On Tuesday July 03, 2007, at around 10pm GMT, several FreePgs sites were intermittently throwing up "Cannot connect" errors, not just mine. When I tried to access the forum, the page started to load and then timed out. Then things appeared to be back to normal for a few days. On Sunday July 08, 2007, at around 8am GMT, it wasn't possible to connect to the forum or any FreePgs sites, although I could access other US sites without difficulty.
I'm wary now of recommending FreePgs plans to friends. I wonder if the connection problems might cause pages to be dropped by search engines.
Hmm.. I noticed FreePgs was down yesterday, but only for a little while. Nothing to make me not like the service..
Hi looie,
Newcomers to FreePgs might not realize it, but this has been happening on-and-off since 2005. There are quite a few earlier posts about it on the forum. Often, the connection problems occur when USA citizens are asleep in bed. At one time I was thinking of purchasing a second account to install a WordPress blog, but because of the intermittent downtimes I set up a blog at Wordpress.com instead.
Yep, 2005 going on 2007, downtime wahoo.
It was down last night and until about - 1 hour ago today
I'm quite interested though - how Freepgs is continually "upgrading" its hosting - MySQL db servers etc and yet database response is sluggish and the servers seem a little slow at parsing.
I'd appreciate an Admin just letting us know whats up - it can be quite disheartening :'(
There are online tools which one can use to
monitor uptime/downtime. http://dotuptime.com/
is a popular one.
Mikey
today 09/07/2007 my site goes down from 9.00 until 18.00 GTM +1 (in this gap i have verified multiple time)
where is the problem???
(sorry for my english)
Gandalf
Vote for, or request Email notification of such events! (cuz although a lot more rare these days they still happen :(
And lets face it! It costs nothing to send an email!
So come on freepgs shake your funky thing! It costs nothing to stay in touch! :p
.
It seems like admin was saying something about this before. If I recall, they stopped doing that because a LARGE amount of the emails were bouncing back. Now that the accounts are paid though I would assume a larger portion of the addresses are valid. There is still the problem of this server being blacklisted and the fact that if the server is down you can't access the user database...on the server.
Just a suggestion: ;D
Can the admin make an announcement page at LVCS.net so we could know if there would be problems on the FreePgs server.
There was significant downtime on 7/7 and 7/8, and I'm noticing today that the SMTP server is intermittently down.
I don't think it's coincidence with the new signups being enabled...
We do not offer SMTP services on the FreePgs server. If you are speaking of the mail() function, many of the sockets were overloaded earlier.
New signups have nothing to do with these outages. These outages were caused by Denial of Service attacks.
Thank you,
FreePgs.com Admin
Oh, DoS. Man that sucks. Freepgs is probably the best hosting I've ever worked with, why do people do that...
At least if it had been a spammer or something the fix would be easy :'(
DOSS... Disgusts me. It's just a bunch of skids that think that if they take down a site through running a dos program they downloaded makes them 1337 h4x3r5!... pfft.
Any news about when freepgs will be back up and running? I read the message about at the end of the week. I was just wondering if there was any news? I'm having forum withdrawls! lol
As of now, there's not really anything that can be done until a replacement drive comes in, so it would appear we're all at the mercy of FedEx (or whatever shipping company that admin happens to be using)
As the person who regularly and offensively attacks Freepgs for their often poor service.
I feel we must give the admins broad discretion here, since hardware failures are out of their control.
I have no doubt that the admins are doing everything they can until the drive arrives to ensure site stability and integrity and that we will soon be back to the poor performance that we use to have ::)
The "Create New Database" link in the Options panel will now create a database on the localhost MySQL server. If you have a backup of your database, you can import your database and be up and running right away.
If you do not have a backup of your database, your files should remain intact in most cases. (As long as you have not dropped the tables in your database, or attempted to perform multiple repairs on the files)
Of course, any user that requests, can now be added to the Plesk server. The Plesk server offers better performance, but uses an older MySQL version.
Thank you,
FreePgs.com Admin
SO, if our databases are still intact, when should we stop getting the "Could not connect to database" errors?
Please send a request via the Contact Form including the database name, and we will see what data exists.
You will not be able to connect to the MySQL5 database server until the drive is replaced. The drive should be replaced by Friday [as long as we receive the replacement part].
Thank you,
FreePgs.com Admin
Quote from: admin on July 19, 2007, 02:16:59 AM
Please send a request via the Contact Form including the database name, and we will see what data exists.
You will not be able to connect to the MySQL5 database server until the drive is replaced. The drive should be replaced by Friday [as long as we receive the replacement part].
Thank you,
FreePgs.com Admin
Thanks for answering all my questions so politely. I know I'm nagging a bit. I'm just very nervous about losing my forum.
Does the Plesk Server cost extra, or are you migrating extraneous users over to the server to reduce load? :S
There is no cost to use the Plesk server.
Anyone can migrate over to the Plesk server.
Also, the remaining MySQL5 database server hard disk has failed. Some files can still be read. When the first replacement arrives, we will attempt to build a working copy of all data on the disk.
Thank you,
FreePgs.com Admin
What's the difference?
When I reported connection problems early in July it turned out to be a prelude to a Denial of Service attack. Around 23:00 GMT last night the same thing happened again. There were serious connection problems affecting my site, FTP this forum. Sometimes the pages would start to load and then timeout. At other times I got a "Could not connect to remote server" error message. My site doesn't use a database. Just now, it took a long time for the forum to load.