How on-rev is about to ruin our business

[Richard Gaskin]

jbv wrote:
...
 > Recently someone praised the on-rev team for reacting quickly
 > everytime something goes wrong with the servers, but yesterday
 > mySQL has been down on thor from the early morning and despite
 > the 2 urgent support requests I've sent, the server went up again
 > around 4:30pm only...
 > I thought it was a 24/7 service...
 > I've almost lost a full day of work, which already happened during
 > last week...
 > And a new client of ours (for whom we rushed to complete a new app
 > last week) had planed to use the last 3 days to enter all data in her
 > DB for the grand opening of her new store today, but couldn't
 > complete the work because of yesterday's problems and finally she's
 > wondering if she chose the right people for her project...
 > And thor just stalled again...
 > And a couple of days ago thor went off so many times that I had to
 > cancel a software demo with a potential new client who will probably
 > never call us again...
...
 > Sorry for the bitter tone of this post, but I'd wish everything was
 > working now as fine as
 > it used to work for the first 2 years I've been using on-rev...
 > Does anyone have any idea why this service has become so bad during
 > the past few months ?

Web hosting is a very difficult business, because it's both very 
demanding in terms of experience and resources (both machine and human), 
and returns very low margins.  This makes hosting a numbers game, where 
only those hosts that can bring in sufficiently large numbers of 
customers can get the ROI needed to cover the high costs of such a service.

As such, we've seen significant consolidation in that market over the 
last decade, with most seeming new companies being really just resellers 
for others' infrastructure - a great solution that can raise levels of 
service over commodity hosting while retaining the benefits of a large 
company's infrastructure.

When On-Rev started it was hosted at ThePlanet.com, at the time a large 
host in Texas with a good reputation, so it seemed the plan was at least 
somewhat promising, depending on the degree to which RunRev had 
ThePlanet providing support for the systems.

The "Data Center" page for On-Rev describes an infrastructure which 
would seem to represent a good baseline for any professional hosting 
service, with multiple redundant T1s, multiple on-site generators, etc.:
<http://on-rev.com/hosting/our-data-center/>

But now absent from that page is a link to the primary hosting company 
itself, where it used to link to ThePlanet.

RunRev described some time ago that they were moving some materials to 
new servers in response to the massive increase in traffic they're 
seeing as a result of going FOSS.

It's unclear to me whether those server migrations were limited to the 
systems they use internally (their web site, mail server, etc.), or 
whether they also moved the On-Rev servers as well.

Going to theplanet.com today redirects to softlayer.com, where we find 
info on that company's recent acquisition by IBM, and where the range of 
services offered seems more cloud-specific, rather than general hosting.

At the moment I'm unable to determine which company is providing 
infrastructure for On-Rev, and given the uncommonly high rate of 
downtime I hope Kevin or someone else from RunRev can step in here and 
offer additional information about both the infrastructure and plans for 
providing more customary uptime.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  Follow me on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys