Firebright Hosting Down

Sunday 20 February 2005 1:53:48 pm

As an eZ publish partner I was wondering if anyone else here is using Firebright at the moment and is having problems with their server being down.

My site has been down for nearly 48 hours with no mention of when it should be back online and they aren't returning emails. I've tried phoning but they're in the US and I'm in the UK and calls go into an answer machine queue with no idea when they'll pick up.

The up-to-the-minute reporting on their web site is giving reports that are more than half a day apart and so I'm completely in the dark.

If I'd known it would take this long to get sorted I'd have arranged for a new host and changed DNS by now. AFAIK, they haven't sent out a newsletter and there has generally been a serious lack of communication considering it's been an absolute disaster during the past two days.

If anone else knows more info I'd really appreciate hearing what's going on.

http://www.wildaboutbritain.co.uk

Sunday 20 February 2005 3:31:15 pm

Hi Simon,

Sorry to hear that you also have a Firebright account.

As we enter the third day of blackout it certainly makes you wonder just how long it will take them to get this sorted. I've been checking virtually every 15 minutes to see if we're back online so that I can get back on with developing the site...a complete and utter waste of my weekend.

I hope that none of the other sites that are down are online shops because they've probably lost some serious revenue during the weekend.

http://www.wildaboutbritain.co.uk

Sunday 20 February 2005 5:01:33 pm

The server's been down long enough for google to re-index their homepage - and cache the maintance page instead. ( http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=firebright ). Quite a long outage by most standards...

This just in from firebright.com's front page:

4:41p. Server has been restored. SW-Soft technical services are installing Viruozzo on the Starlight node and it should be restored as soon as their final work on the system is complete. Starlight should be restored momentarily.

We experienced some major problems with SW-Soft software re-installation that prevented a speedy restore, most specifically that the backup software provided by HSP to back up their software is incomplete and does not include important information needed to restore the accounts. FireBright had replaced the physical system by 3am Saturday morning. We're very discourage with SW-Soft, as this is the second time their software has let us down even on simple server restoration, and are evaluating our options going forward.

We deeply apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced.

Please note that none of our customers on Taclight, Limelight, Daylight, Whitelight, Brightlight, Darklight, Greenlight, Blacklight, Redlight, FireLight or any of our other production systems were affected. This outage was limited to a single server.

Monday 21 February 2005 1:17:11 am

Thanks Sean for you're recent explanation, it almost sounded like you were making an apology and whilst you never actually said it, I think I'm right in saying that you what you wanted to say is that you're 'Sorry!'. I guess we'll have to settle for you being sympathetic with our hardship.

Just a few questions about the quality of the Firebright service.

What prevented you from sending emails to your customers to say 'Look, we've got a major nightmare at Firebright and this total disaster will probably leave you in a complete blackout for at least a few hours/the rest of the day/24 hours/the entire weekend!'

Better yet, what prevented you from making a phone call to explain the above, or at least get some more people in to answer phones so that we didn't have to wait in an automated queue.

Why did you not reply to our emails to emergencysupport@firebright.com ?

What prevented you from making updates to the firebright.com front page that were more like the promised up-to-the-minute reports and less like the actual up-to-the-fourteen-hours-plus?

It sounds to me as though your biggest problems can be directly sourced to your hosting provider and Virtuozzo. I'll make the assumption that you already knew about the problems with Virtuozzo backups not including the configuration files, because obviously that would have been identified during risk analysis and when running your regular exercise scenarios in system failures? I assume that you do actually do this at Firebright?

I trust that you also identified your hosting provider's lack of Redhat certified techs, as this would also be an obvious 'pinch-point' that would have been realised from even the most rudimentary risk assessment.

So where does this leave us? Did you know about these problems already but simply chose to ignore them, or not have suitable procedures in place to remedy them. Or, did you not have a risk analysis system that could identify such critical weaknesses in your company? I'm still undecided as to which of the above scenarios is more scary, so I'm hoping that I've missed something and you can provide some alternatives.

I certainly find your remedy very interesting - we can move our $30/month VDS accounts to one of Firebright's $300 per month dedicated server accounts (setup and first month free). That's hilarious!

http://www.wildaboutbritain.co.uk

Monday 21 February 2005 3:09:55 pm

Somebody cynical could say that this blackout was intentional so as to transfer us all on to dedicated servers. "You can have a free month but after that it will cost you 10 times as much!"

The whole reason that many users aren't on the dedicated servers is because we are small companies that simply can't afford a huge hike in prices. It seems as if firebright are saying that it is OUR fault for being foolish enough to believe that we could expect our site not to be pulled down for over 50 hours without warning or support!

It would be hilarious if it wasn't true, but I find it quite disgusting along with the fact that I still haven't seen the word "sorry" appear anywhere from Firebright.

I shall be moving from Firebright as soon as I can and advising other people to stay well away from them.

Monday 21 February 2005 5:14:43 pm

I was wrong and you need to know it. Anyone who spends more than 3-12 months around Jonathan (Whatever his last name is this year) will realize that no one should let him in their life at any capacity, on any terms, at all.

Jonathan / FireBright is a hosting services that will never come out of the closet.... Jonathan / FireBright is a pariah in any community (in person, software communities, eZ publish, Drupal, etc). Jonathan will build up a person with compliments only so their insults will hurt all the more.

Sadly only the people who do trust him with their data, hosting or meet him in person for extended periods of time will begin to see how he manipulates people to _his_ advantage. without thought or pause to his affect on the victim...I mean customer.

Watch them try to put a new spin or excuse on the why, but you can't escape the nature of their presence on the eZ publish community, take a look at what they contribute.... Google in depth about FireBright, watch Jonathan post online simply to increase his name / business name's Search Rank Placement with pointless posts to old topics.

Sad part about these kinds of people is that it takes people who will stand up and go public with their experiences to oust these types of people for what they really are; from seeming to be upstanding regular people on the surface and warning others about the inherent dangers of these kinds of people in any situation.

See: Pariah in the community, Parasitism, Social Parasite, Predator, adnausium... In short, Social parasite is a derogatory term denoting a member detrimental to the rest of society by taking advantage of it. In some cases the term is related to specific notions.

My sincere apologies go out to anyone who has ever been a customer of FireBright or is considering having anything to do with FireBright. Talk to advanced users who have hosted with them, they will tell you about the `pages` of problems associated with using them, poor support, don't answerer or return phone calls, you can trust FireBright to take your money but that's about it.

//kracker
this isn't about me, i'm already dead
---------------------------------
Search, Lyrics, Korn, Fake

---------------------------------
My Mistaken Opinion ...

First off, let me start off by saying I proudly host with Firebright.com and will continue to do so.

I have over 4 different vds accounts with Firebright, all of them were on the affected starlight hardware node.

I do web development for a living, not a hobby, so when service is affected it affects me greatly. But I don't run to the first forum I find to tarnish the providers reputation every time I have a problem. In the end that doesn't solve your problems, instead it makes you look really bad. 

<i>The Outage</i>

This was not an intentional outage! You honestly belive that an enterprise eZ publish hosting firm, an eZ publish partner no less, would risk their reputation like that? If you belive that your only fooling yourself. 

Forum posts are forever, your only making yourselves look like jaded customers without sympathy for what was a really bad situation gone wrong. Usually people who make comments like your making don't really understand or respect just how intense and complicated it is running an enterprise hosting platform. 

<i>The Reply</i>

I interpret Sean's post as saying that if you need 99.999% uptime that is not encumbered by the requirements of all the other clients who host on the same hardware you can find this with hosting your applications / sites on dedicated hardware. He was not saying that if you were bothered by the outage that you should switch to dedicated hosting. He was offering a solution to customers who need a higher level of service and availability.

Every hosting provider in the market has hardware failures, they are a fact of life. It's what you do afterwards to recover and get back to work that makes the real difference. Firebright offers service unmatched in the market place with a lot of features that others charge a lot for ...

<i>The Response</i>

I guess unless you have spent 36 hours straight replacing, rebuilding and recovering an enterprise server you could quickly belive that there was a whole lot more to say than the firebright.com said during the outage. 

I'll agree with you, it would have been nice to have consistent 4 hours entries to the site that explained the status in greater detail, but I would disagree that updated status messages that can't really explain in detail enough to everyone would be worth it if they took away from the recovery of the outage.

I myself didn't send an email or call them, nothing. I knew it was outside my hands and in theirs. I knew that service would be restored as soon as physically possible and not a moment before regardless of how frustrating it was for me and my clients or how much I wanted to complain about any number of things that failed to meet my fancy.

Take a good long look from someone else's perspective besides your own? Respond objectively, be open minded about this being a breakdown for everyone who relied on starlight and that your not alone. Many of us were affected, including Firebright, who hosts their own site on the very server that the outage affected.

"Be Like Water" is a well-grounded, step-by-step approach to applying the warrior mind-set to life's daily challenges. 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0446690317/104-8560583-3247938?v=glance

Respectfully,
Graham Brookins 
Brookins Consulting
eZ publish Developer

Eyedea And Abilities > One Twenty

Member since: 2001.07.13 || http://ezpedia.se7enx.com/

Tuesday 22 February 2005 9:53:37 pm

kracker,

Sorry for being off topic. I understand your websites are also on the same affected server. I was wondering if you can pay a visit to my site, crystaladdict.com. I don't understand why... but the site sometimes crawls to intolerable level. FireBright has been very helpful, but they said my site's not getting hit enough. They concluded the server is warming up when I request a page from the site, thus, the site requires some time to process.

Since you are on the same server, could you pls provide any tips on how to speed up the site a bit?

It's really difficult to find a decent ezpublish host in America.

Thanks much!

Wednesday 23 February 2005 4:23:37 am

I'm still trying to get FireBright to install Zend Optimizer or whatever to speed up the PHP code.

So, do you have any suggestions on how to deal with this issue?

Thanks again.

Monday 17 October 2005 6:02:41 am

Hello all- despite the obvious protestations of kracker I need to revive this thread.

I am trying to find a new CMS to use and as my name would indicate have absolutely no experience with them whatsoever but I am leaning towards eZ Publish.

I was doing a Google search on "eZ Publish host" and this thread came up second and as I had seen Firebright advertising as an exceptional host for eZ Publish, I wanted to know if anyone here has experienced any similar problems in the intervening months with Firebright.

Ironically, as I said before I had seen Firebright's site and actually sent them a pre-sales question partly in regards to not seeing an uptime guarantee several hours ago through thier "24/7" support mail and had not heard back from them so I was looking for other hosts specializing in eZ Publish when this thread came up.

As kracker himself said in his post: "Every hosting provider in the market has hardware failures, they are a fact of life. It's what you do afterwards to recover and get back to work that makes the real difference."

So with that in mind I was just wondering if anyone has experienced anything similar since this incident or if it was an isolated event.

I am in the USA and it does not seem like that many hosts specialize in eZ Publish.

I found a host called siteground.com which says they do, and they seem much larger and offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee and I cant see any guarantee whatsoever on Firebright's site, however- while they are cheaper overall (with shared hosting), thier VPS accounts are 3x that of Firebrights (from what I can see Firebright does not offer shared hosting for eZ Publish).

I mention this because I am curious to know if anyone has any opinions on whether VPS hosting is better for eZ Publish because of the demands this CMS puts on a server or if it does not matter either way.

Incidentally, I am not trying to "pile on" against Firebright- they seem to have a nicely designed site and are offering "eZ Online editor" free with signups which seems like a nice perk, however I worry about reliability issues in general and would rather know now if it will be a problem as judging by thier Alexa.com rating (which is not perfect) they are a fairly small company so I wonder if they can handle the demand this site will put on them as this will be a large membership community and I dont want to go through this twice so I was a little concerned even before I saw this thread.

Also- I know this is already a long post and I dont want to go "off topic" but it seems like a better idea to get a few general answers here than start a completely new thread which would just take up more space and this thread is in the "General" category anyway so...

Speaking of the "eZ Online editor" - what does that do exactly? is that like a "WYSIWYG" editor? I tried to look through the literature but I am seriously dumb with CMS systems and have never even used FrontPage etc. and dont want to learn now.

That is actually the main reason I like eZ Publish is that it produces search engine friendly URL's.

However, I dont know PHP at all either so will I be able to even edit anything right in the file manager without this tool? I only know actual HTML and do all my work right in the manager.

I dont like WYSIWYG as from an SEO perspective (which I DO know a lot about) they are bad so I want to use CSS but maybe I get WYSIWYG anyway with this CMSI am unclear about that.

Also, I realize this is a eZ Publish site and hope it's not bad form to ask - but I have read in many, many places that while everyone seems to agree ez publish is a great CMS- it is also a very difficult CMS to learn, and that is for people with some scripting experience- I am a total idiot with that kind of thing and dont really have the time or aptitude to invest in learning PHP so is this CMS too much for me?

One reason I am thinking of Firebright is that they have everything pre-installed as even installing something like this is way beyond me.

Like I said I am definitely leaning towards ez publish or I would not be interested in the firebright question, but just for comparison sake can anyone else possibly give me an idea of any other simple to utilize CMS' out there?

The 1 main requirement is the clean URL's which from what I can see, only Drupal and Sitellite have this feature besides ez publish and they both look as hard to learn and are not as nice looking.

The only other one around that has this feature I have found is Joomla/Mambo, but they do it with an ugly hack I have read and I want it built into the core.

Anyway, I seriously apologize for this really long post but I have been reading day and night for 2 weeks to find something so I really, really need some advice on this so any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks very much.

Monday 17 October 2005 6:57:40 am

I'd say VPS hosting would help. ezpublish is quite ressource hungry and usually the ISPs cram fewer VPS on a machine than normal hosting customers. This makes sense, as VPS needs more RAM and other ressources and is thus somewhat self limiting.

As for ezpublish being hard, yes and no. For standard stuff, it's quite straight forward, but once you leave that, it gets rather hard. It is however quite a bit more flexible than most of the other CMS, surely much more so than Mambo.

If you don't feel you can install itself, it's likely you won't be happy with it after that. :(

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