Site downtime ongoing issue

Happy New Year, this one has been brewing for a few weeks now.

I keep getting monitor is down alerts from Uptime Robot for my wife’s site www.cakebysadiesmith.co.uk , I now have six sites in total hosted with Tsohost either on my own account or clients accounts but lately the only site I have been having trouble with would of course be my wife’s. These alerts started over the Christmas period and have been a combination of down time and slow response time. My wife is often on her site posting pictures of her latest cake creations so if Uptime Robot wasn’t emailing me I was getting real time updates that were harder to ignore.

Email alerts from Uptime Robot

I started getting regular email alerts from uptime robot and Google webmaster tools had also recorded a slow server response time on the 27th. Across the last few days of the year I was getting alerts daily:

Uptime Stats

I raised ticket with support on the 31st (like I have anything better to do on New Years eve). I received a response within 7 minutes stating:

We were having high load issues on the cloud. This may have caused the site to go down temporarily. This is definitely something we are aware of and the Directors are currently working on this issue.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

I checked the Tsohost Service Status page and with no issues reported asked to be updated when this issue was resolved. Again I was told the issue had now been resolved. My last email at 11:09 pm on New Years Eve highlighted it still hadn’t (I know how to have a good time on New Years Eve!)

7:32 AM on New Years day and some poor soul from support replied:

I do apologise for this inconvenience caused here – it appears that ‘c’ sites on the Cloud were suffering form a load issue yesterday, although this does look to be remedied.

I’ve just tried the site and it looks to be loading perfectly for me — could you please let me know if you still encounter any issues today, as to the best of my knowledge, this should no longer be causing you any problems at all.

As the day progressed and I was still getting alerts I continued the thread on the ticket but was told everything looked OK from their end. Its in these situation that a third party monitoring service such as Uptime Robot is useful, it is possible that I was having problems with my ISP or a browser caching issues however as Uptime Robot is on another network it would not be effected by any local issues I was experiencing. I was also able to provide evidence to prove that this is not a local issue:

Tsohost site down

After a bit of back and forth at 10:03 PM I received an update as follows:

I’ve moved your site over to our new load balancer as I believe this may be causing the gateway errors. It’s going to take some hours for this to update, but should be done by morning, if you’re still encountering issues regarding this site tomorrow morning could you let us know please?

Update

Things seem to have settled down for a few days but then more downtime, read here part two.