'll kick you off.

Support response as almost always very fast (except for a previous request which took 1 week to sort), yet today for some reason you dont seem to want to reply - wonder why?

[Mark.B]

Originally Posted by daryllg

You upgrade the MySQL component today, the same day in which you suspend our website for using too much Mysql usage. The website has been suspended for most of the day, we have sent you message asking for it to unsuspended so we can correct any issues. You ignore us. I find it highly interesting that you choose today of all days to suspend our site.

The Semi-Dedicated package is advertised as "Best for high-traffic or high-resource web sites.", which we are. What you dont say is how much resources we have to use before you try and force us into going dedicated by turning off our site. Poor show really.

I dont expect you'll allow this message to remain. I've spoke highly of Wirenine on webhostingtalk, perhaps it's time to allow others to know what to expect. We haven't been on this server for even a month and we're almost being told buy dedicated or we'll kick you off.

Support response as almost always very fast (except for a previous request which took 1 week to sort), yet today for some reason you dont seem to want to reply - wonder why?

I feel I've got to put the other side of this story across. I'm also on the Wire3 dedicated server. I've been on it since April 2007. And I can confirm that in the last couple of weeks the performance of it has been *severely* impacted by something....which it now transpires has been your site. I hadn't been the only customer on Wire3 to notice the problem either, it's just that I happened to be the one who reported it, because my members were giving me Hell over it.

I reported the matter to Wirenine about 48 hours ago, and they have promptly and efficiently rectified the situation and the server is back to its former excellent performance.

I sympathise with you for having your site shut down, I really do. However, the fact that the MySQL upgrade was due that day (it's apparently been delayed) really is pure coincidence. The reason your site was shut yesterday is because I had made a report of server performance issues the day before. So blame me for the timing of this if nothing else.

I'm truly sorry that this resulted in a site suspension, but the server really was suffering a performance degradation. There were loads in excess of 30 at times. I am always thinking about plugins myself, my site has several, and I always try very hard not to install anything that could grab too many resources. That's one of the risks with a modified site, I have seen some addons for forums where the queries will just kill the server.

I have even rescheduled my own automated SQL backups from "on the hour" to other times, to avoid that peak period when everyone's scripts run, in order to try and cut resource demands for everyone.

I don't know what software you run, if it's vB then you can turn all the plugins off and investigate them one by one. Wirenine might be able to shed some light on which plugin it might have been, or at least which queries were at fault (which would help pinpoint the plugin).

What I would say, is that Wirenine have acted responsibly in this case, they have a responsibility to all customers on the server. If my site was knocking out everyone else's then, much as I would not like it, I accept that my host would HAVE to switch it off until the problem was resolved. Wirenine are an excellent host and I feel I have to defend them on this.

For my part, I sincerely hope you can get back up and running and get the problem sorted. I'm no programmer, but if there's anything I can suggest to help, then I'm more than happy to try.

[daryllg]

Originally Posted by Mark.B

I feel I've got to put the other side of this story across. I'm also on the Wire3 dedicated server. I've been on it since April 2007. And I can confirm that in the last couple of weeks the performance of it has been *severely* impacted by something....which it now transpires has been your site. I hadn't been the only customer on Wire3 to notice the problem either, it's just that I happened to be the one who reported it, because my members were giving me Hell over it.

I reported the matter to Wirenine about 48 hours ago, and they have promptly and efficiently rectified the situation and the server is back to its former excellent performance.

I sympathise with you for having your site shut down, I really do. However, the fact that the MySQL upgrade was due that day (it's apparently been delayed) really is pure coincidence. The reason your site was shut yesterday is because I had made a report of server performance issues the day before. So blame me for the timing of this if nothing else.

I'm truly sorry that this resulted in a site suspension, but the server really was suffering a performance degradation. There were loads in excess of 30 at times. I am always thinking about plugins myself, my site has several, and I always try very hard not to install anything that could grab too many resources. That's one of the risks with a modified site, I have seen some addons for forums where the queries will just kill the server.

I have even rescheduled my own automated SQL backups from "on the hour" to other times, to avoid that peak period when everyone's scripts run, in order to try and cut resource demands for everyone.

I don't know what software you run, if it's vB then you can turn all the plugins off and investigate them one by one. Wirenine might be able to shed some light on which plugin it might have been, or at least which queries were at fault (which would help pinpoint the plugin).

What I would say, is that Wirenine have acted responsibly in this case, they have a responsibility to all customers on the server. If my site was knocking out everyone else's then, much as I would not like it, I accept that my host would HAVE to switch it off until the problem was resolved. Wirenine are an excellent host and I feel I have to defend them on this.

For my part, I sincerely hope you can get back up and running and get the problem sorted. I'm no programmer, but if there's anything I can suggest to help, then I'm more than happy to try.

Mark,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. My previous message was born out of frustration in Wirenine not replying as I have been a satisfied reseller customer for some time. Perhaps your are correct in the timing of the mysql upgrade, however with support refusing the respond to us and our account being suspended on that said date, it was easy to jump to conclusions.

I obviously asked for proof that it was our account that was causing issue, but no one has come forth with any figures etc.

We do run Vbulletin and it was the stats module that Wirenine identified as causing load issue and on our unsuspension we removed this completely and turned off our portal. Vbulletin was set to reject connections when the server load was too high. We then asked Wirenine to run a full backup, they replied to say we could do it ourselves. We started the full backup and they then suspended us for increasing server load by running this backup?!?!?!

We are a football team website and as such due to instances happening we have been experiencing surges in more than what is our normal service. Firstly our team manager quit, causing a surge of visitors. Our competitor site then went down recently and this created our busiest day. This would have been the surge that caused you to log a fault call with wirenine. It is expected that our new manager will be announced soon and that is why our visitor numbers have been increased.

We are trying to rectify the sitation, but the response we get from wirenine is that our site is suspended and we should email their sales address to get a dedicated server. We feel as though we are being pushed into purchasing one since they wont let us backup our site to transfer elsewhere.

As it stands we have been offline for some time, it being the weekend our team played yeserday and as such the weekend is our busiest time. We're losing visitors and the frustrating thing is wirenine are not helping us. I appreciate the need to mantain the server for the other customers on it, but they accepted us onto the server knowing we were a large site when they had issues restoring our backup from a previous host. All we want to do is get the site back online, even if it's on a limited basis. The suspension page is hardly inspiring for our users.

[Mark.B]

Originally Posted by daryllg

All we want to do is get the site back online, even if it's on a limited basis. The suspension page is hardly inspiring for our users.

One temporary option might be to get a cheap hosting account, upload a holding page explaining the outage, and then ask Wirenine if they can change the nameservers to point at that cheap account....then using the cheap account's CPanel, "park" the domain there. Within a few hours most people will see the holding message and that at least shows them you haven't just disappeared.

[daryllg]

Originally Posted by Mark.B

One temporary option might be to get a cheap hosting account, upload a holding page explaining the outage, and then ask Wirenine if they can change the nameservers to point at that cheap account....then using the cheap account's CPanel, "park" the domain there. Within a few hours most people will see the holding message and that at least shows them you haven't just disappeared.

Mark it is something we are going to have to do now.

We got unsuspended this morning and ran a watered down version of our website. No guest access and more. Server load was under 1 all day (we're uk based, its 17:45 at present). Suddenly the load increased, i was using ftp at the time editing files and downloading some. Stalled, tried to get Cpanel, wouldn't load. Our site has been offline for the last hour or so with Database error's, not caused by us. Our reporting system has failed to email the cause to us.

So suspended AGAIN, no proof we caused load spike and now being told we wont be activated again and they would supply a backup for us to use (probably in a day or so!).

And.....all accounts on my reseller account on a seperate wirenine server have stopped working. I actually only host one very small several page website on this and have been overpaying for some time (I really dont need reseller). Checked the server is online via it's IP, just my sites unaccessible. Logged a ticket some hours ago, no response. Another shocking coincidence perhaps!

[WN-Ali]

Your account was suspended due to your usage causing the server to crash. You have unstable plug ins installed on your forums, which were using extremely high resources and causing the server to crash.

[Mark.B]

I must confess I don't know enough about servers and MySQL servers to understand all the ins and outs of stuff. I know when we take an SQL backup ourselves it has been known to slow the server down, but other times it doesn't, so I can't work that one out.

My report the other day was triggered not by one specific event, but by a build up over the last month or so of ongoing load issues. Today it went much worse for a solid four hours, whether that was you or not I'm not sure, but whatever it was today actually took my site out completely and I had to log another ticket. It all seems ok now though.

I must confess I am not that well up in the whole semi-dedicated market. I understand (I think) the difference between semi-dedicated and VPS, in that VPS gives you a closed environment that runs as if it was your own server. However I'm not sure what resources a semi-dedicated server is designed to cope with. There is, I am sure, a point at which semi-dedicated is no longer viable and fully dedicated is needed.

My site is only borderline for needing semi-dedicated. In fact we ran for years on our previous hosts on a normal shared account with no problems, it was only when they were sold to someone else and downgraded all the servers, causing major issues, that we moved onto Wirenine. I just decided I'd rather have a semi-dedicated server for the increased reliability (and it HAS been very reliable, overall). I think we were possibly only the second customer on the server at the time.

It is not good if you can't get a backup of your site, I would hope they'd let you have that at least so you can easily move elsewhere. I haven't seen your site's figures but it's starting to sound like you *are* heading towards fully dedicated territory, if the surges are that large. Only a fully dedicated server can really cope with that sort of thing. But like I say, I haven't seen your figures so I can't say for sure.

[Mark.B]

If it's any consolation, most UK ISP's now update their DNS *really* quickly. When I moved to Wirenine from Imagelink in April most UK based members were on the correct site within four hours. The only exception is Tiscali, which took almost 48 hours.

If you have any US members, *most* of their ISPs seemed to be fairly quick as well, though our site is primarily UK (as I guess yours is) so we didn't get a good cross section.

I'll keep an eye on yours (I found it) and let you know when it updates for me, I'm on ntl (now known as Virgin Media). they were quite fast with my own site.

[daryllg]

Originally Posted by Mark.B

If it's any consolation, most UK ISP's now update their DNS *really* quickly. When I moved to Wirenine from Imagelink in April most UK based members were on the correct site within four hours. The only exception is Tiscali, which took almost 48 hours.

If you have any US members, *most* of their ISPs seemed to be fairly quick as well, though our site is primarily UK (as I guess yours is) so we didn't get a good cross section.

I'll keep an eye on yours (I found it) and let you know when it updates for me, I'm on ntl (now known as Virgin Media). they were quite fast with my own site.

Another Virgin Media customer here :-). As a happy reseller customer of wirenine, I'm disappointed with the way the hosting has gone for this site with I recommending wirenine to the rest of the technical team. Some things are meant to work out in life... Whats your site Mark? I ask out of interest to see the size of other sites on the server. As I said previously, I find it strange for our site to be such a burden since it was previously on a shared server with some very large sites. But it must be a configuration/specification issue. Previous host ran the same version of Cpanel. Nevermind ;-)

We'll actually have to update our DNS again once we find a suitable Dedicated provider. The current change is just to try to limit the issues we are causing. We did ask Wirenine for a quote given they knew the spec of server needed for our load but they haven't provided one which was shame.