Hey everyone, and happy new year!
Sorry about that super long downtime there. Yesterday (Sunday) morning at 10:03AM PST our server suffered a physical hardware failure, apparently a power supply failure. Unfortunately despite opening a ticket with our hosting vendor (OVH) a few minutes later and them claiming to have 24/7 support, nobody looked at our ticket until this morning when their phone support lines opened and I called them.
They've now replaced a defective power supply and we're back online, after ~26 hours of being offline. Some pretty disappointing response times, to put it nicely.
We're planning to move away from OVH at the end of this month, onto proper enterprise grade hardware that we own and control. This will give us a HUGE boost in server resources and allow us to scale for the foreseeable future, while also giving us the control to resolve problems like this much quicker. Expect another follow up post about this in the next couple weeks once I've put together the migration plan.
Timeline:
- Jan 5th 10:03am PST - We get alerts to the server being non-responsive.
- Jan 5th 10:05am PST - I pull up the console via IPMI and it's completely non-responsive. Attempting to power off / on the server or do anything, does not work.
- Jan 5th 10:15am PST - Initial support ticket created with OVH. I followed up a couple times over the next few hours, and got no response.
- Jan 6th 6:32am PST - Called OVH, gave them the case number and asked them to investigate
- Jan 6th 7:34am PST - I get notified they'll start their "intervention" in 15 minutes.
- Jan 6th 11:04am PST - Call them again, the tech is still working on it and they'll get back to me with an update
- Jan 6th 11:34am PST - "I was informed by our data centre technician that there is an issue with the power supply unit for the rack on which your server resides. Your server will come back online once they have replaced the power supply."
- Jan 6th 12:17pm PST - We're back up finally!
Edit on Jan 7th @ 8:40am PST: We just had another outage of about an hour. Investigating with OVH.
Any hosting you can recommend?
I need enterprise level hosting guaranteed in Canada and currently, our servers are on Rogers.
To say that Rogers is the fucking worst is an understatement as at this point I'm seriously considering the word "sabotage"
That does not include the fact that they're extremely overcharging for very low hardware specs, their support staff literally doesn't know nor care, even though were payong through the nose, and their "enterprise level" support literally means that they might look at your ticket within 5 business days and their SLA is "fuck you"
So with that in mind, and previous great experiences with ovh, I got myself a nice big fat OVH server for testing which is single handedly flying circles around 10 of our Rogers servers for a fraction of the cost of those servers at Rogers and so far its been awesome.
Not having a ticket looked at for 24 hours, however, is not possible for us, we need 24 support...
Anything you might be able to recommend?
Unfortunately no recommendations unless you want colo space to run your own infra in. I'd avoid any large corp like Rogers or Telus.
I'm sure ovh is fine if you have multiple servers and roll your own redundancy. You can also pay them for premium support.
If you’re looking for a Canadian company, check out ThinkOn. I'm not sure if they offer what you want, but i know some our our government agencies use them.