RE: UKHA Overmoderated? [LONG]

["Keith Doxey" <ukha@xxxxxxx>]

As Steve correctly says, O2Hoster is now up and running again and email is
getting through. I havent yet received email that was sent during the
outage
but I also havent had my test messages bounced either. Only time will tell
if some email has been lost totally.

All ISP's and Hosting services experience some form of outage at one time
or
another. The severity of that outage is dependant on the scale of operation
being run. The bigger and more expensive the operation is, the more should
be spent on resiliance and redundancy and any downtime should be as short
as
possible.

For example, I now have ADSL so "could" host my websites on my
own PC for
free but I have no form of backup in the event of PC or ADSL failing and my
websites would be "off the air". I chose a hosting service that
fitted with
my available budget and offered the features I need.

I have had a previous low cost hosting service fail completely in December
2001 which resulted in my sites being down for a couple of days. OK, so
that
wasnt good but as has been already pointed out, the total charge for a year
was less than the MONTHLY cost from the big players.

As to UKHA being overmoderated, in my case I have been a Co-Moderator ever
since Mark created Co-Moderators. I believe this is the FIRST TIME I have
ever used that power.

I closed the thread because I believed it had run its course. At the time
of
closing there had been 47 postings about the problem and I include part of
my reasons below ......

> 1 O2 Hoster is having major problems of some sort which WE can do
nothing about but it seems to be DNS related.

This was borne out by an update from O2Hoster stating....

"We had been hit today with a serious problems that we had not had a
contingencey plan for and was taken by suprise.
We have put plans in place so that this NEVER happens again."

On the O2Hoster forum is stated that this was a Primary DNS failure


> 2. Chris Bond has pointed out that he is no longer associated with
O2Hoster and is unable to comment further until next week.

If he no longer works for the company he cant do anything about it so there
is no point keep raising the matter.

>3. Our email seems to be queueing somewhere but the exponential
increase in list traffic that this problem is currently causing could
result in some of us losing our Yahoo accounts as happened recently.

I was being mindful of what happened when Yahoo mail was not getting
through
and Mark Harrisons Yahoo account was deleted resulting in the permanent
loss
of several of the spinoff groups.

> 4. Until such time as there is an announcement from someone in a
position to resolve this I believe it is best that this thread is
closed.

I still believe I took the right course of action and although a couple of
messages were posted after it was closed I made no comment about that ( in
fact I received an offlist apology about it). They were in response to
earlier postings in the thread and were sent before the posters had
received
the messages about closure. I often dont get to read the group until the
evening an have myself posted replies to early messages in a thread that
had
already been closed later in the day.

What is not acceptable IMHO is to post replies to messages sent AFTER a
thread is closed or when a specific request has been made saying DO NOT
REPLY.

I realise it is difficult when a website or email is down but we all know
it
happens from time to time and have to accept that or pay a very high price
for something with 99.9999999% uptime.

I find it hard to believe that some people on this list have only one email
address that they can use. That is an "all your eggs in one
basket"
situation. I believe most of us will have at least one other email account
hosted elsewhere that they could use in an emergency. Yahoo will allow you
to have upto 5 addresses associated with an account and it is a simple
matter to direct delivery to another account although it can take a while
for the change to filter through.

Because I am so reliant on email these days I have accounts on 6 different
domain names that I own as well as free accounts on BTInternet and Talk21.
( I also have Hotmail and Yahoo but cant remember the details!!!) My
domains
are controlled by UKReg so I can point them where I want and although
changes do take some time to filter through I can restore some form of web
presence within 24 hours.

We must all take responsibility for our own decisions and judge things by
our own criteria. If someone offers something that seems to be "Too
good to
be true" then it could well be. I took the view that the O2Hoster
offer was
good value for money and have to take the rough with the smooth. The
service
had been pretty good for most of the time. When it becomes too rough I have
to move to calmer waters.

That is my final comment on the situation. I am not relinquishing my
Co-Moderator rights but it will probably be a long time before I use them
again unless things are really out of hand and no other moderator has
already acted.



Keith

www.diyha.co.uk
www.kat5.tv


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steve Morgan [mailto:steve@xxxxxxx]
> Sent: 10 May 2003 08:07
> To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: [ukha_d] UKHA Overmoderated?
>
>
> Nobody yet seems to have mentioned that nothing has actually fallen
> through. O2Hoster is back up and running (as far as I can tell). They
> were out of action for no longer than previous outages I've
> experienced with both BT and Demon.