Sitecloud have ditched Amazon! - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 18, 2010, 11:31:06 pm
content: The email from my host Sitecloud about all the recent problems:"Dear Valued Customer,This e-mail is to notify you that we've rolled out the fix for the issue that many of you have been seeing; 503 errors, random outages, performance issues, etc. For those of you who are still experiencing any sort of issues, please e-mail support@sitecloud.com and include as much detail as you can. This would be an odd ball case if you're seeing errors.Over the course of the last few weeks, service has been seriously deteriorating, mainly due to the network throughput between our instances at Amazon EC2. This causes communication between the instances to be slow which cause performance issues. We then noticed that computing resources from our provisioned instances on Amazon EC2 were being "stolen" by other instances not owned by us, this was causing considerable damage to our front end instances, which then resulted in 503 errors. We had done ample research before selecting Amazon EC2, based on their own sales people, reviews and recommendations. The type of performance/reliability issues that we have been experiencing were not presenting themselves to us during extensive stress testing and beta testing. The condition it is in now, is not suitable for us or our customers. While Amazon EC2 has it's place for number crunching, backup etc, it is evident that it is not ready for mission critical applications, such as ours.To avoid the worse case scenario, we attempted to work with Amazon EC2 to resolve the issue, however had no success. We made the crucial decision to move on and find alternative infrastructure to host our application on top of.I'm glad to announce that we've successfully migrated all of our customers from Amazon's EC2 to new infrastructure supplied by Singlehop. We have leveraged their network and hardware to place our application on top of which we are seeing considerable improvement in terms of performance and reliability, reported by both our beta testers, customers moved over from our Amazon EC2 installation and our own administrators/tools. It's important to know that while the back-end infrastructure has changed from Amazon EC2 to Singlehop, the proprietary application that we have built which distributes and manages load is still intact and without problem. Our service remains unchanged except for the problematic underlying infrastructure. The application we have built was developed and tested on infrastructure like Singlehop provides. We are very confident about this decision and we look forward to moving on.We would like to apologize to all of our customers for the troubles and inconvenience that may have been experienced. We are committed to providing a quality service and will not rest until we are providing it. We look forward to serving you in the future for many years to come.If you have any questions or concerns, you are more than welcome to e-mail us at support@sitecloud.com.Thank you for choosing SiteCloud as your cloud hosting provider.Karl D - Sr. Systems AdministratorSiteCloud LLC"

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 18, 2010, 11:44:39 pm
content: In addition, my SQL database errors have now dropped to 0.08% for 500K requests per hour, for the last 20 hours or so.That's a huge improvement over the 3% error rate I was getting before on when they were on Amazon!Dave.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 19, 2010, 12:13:49 am
content: I'm now hosted somewhere in here:Dave.

author: migsantiago
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 19, 2010, 01:05:22 am
content: It's good to know your services are back to normal.How did you get those server pics?

author: DJPhil
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 19, 2010, 04:34:47 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on September 19, 2010, 12:13:49 amThat place is so clean and neat that it's mesmerizing and horrifying at the same time. Extra points to the janitorial staff. It's fascinating how much is being accomplished there in the presence of so little overt disorder. If I worked there I'd be campaigning to add some color of some kind before I snapped.Maybe I've just had too much coffee.Anyhow, congratulations on the fix Dave, I'll reset my panic-o-meter.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 19, 2010, 05:43:12 am
content: It's almost scary that place!You can picture Men In Black walking aroundThe pics are from the host:http://www.singlehop.com/SiteCloud now use then as the "cloud" with their own cPanel/web host stuff on top of that.Dave.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 19, 2010, 07:10:40 am
content: well all i have to say is more fool them for using a "back up service" I think someone had dimes and cents for eye

author: djsb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 19, 2010, 09:33:32 am
content: Is this shared or dedicated hosting that they are providing for the site?

author: cybergibbons
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 19, 2010, 11:17:13 am
content: Quote from: Simon on September 19, 2010, 07:10:40 amI don't get this?

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 19, 2010, 12:23:43 pm
content: Quote from: djsb on September 19, 2010, 09:33:32 amIt's "shared", but it's different to normal shared/dedicated servers because it's "cloud" based.So in theory even though my site is "shared" it can handle any size dynamic site traffic load, or that's what they guarantee anyway.My site already handles around 500,000 SQL database accesses per hour!Dave.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 19, 2010, 03:13:53 pm
content: Quote from: cybergibbons on September 19, 2010, 11:17:13 amif you read the statement it sounds like they are now blaming amazon for not having a robust enough service and that the current one they used was meant more for backing up stuff than running more mission critical things than thousands of websites simultaneously

author: slburris
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 19, 2010, 03:27:54 pm
content: Quote from: Simon on September 19, 2010, 03:13:53 pmI thought the story was that Amazon built these flexible storage and compute services for themselvesso they could handle holiday shopping and special promotions after a major meltdown a number ofyears ago. Since they had built the infrastructure anyway, rather than let equipment sit idle, theystarted offering it to others to rent.So why this works for Amazon, but not SiteCloud, I don't know. I've never used EC2, butI use S3 for storage and have been happy with them.Scott

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 19, 2010, 03:36:34 pm
content: it's probably something like cloud outgrew amazon but was slow on the move and waited too long: until it all started crashing and their software was probably not made to redistribute resources effectively in case of a meltdown

author: hans
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 19, 2010, 05:53:59 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on September 19, 2010, 12:23:43 pm500k/h? Probably from the 'cloud' server. Kinda says why the server was getting quite slow before..It still amazes me they claim they have got a 99,9% uptime guarantee. 0.1% @ 1 year = 24*365*0.001 = 8h and 46m, or not even an hour per month. They probably already gone over that by now, maybe you can claim your money back.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 19, 2010, 06:07:16 pm
content: I'd be inclined to ask for something back. to be honest these people are out to make money and will do it any way possible, choosing a cheap but underpowered system is not acceptable, they don't wake up today and discover they are so overloaded they cannot cope, they should of had plenty of warning and blaming amazon is not an option. you don't take on a service without knowing it inside out if your using it and reselling it. the bottom line: if they think they are so brilliant why don't they have their own data centre ! - oh wait, then who do they blame

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 20, 2010, 12:46:40 am
content: Quote from: hans on September 19, 2010, 05:53:59 pmYes, 500,000 SQL database requests per hour, and that's just my web site(s)!Here is my old stats while on amazon:The new server now gets around 0.06% error rate.Much much better!Dave.