Welcome to Hollywood, Claranet-style: You've (not) got mail, or hosted sites for that matter

Hosting-cum-cloud-slinger Claranet had a very, very bad start to Wednesday as customer sites toppled over and email services stuttered to a halt due to an issue at one of the company's server estates. Things went south at around 09:30 BST in what the company described as "an issue with services hosted in our Hoddesdon Data …

[lglethal]

Redundancy? They've heard of it...

[mj.jam]

Indeed, you would think that "a fault with one of the two feeds" would be the sort of thing they can handle.

Now instead somebody else will be having to deal with the other sort of redundancy.

[Anonymous Coward]

They took nearly 6 months to fix the customer wifi there despite virtually no mobile coverage.

If ya can't configure a wifi router what chance have you got with mains power feeds.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a guess

Two feeds, one to the top of each rack and one to the bottom. This design assumes that all servers etc have two power supplies or multiple examples eg switches. However if later on someone were to save money by only specifying one power supply per unit ...

Just one possible scenario.

[tin 2]

20 years ago I worked at an ISP. Update the IVR and the status webpages were the first action when stuff blew up that customers would see. What is wrong with these people?

[Muscleguy]

Staffing levels are so low everyone is on deck firefighting and there isn’t anyone spare to do that is very likely. Allied to ‘get it done NOW before anyone notices’ type instructions and it all overruns initial over hopeful estimate.

[Robert Carnegie]

If they have their Twitter account adequately secured as you have to nowadays, it's possible that a major failure in their data centre meant that they weren't able to get onto Twitter.

[paulf]

Exactly this. Tell people something is wrong and you're working on it, otherwise people think you don't even know, let alone care, that everything has died on its arse.

I have some of my email hosted with Claranet and this started causing problems yesterday morning. I checked their status page, but nothing. It might as well have shown the dog in a burning room saying everything is fine (or Frank Drebin saying, "Nothing to see here").

In comparison I also use Fastmail for some of my email. They go down for three hours and IIRC they immediately updated their status pages, and a week later posted a detailed wash up of what went wrong on their website.

[Pascal Monett]

"Apologies for any disruption"

Is it me, or is there an epidemic among hosting companies these last few days ?

It can't be a coincidence, now can it ? If the Flying Spaghetti Monster trying to drum up some attention ?

[Will Godfrey]

Re: "Apologies for any disruption"

Ninja'd - exactly what I thought when I saw the headline.

[iron]

Claranet have always been poor at updating status pages and I've known of issues that never appeared on them. But, when you call you can speak to an engineer, not a call centre thousands of miles away, and they are good at resolving problems quickly.

[Mo'Fo B'dass]

Go Claranet

Bad memories from years past. Terrible Service.

Ditched them for Star Internet. Great Service.

Then Claranet bought Star. Terrible Service Again...

Never go back.

[disgruntled yank]

Claranet

A weak reed?

[jake]

Re: Claranet

Torn cork, cracked barrel & soggy pads.

[Captain Scarlet]

Didn't know Hoddesdon had a dc in the town

Even weirdier is its address (Assuming Claranet co-locate here)

Computer Building, Geddings Road

And wow the amount of times the company who ran it was acquired by Interroute and then GTT (Whoever they are)

[MrBoring]

My guess would be a UPS related issue.

[caffeine addict]

Specifically the TiTs version...

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Is this because I finally erased my old Claranet username & password from Firefox yesterday?

[Imhotep]

Ahh. So that is the disruption we felt in the force. Never speak of this again - it is best that no one know.

[Anonymous Coward]

That explains it.

A client with an old Dircon email account called around 1015 this morning to say that her inbox wouldn't open, what should she do?

I told her that I couldn't do anything about it at the time as I was tied up with something, but that it would probably fix itself. A glitch in the system, happens all the time. etc. Give me a call if nothing changes by tea-time.

At 1129 she called to say "it's just opened up, everthing is ok."