Back up after maintenance

The server is back up again after the memory checks. The 1and1 tech emailed that the memory tests passed. He's put in a request for the hard drives to be put in another server to see if that solves the problem. I tried to get the other techs at 1and1 to do this almost four months ago when the crashes started but they refused.

Down for memory check by 1and1 tech

The 1and1 techs have just taken the server down to do memory checks.

No badblocks found

The badblocks scans of both hard drives requested by the 1and1.com tech turned up no bad blocks. I emailed the tech the results a couple of minutes ago.

Up again for now

They got it to reboot finally about 23 minutes ago. I've been talking to 1and1 support about the server's history since then. The person at 1and1 seems more inclined to replace the server but asked that I run a bad block scan on the drives and send it to him first. It'll take several hours to complete. It's running in the background now and I'll check the results when I get up in the morning.

Since it's 6 AM there no one is around who can give me the contact info for their corporate hq.

They put me on hold

I talked to 1and1's tech support and told them to reboot the server. I've also asked how to contact their corporate hq in Germany since the American operation either can't or won't fix the server.

I've now been on hold on my cell phone for 14 minutes. The server is still down.

What a surprise, 1and1 server down again

1and1 has proved once again just how bad a hosting company it is. The server that their techs "fixed" has crashed again a little over a day later. Even knowing that this server has been crashing every few days for four months didn't get them to fix anything. Even after they read the server's history in this blog a little over a day ago they still wouldn't replace the server. I know they read the blog because the person I talked to on the 26th went to it while I was talking to him. They apparently don't know enough about servers to fix anything. Or maybe they just don't care. I'm going to try to get hold of their corporate headquarters, I think it's in Germany.

For now I've put in another call to what they laughingly call "tech support" to see if I can get them to reboot the server again.

Up again

The server is back up again. 1and1 got it to reboot. Since it's been a week or so since I backed it up I just did a backup and copied it to both another 1and1 server and to my server at godaddy.com.

Now that I can see the logs it looks like it actually went down around 2:40 PM. I just didn't notice it until a little after 5 PM.

Now we'll see if they do anything to make the server not crash every three or four days.    :^(

I miss the "good old days" when it was economical to run small hosting companies. It used to be great to just get up and walk down the hall to the server room if there was a problem. Now it just doesn't make sense economically unless you have hundreds of servers. At the largest we only had around a dozen physical servers on a T3 and hosted around 800 domains.