FreePgs outages are back

[bookish]

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.

[looie]

Hmm.. I noticed FreePgs was down yesterday, but only for a little while. Nothing to make me not like the service..

[bookish]

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.

[OLG]

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 

[doctoreast]

  There are online tools which one can use to
monitor uptime/downtime. http://dotuptime.com/
is a popular one. 

Mikey

[Gandalf]

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

[r03in]

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



.

[brainiac744]

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.

[markjay]

Just a suggestion:
Can the admin make an announcement page at LVCS.net so we could know if there would be problems on the FreePgs server.

[fizznos]

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...

[admin]

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

[fizznos]

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 

[David]

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.

[dragonqueen]

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

[brainiac744]

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)