Webcity Host - Down?

Technology and Internet
#1

G’day,

I recently began looking after my dad’s website for the little music festival that he runs in Horsham. The festival is on right now… and the website has disappeared - “Server not found” or “Connection timed out”.

The site is hosted by WEBCITY - webcity.com.au

I see over on whirlpool people getting upset that their site was “limited” due to excessive CPU time. I really don’t think that would be the issue here, as the site has no forms/etc - it’s just got a half dozen pages, with PDFs to download.

Looking at Webcity’s website, the main domain still works, but when you try to access their admin pages or even their terms/conditions, the pages have the same as above - time out or not found…

Are we screwed…? I should say… am I screwed… There’s no back up… though google cache looks to have most of the text saved… and the PDFs (for music programs etc) will probably be available from other sources…

Cheers

Travis

#2

Yep -

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=2618810

#3

Apparently Enetica is the same people as WebCity - so they are also down. Been down most of Thursday and all today.

My dad isn’t too concerned - I guess from his perspective people are already in Horsham for the festival now, so could just attend an event and ask what’s going on… But still - not great service. Lot of pissed off people on Whirlpool saying their businesses are losing sales etc…

#4

That’s correct, Unfortunately this is just one of the latest botched issues with them. I’m a pretty strong advocate for VentraIP Australia. Those guys are awesome and they will actually address issues when they arise.

I always try to get all new and existing customers that I deal with on a daily basis away from the following.

Anything owned by Dreamscape Networks, Melbourne IT and Enetica for a list of their trading properties you can see here http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/wh_company_structure

Go Daddy and anything they run as well and I would say keep away from anything own by Endurance International Group.

There is probably about three or four companies I move my clients to.

#5

I’ve been pretty happy with NetVirtue the past 4 or 5 years. I don’t recall any significant unplanned outages.

#6

Thanks for the feedback, guys.

I know the domain is paid up til late 2018 (not sure who through), but I believe Webcity’s only paid til the end of this year… so I may well look into other options for dad’s site. Of course, the music festival doesn’t look to have much future unfortunately, as my dad’s been doing it now for 12 years and is about ready to give it up, but with no one to take over…

#7

Domain should be pretty safe if you delegate your DNS elsewhere.

I’m a big fan of Hover for my personal domains. And at work we’ve gone all in on AWS Route 53.

#8

They are also one of the hosting companies that I use with my clients and they’re currently my web host. I’ve also been very happy.

Regarding outages and NetVirtue I’m only aware of them having one major problem that lasted a few days and it only affected some of their customers on one of their servers.

However they were able to communicate the issue directly and on their status page with their customers and were active on whirlpool as they have multiple representatives.

And after they were back online they performed a incident investigation which they made their findings public. But this incident was probably more than three years ago.

VentraIP, Also handle incidents pretty much the same as NetVirtue and I’m only aware of them having one or two incidents Nothing recently in the last two years.

NetVirtue, Run their own hosting infrastructure, and resell the domain names through Synergy Wholesale which is VentraIP’s Wholesale Division.

VentraIP, run their own infrastructure as well. All their domain name registration is done these days are through their wholesale division synergy wholesale and are accredited directly for every single domain name extension they sell.

So my normal recommendation is at the moment on Whirlpool VentraIP for domain name registration. they are pretty much the best Australian provider when it comes to domain names.

When it comes to hosting I can highly recommend these and have use them for clients and myself these providers are all great as well and have good reputation on whirlpool.

VentraIP
Zuver (VentraIP’s budget brand.)
Net Virtue
Panthur (it has one of the best support levels and reputation on whirlpool I would also agree they’re excellent)
NetOrigin (perth-based)
Micron21

If you have a large portfolio of domain names OR Want to resell domain names I can highly recommend Synergy Wholesale. Most of my domain names except for a small handful a in my synergy wholesale account.

#9

I hope it helps. If you have any questions feel free to ask in here.

That’s easy to find out you can look to domain name registration up at

If it is a .au
https://www.ausregistry.com.au/whois

For pretty much everything else.
https://who.is/

Also remember, you can transfer in most circumstances a .au domain name for free at any time. gTLD’s normally costs are year of registration which gets added to your domain name.

With a little bit of planning it’s pretty easy to move a website these days with little to no downtime.

The web host’s that I mentioned above will also be able to help you bring everything over by doing a cPanel to cPanel migration.

#10

In less it’s a very large and important website normally I just recommend finding a reliable and decent domain name registrar and includes reliable DNS hosting.

I also recommend managing your DNS Records manually if you have the skills to do so.

Used to have quite a few of my domain names with hover then I found VentraIP and I found them just as good as hover and there an Australian based company. With Australian based support 24 hours a day and I much prefer to support an Australian based company when possible.

AWS Route 53 is a good place to host your DNS Zone, DNS Made Easy is also a good provider.