Yesterday afternoon, just as we were winding down for our client festive party someone turned the lights out in Hosting 365 again!  Yes that recurring theme of power issues to the data centre recurred once more – the third time in a year. SitesToGo websites were not affected, (although blogs did not function). Windows hosted sites like our own GiftGallery online gift voucher business were down for about three hours .  Its the email outages that cause the most grief and that hit clients badly. Updates were not possible as phones were answered by voicemail queue and did not progress further.  And the useful Hosting365 status blog has been discontinued.

We are actually in the process of moving our client domain management and emails to a host with a better track record and will probably accelerate this. But its a mammoth job with more than 750 domains to relocate manually and there is the potential for client email disruption.

We are taking the step of allowing clients to nominate themselves for priority transfer – especially when we know that timely email is critical to their work processes.  More than one client was actually happy enough to take a break from emails once they knew most of Ireland was affected!   For additional communications support we have also set up a status blog on WordPress who have servers outside Ireland and will always update this for clients in the event of further incidents.

We don’t plan to  move our web hosting though as the service we get from Hosting 365 has always been good in this area and the new blade infrastructure seems very stable.  We use external monitoring though because in an outage like this there were no outage alerts from the Hosting 365 servers.

Mail now functioning well but there may be backlog, all sites back up. Report next week will be sent to all clients affected when we are fully briefed by Hosting 365

From lunchtime today some of our shared hosting clients started to experience outages. SitesToGo websites are not affected currently but some email accounts are. Judging by other boards and blogs it is a fairly widespread problem.  www.Hosting365status.com is not functioning but other status sites like www.jswebstatus.info are – our apologies to clients but this is beyond our control. Subscribe to or watch this blog for updates.

Another benchmarking survey today from Epitero reveals that on average in Dublin broadband speeds delivered are running at 60% of average.  Goodness knows the equivalent outside the capital! But Dublin ranked seventh out of eight capital cities. Bertie’s digital hub – dream on! This adds a whole new meaning to the enevitable disclaimer ‘broadband speeds may vary’

Good news is that you can download a bit of software to measure the performance of your own supplier. We are testing ours (Last Mile) this week and are suggesting clients do the same and report to this blog.

The Epitero report is not yet on their website but I will add a link once it is (I wonder can they update their own website without specialist skills or software?!)

Given that Ireland’s terrestrial broadband is second only to Greece and Mexico as the worst quality in the developed world, how will this be affected by the news that the preferred tenderer to replace the debacle that was the rural broadband scheme is a mobile provider 3. Looks like things can only get worse out here in the sticks… Much as we all love to blame Eircom for that farce which is our digital economy, at least they might provide an infrastructure based upon the type of speeds and consistency that the rest of Europe enjoys.

Broadband?  Sure you would have to go to Dublin for that….