Site downtime over the past several days

by Alex Kuretz on March 2, 2009 · 3 comments

in MediaSmartServer.net

Many of you have observed the outages and downtime of the site over the past several days. This was due to an intended change where I was trying to move to a higher performance hosting solution to provide a better experience for the MediaSmartServer.net visitors. Unfortunately this process did not go smoothly at all and my (former) hosting provider was actually making things worse rather than fixing the problems.

I’ve now got the site moved to a new host, I don’t expect any more extended outages. It may take a little while (up to a couple days) for the DNS info to propagate across to all the internet. There may also be periodic short outages or hiccups (should be isolated to just a moment or two) as I get the system tweaked for performance and stability.

Thanks for your patience through this, as hard as it’s been on you all it’s been way worse for me. :(

Please let me know if you see anything not working as expected.


Article by

I'm Alex Kuretz, and I'm the founder of MediaSmartServer.net. I was the Lead Test and Integration Engineer at HP for the MediaSmart Server until April 2008 when I moved on to other opportunities outside HP. I've kept active in the Windows Home Server community, creating several add-ins and helping users make the most of their Home Servers.


{ 3 comments }

hakr March 2, 2009 at 8:56 pm

I’ve never known of a site that moved to a new host that didn’t have a few days or weeks of “downtime” because of unanticipated glitches.
Not to worry…

Eric March 3, 2009 at 8:19 am

Hi Alex, The problem is with traditional DNS and it’s high cache times. Next time you plan on moving your site, simply let me know and TZO can create a DNS entry for you a few weeks before the move using the same IP. Then, when you are ready to move, migrate your content, then simply update the new IP addresses in the TZO DNS and with our low cache times, the new site will have less than 5 min of downtime due to a low cache, and you’ll never have this issue again!

Alex Kuretz March 6, 2009 at 12:50 pm

Thanks Eric, I really appreciate it and may talk with you offline about DNS management for me. Unfortunately the downtime was do to missing files and databases and misconfigured hosts on my providers side. Once they straightened that out enough for me to move my files to the new host things were working OK pretty quickly.

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