VPS down...maintenance? no announcement!

[DTinAZ]

In the content window of my Spry VPS control panel, I see the following:

Server is temporarily closed for maintenance

Server is currently undergoing maintenance and upgrades by our technical support team.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you and thank you for your support as we continue to enhance and improve our software and services.

Thank you.

None of the domains in my VPS are resolving, because the DNS servers (dnscloud.com) aren't functioning, nor is the Spry Support login/trouble ticket system.

Take a look in the "Spry Maintenance" forum here....ONE SINGLE FRIGGIN' MAINTENANCE ANNOUNCEMENT FROM LAST OCTOBER!

HELLO, SPRY? ANYONE HOME? No, I didn't think so...

A Very Disgruntled Customer
(darn...I really, really HATE moving all my accounts to a new host....)

[wheeler]

I will second that i'm having the same problem, ALL our sites are down and have been for about 2 hours!!! what the hell is going on? No doubt this was something out of the blue but usually problems are resolved within minutes on our server.

things have been generally good apart from some inadequacies of hspc, but today is really hurting when we add up 5 staff wages sitting around doing nothing, many sales down the drain, not to mention we "were" having our best days yet on some new sites... goodbye customers

ouch

[networkistic]

Mine Is Down Too! Spry! What's Going On!?!?

[DTinAZ]

During the DNS server outage tonight, the only way to reach Spry was by sending email to hostingsupport@spry.com, and they've responded as follows:

We're extremely sorry for the downtime that occured earlier this
evening. This was due to a failure on both our primary and secondary
name servers. Service was restored at aproximately 10:40PM. We're taking
steps to ensure this will not happen again. If there is a maintenance
window required we will be sure and notify you well in advance.

I expect them to make better use of this Forum venue, in that they could have posted an announcement here once the situation was in process. I think we all need to demand better communication from Spry or they won't change.

[DTinAZ]

things have been generally good apart from some inadequacies of hspc

BTW, I've been able to find some workarounds for the way that email aliases and forwarding are handled in HSPC. I'll be glad to share anything that might be useful to others.

DT

[tamlyn]

I think this kind of query would be better handled by a support request or was the main spry site down too?

[DTinAZ]

I think this kind of query would be better handled by a support request or was the main spry site down too?

The "Spry Support sign in" function was down during the outage. As I mentioned above, I wrote to hostingsupport@spry.com as well, and eventually received a response.

Yes, specific individual support issues are best handled using the other Support options (although I'm finding that they're closing tickets sometimes without actually resolving issues), but this was a larger outage affecting many customers, and this kind of venue could be useful in situations like that.

DT

[Todd]

Thanks all for your feedback on the communication provided during last week's DNS outage. As you know, that outage was one of the worst we've experienced in terms of impact and duration - DNS didn't work for the over 5000 domains pointed at ns3/4.dnscloud.com for nearly 2 hours.

In the past, we have e-mailed planned maintenance notifications to customers, and we've limited posting maintenance notifications in this forum to maintenances which meet the following criteria:
1 - they are a planned maintenance.
2 - the maintenance will cause an outage of some type for customers.
3 - the outage will be for all Spry customers (this was decided because of the difficulty forum readers will have in determining if a planned maintenance will affect them or not when the outage is limited to a sub-group of Spry customers).

Because of your feedback and our experience with the DNS outage last week, we are going to change that notification policy, however. Going forward, we will post planned maintenances that will impact more than a single Spry customer in the Spry Maintenance forum. We will include information in the post that can help readers determine if they are included in the group of impacted customers.

In addition, we will strive to put notifications on the forums when there is an unplanned outage. To be quite honest, however, in most cases of unplanned outage, we are simply focused on resolving the outage and handling the phone calls/emails/trouble tickets that are generated by impacted customers. This focus will not change, so notifications in the forums may not be as timely as some would hope.

Thanks again for your feedback, and I appreciate your patience and understanding during the DNS failure last week.

[DTinAZ]

Thanks for the response, Todd. Even during a server "crisis," if some people know to come here, and you post a brief announcement, then fewer people will be contacting Support and your staff will be better able to spend their time dealing with the situation. But that will only work if Spry makes better use of this venue, and customers know that and also show up here. It's a two-way street.

DT

[MikeDaSlob]

Thanks for the response, Todd. Even during a server "crisis," if some people know to come here, and you post a brief announcement, then fewer people will be contacting Support and your staff will be better able to spend their time dealing with the situation. But that will only work if Spry makes better use of this venue, and customers know that and also show up here. It's a two-way street.

DT

Im agreed, and I wouldnt mind MRTG traffic views of the spry INternet lines, that way we can see if it is not just our server that is problematic, or if in fact it is a line.