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You might remember that back in September we asked you to vote for us in the DevProConnections Community Choice Awards. A lot of you must have responded, because we placed 4th!
You might think 4th place is nothing to brag about, and usually that’s true. But look at who we placed 4th behind:
When you look at those kind of heavy hitters, the fact that Winhost, as a relatively young upstart, managed to rank anywhere near them is kind of amazing.
We work hard to provide the best hosting service anywhere, and it’s great to have the .NET hosting community tell us that we’re doing a good job.
And most of all, we thank all of you who voted for us. You are the reason we get out of bed every morning (or every afternoon, for those guys on the night shifts) and look forward to coming in to work.
So yeah, maybe we’re the only people who are goofy enough to announce losing, but to us, it’s a major win.
congrats!
If you had network redundancy as advertised so that so many sites would not be affected by something as lame as a power failure like the one on december 3rd that took my customers offline, provided actual means of notification that such outtage has occurred, and further actually had a phone number you might have placed more than 4th.. I will say again that while my customer still has approx. 9 months left with you all I will stress to them to move to another hosting service closer to that time if changes are not made.. It should be further noted that I am their developer and IT Manager so this change will be gladly accepted if I mention it… I am a Dual Major in Networking Technology and Computer Programming and there is no excuse for such a failure as December 3rd…
We do have redundant IP connections. Unfortunately, this fact did not help in the Dec 3rd outage. We posted about this outage in our forum because we are transparent about these things.
We have monitoring systems in place so we knew about the issue when it happenned and our staff was working on fixing the issue. It took a couple of hours to pinpoint the issue and fix it.
We do not have phone support but even if we did and got a call from you and other customers that would not have changed the fact that it would have taken a couple of hours to fix the outage.
The voting of the award was complete way before the outage occurred. So our 4th place finish would not have been affected in any way with or without the outage.
We understand that you don’t like outages and the fact is that we don’t like outages too. And we work really hard to try to not have them. But as a fellow IT professional you will find that outages don’t happen often but they do happen and we all learn from the experience and improve our system/procedures. We are doing what we can to improve our hosting and at the same time keep our prices as low as they are.
As for communications during outages, that is something we are trying to improve all the time. That is why we post our outages openly in our forum unlike many other hosts.
And as for super-redundant cloud systems that are built for zero downtime – they also have downtime. Check out: http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/cloud/232300904/the-10-biggest-cloud-outages-of-2011.htm and http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/applications-os/225701829/10-biggest-cloud-outages-of-2010-so-far.htm – all the big guys like Amazon, Azure, Google, Rackspace, Gmail, Yahoo, Netflix…etc. have experienced downtime in many cases longer than our Dec 3 outage. And these guys are like a million times bigger than us.
You can move your sites away from us if you want, but you will never be on a zero downtime system. There is none out there.
I couldn’t agree more with curtis.
If you’ve been working in the IT field for longer than a week you realize outages are expected and a fact of life.
One of the things I like about Winhost is their transparency. Don’t hide your dirty laundry under the bed. I want to know when there are outages, what was done to fix the outage and that changes were made to improve the contingency plans and procedures.
Good luck moving to another service Bryan. If you find one with zero outages please let the world know about it.
Is there a network status page that we can go to see the current status of the various web and database servers? Something like Apple has at http://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/ or Microsoft’s at https://status.live.com/ or Google’s at http://www.google.com/appsstatus ? Facebook, Twitter, et al have these as well.
While I appreciate you likening us to Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, we are slightly smaller than most of those guys and we can’t necessarily do everything they can do. We can do a lot of things they can’t, which is good, but at the moment a system status page isn’t feasible.
If you are having an issue the best thing to do is check the outages forum, we post everything there: http://forum.winhost.com/forumdisplay.php?f=3
Thanks Hank. I will check that link.