I stopped by speedtest.net recently to see how my connection is doing.

Speedtest.net results

I know that speedboost is supposed to speed up small files, but this much? It absolutely sucks when I’m trying to move a few hundred megs up/down from my servers, but regardless this was pretty damn fast.

What drives me nuts is that they will boost my speed up to 20Mb/second for some small files when I would just settle for 1Mb/second consistantly. If I try to FTP/SFTP a few hundred files to my server, my speeds will drop to dial-up or worse.

Trying to compete on theoretical limits is like trying to compete with free. Don’t do it. Sell me a consistent, reliable, unthrottled connection and I may go with you because I want to instead of the lack of options. Do that, and I’ll be impressed.

Something is up with PC Club…again. We’ve been here before and I think the niche that they fill will be void in their absence, especially here in Salem, Oregon where a majority of the computer shops are either box stores or junk resellers. I’ve seen a couple of new computer stores open, but they don’t seem to have websites or any marketing going on. Here are some strange screenshots from pcclub.com that only seem to reinforce the events.

Only two systems available

No Stores #1

No Stores #2

By all accounts, yesterdays GMail outage was pretty big. It just so happens that I ranked in the first few results in the SERPs for keywords related to the outage. The traffic influx was huge.

Media Temple (the SKFox.com host) uses a system called GPUs or Grid Processing Units to give you a good idea of how much CPU, I/O, and disk space you are using on their system. Yesterdays spike is fairly obvious.

Mint, from haveamint.com, gave me my first clue as to what was going on. While I like the depth of Google Analytics, the real time stats from my Mint installation are priceless.

SKFox.com normally gets about 100 visitors per day. At the peak of the outage, I was getting about 23 per minute. That’s awesome, but hopefully there isn’t another repeat anytime soon.

Earlier this week I saw about 300 visits over a 24 hour period from people searching for solutions to the error message they were getting when logging into Gmail. I have seen over 800 in the last hour. Sure enough, my gmail is out too with a Temporary Error (502). POP3 seems to be working. Following my survival guide, I checked the Gmail google group. The issue for today, 11 August 2008, is a known issue with the web interface, they acknowledge that POP3 and IMAP are still working.

Here is to all of you and myself, let us hope it comes back up soon.

Update 1: Mine is back up after about an hour. Anybody else?

Update 2: 2,000+ hits in an hour because of this. Media Temple server holding up nicely.

Previous outages

• March 2008
• May 2008
• July 2008

Help

• Surviving Gmail 502 outages
• Gmail alerts and annoucements

Other coverage

• Techcrunch: Systemwide GMail Outage
• CNET: Gmail is down, Twitter sizzling
• Mashable: GMail is Down

Just some random thoughts on website hosting…

I keep checking the Media Temple System Status page by hitting F5 repeatedly. I’m having Account Center withdrawals, it has been down all morning. All of my sites are still up, just the control panel is taking a day off. They give us customers such neat tools that not being able to check in on them is frustrating. Despite their occasional stability issues, I still like Media Temple. I got some schwag recently and even though nobody knows what (mt) is, I can feel my geek cred go +1 whenever I wear my (mt) shirt.

Magics Hosting continues to do a great job of keeping my client sites up. They really make hosting an easy, no thinking required, job. Thanks Guys!

Sean from Template Fusion was having a crappy time with his most recent host. I don’t know what their problem was, but I can’t stand to see a young designer getting shafted by his host, so I put him on my Magics Hosting server. As far as I know, his server has been problem free and his templates site has been humming along ever since.

Darren from Problogger recently crowd sourced a question about webhosting. He has gotten 200+ responses as of this post. I read through all of them and noticed a lot of (mt) users, dreamhost, GoDaddy, etc. Also a lot of comments about WordPress (whatever that has to do with the question…). WordPress gets a lot of crap, but I love it.

Still dying to try either Slicehost or GoGrid. Could be a fun, albeit expensive, habit.