MD Web Hosting

  • Posted by saucer
  • February 26, 2008

It appears that MD Web Hosting, an Australian web hosting company based in Melbourne has been having server outages from as far back as early February 2008 (Whirlpool Forum posts). Reading the forum posts, MD Web Hosting claims the the web servers suffered power failures. Technicians have been working to get the servers up and running again… promises that the server will be live again within 24 hours… excuses that parts need to be ordered from overseas… two weeks later, the servers are still own.

Whirlpool forum posts about MD Web Hosting
MD Web Hosting Down
MD Webhosting issues #2
MD Webhosting issues #3

Web Server Downtime Redundancy

While many small companies rely on the net to conduct everyday business, what effect would 2 to 3 weeks of server downtime mean to them? Also, more importantly, how can a small business protect itself and minimise downtime?

Imaginge you were running an online florist. Valentines day (14 Feb) is one of the busiest days in the year. Your website has been down since early Feb. You lose thousands of dollars in sales. Loyal customers take their business elsewhere - or even worst, loyal customers think you have gone out of business and find another florist.

This got me thinking. Web hosting is reasonably cheap. You can get shared web hosting from $10 - $20 per month.

Using two different web hosts (ideally in two seperate geo locations or datacenters), you can create two mirror websites. You can even backup each site remotely. If one hosting company goes down (for technical, financial or other reasons), an update of your sendonary servers DNS details will get you back online within hours. Just remember to use a third party for your domain name registar.

This may sound a little technical to the average person, but any half competant web designer/developer should be able to set this up.

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February 26th, 2008
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Comment Number:
1
Written by:
nikadmeus
Posted on:
February 26, 2008 at 10:07 pm

Yup, as a recent refugee from MD Webhosting, I can confirm that they are incompetent. We had 2 servers, one in Sydney mirroring one in Melbourne and they both went down….

And yes, the Police concert was fantastic and we had seats waaaay up the front :)

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
na
Posted on:
May 20, 2008 at 10:39 am

I have been with MD for approx 3 years and have had endless issues! They are useless, when the servers are up they run fine BUT if you ever have a problem don;t expect them to care nor resolve the issue quickly. I have a whole server fall down for 6 WEEKS!!!! At the end of last year I lost all the sites + all of the databases. DO NOT USE MD WEB HOSTING!!!!