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How much is too much?

Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2005 6:07 pm
by neophyte
Okay over the last four months my db has been down five times, apache once and ftp once. So the question is how much is too much?

How many times is too many times to have your DB down on your site? And when would you leave your hostng company?

Re: How much is too much?

Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2005 6:14 pm
by alex.barylski
neophyte wrote:Okay over the last four months my db has been down five times, apache once and ftp once. So the question is how much is too much?

How many times is too many times to have your DB down on your site? And when would you leave your hostng company?
Once....

That doesn't sound 99.9% uptime garuntee to me :)

Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2005 7:06 pm
by trukfixer
depends on what is causing teh db to be down - if it is *your* script that causes mysql to load up and crash, the problem will move with you. (we had a client once that claimed our hosting was worthless because mysql kept going down, though the response time to getting it back up was always < 300 seconds .. finally, he moved to a "bigger" server (dual xeon and SCSI drives, etc) and THAT server started crashing too. He had been told by us every time that mysql crashed that the problem was being caused by *poor* programming and sql in an application he was running, he refused to believe it, because he had paid over $300 for the software he was running... and the developer told him there had been no problems from anywhere else..

I think he has changed hosting twice more since then, and each time, the problem has followed his move.

the key is to find out from the hosting company *WHY* the database is going "down" and figure out whose script or queries are causing the issue, and if they cant tell you , then yes, I would move.. (or Id also move if they can tell what the problem is, but dont fix it or boot the user causing issues) but otherwise, I'd want to know why MySQL was going down, because if it was your script causing it, and you moved, the problem will just follow you around like a stray dog that you gave a handout to :)

Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2005 7:10 pm
by Buddha443556
How's the service? Fast? Polite? Are they on top of things? Keeping you informed? There's always going to be downtime sooner or later however good service will make it less stressful.

I'm always looking for better hosting ...

Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2005 7:42 pm
by Chris Corbyn
OK... shared hosting (I'm guessing)... not bad.... it provides a service.

Dedicated hosting... fantastic

Virtual Dedicated/UML hosting... spot on...

IMO... try VDS... it's cheap and it works the way you make it work. My server has had almost 3 months without a reboot, and if I need PHP/Apache/MySQL re-configured I just do it.... I can't complain at all.

IMO... 5 times DB down in a month is lame... it should be a rarity ;)

Re: How much is too much?

Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2005 8:41 pm
by Roja
Hockey wrote:That doesn't sound 99.9% uptime garuntee to me :)
Gotta nitpick here. As a former webhost provider, I constantly had people misunderstand that number.

31 days in a month
x24 hours in a day
x60 minutes in an hour
------
44640
x0.01 allowed downtime
------
446.4 minutes (almost 8 hours).

Also note that it doesn't include *planned* and scheduled downtime.
Hockey wrote:How many times is too many times to have your DB down on your site?
Depends on what you need to do. If your site is paying your rent, any outage better have a refund attached. If you are running a little-used homepage, who cares?
Hockey wrote:And when would you leave your hostng company?
The exact moment I thought I could get a better deal elsewhere. The challenge is that a "better deal" includes SO many things.. security, support, network (speed AND latency), server upgrades, software supported, versions, and much - much more.

Re: How much is too much?

Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2005 9:18 pm
by sheila
Roja wrote: 31 days in a month
x24 hours in a day
x60 minutes in an hour
------
44640
x0.01 allowed downtime
------
446.4 minutes (almost 8 hours).
I think you missed a decimal place there.
1.000 - 0.999 = 0.001

44640
x0.001
-------
~ 45 minutes / month

Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2005 9:44 pm
by neophyte
I have two shared plans with this company on two different servers. I've had almost no problems on one server. The other server has been a disaster. As I said earlier the DB has been down on multple occassions. The worst was the first time. I set up my tables the day or the day after the account was set up. Within a couple of days after that the DB and user was completely wiped out. This time they say the permissions on my dbuser was changed and that the MYSQL server was okay. But I know I didn't change permissions. So who did? Still trying to find that out. I agree with d11wtq virtual and dedicated is the way to go if you have the money to do it. I've only once got something for a 99.9% up time violation. In that case they deleted my user account from the server -- oops... They gave three months hosting.

Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2005 10:47 pm
by d3ad1ysp0rk
That's kinda funny, the second I finished reading this topic, I went to my own site (http://lanp245.com/) and the database was down for the first time in 2 months. Damn.

Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2005 5:08 am
by onion2k
I've been with clook.net for about 2 years now. As far as I'm aware it's never been down.

Re: How much is too much?

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2005 3:11 pm
by alvinphp
neophyte wrote:Okay over the last four months my db has been down five times, apache once and ftp once. So the question is how much is too much?

How many times is too many times to have your DB down on your site? And when would you leave your hostng company?
It depends on how much you are paying. If you pay $25/year then you should expect downtime. If you pay $20/month and it goes down more then 2 times in a year I would be <span style='color:blue' title='I'm naughty, are you naughty?'>smurf</span>. At 3 I would leave. And if you have a lot of sites (like me), then moving is a major pain in the butt.

I personally pay the higher price because I want reliability, 24/7 live support, and real daily backups so when I screw up a DB I can msg them and get yesterdays DB in less then an hour.

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2005 4:24 pm
by Ree
Hey, how do you crash mysql via a query? :lol:

Didn't think it was possible.

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2005 6:15 pm
by trukfixer
Ree wrote:Hey, how do you crash mysql via a query? :lol:

Didn't think it was possible.
Oh yeah , It is most assuredly possible :)

where I work, there are two applications that , under high traffic, will bring not only mysql, but the entire server to a crashing , grinding halt (at ssh login, it takes over 3 minutes, on average just to get to the root prompt due to extreme high loads ) due to poor mysql query and/or index design...

I prefer not to list them here, as the developers of those applications have been informed countless times, (and shown evidence and proof of the problem) but have so far done very little ot alleviate the problem - so we ended up (at least on one- the other is send encoded) fixing the problem ourselves, so that the issue would not be as severe (would you believe something as sinple as creating an index on a single database table will improve an applications performance by as much as 300% ?)

Anyhow- speaking from first hand experience on the sysadmin side of things, yes, MySQL can most certainly crash via a query (or a bad or non-existent index)

Bri!

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2005 9:28 pm
by Ambush Commander
MySQL query done, inspected 129831202931 rows.

A DBM's worst nightmare.

Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 3:51 am
by Grim...
I've been with Dataflame for 2 years and ukhost4u (shudder - that name sucks) for about 1 year.
The only time anything went down on either (to my knowledge) was when a silly web game I made got really popular when I wasn't looking and crashed their server :D