Where is my website?

[casey]

The only day in the last 4 years when it is essential to have a website to give info to parents about the closure of the school, and what happens?

NO F*!%in' website!

I've been on hold on the phone to SWGFL for the last 20 minutes, still no reply.

What a waste of space they are.

[FragglePete]

Yeah, I wasn't happy either. Between the hours of 7am and 8:30am when parents were checking to see if you school was closed the Browser timed out. After a number of support calls and a bit of pressure from our contact for SWGfL this is the official response:

"Due to excessive load, a small number of South West Grid for Learning school websites were unavailable for sporadic periods this morning. Our webservers are usually capable of handling hundreds of thousands of visits above the normal levels. With the amount of schools closing and parents repeatedly checking multiple school sites, we were dealing with over a million extra hits per webserver.

Whilst our hardware remained operational, pages were taking a long time to load for some sites which lead some browsers to timeout.

We're now working to increase the effectiveness of these servers for the future. We apologise if parents and teachers struggled to access any if your website resources this morning"

Apprarently it was down to the Cache Server which was hit the hardest.

I'm annoyed. The reason we chose to host with the Grid is so they could cope with things like this and security. I'm now looking to host our own. We've just gotten Frog in recently so may look to host the School website on that now.

Pete

[stevehill06]

It wasn't just SWGfL that had problems. Have a look at
Anyone else's embc school website go down? and Websites down / seriously slow?

Steve

[gaz350]

Our vps host worked a treat just made a iPhone interface for the head so he can press 3 buttons and close the school! well post if it's open or closed with an optional message.

[speckytecky]

Ah! That explains a lot. The SWGfL Team had a change request from us at the beginning of December to move our development site to the regular site, they promised fsithfully that it would be completed this week. Still waiting for it to happen and getting grief because it hasn't!

[SimpleSi]

When my websites first went down on Tuesday, I was annoyed - but then I thought about it and realised no-one had planned/tested for this sort of event before and therefore it is/was inevitable.

Others on here who have hosted their own websites also experienced similiar failures.

Sometimes things fail just when you need them - thats life.

In future, we can ask that money for line speed increases is diverted to more webservers if that's what we think is more important


regards

Simon

[AWicher]

We have an offsite web server, and looking at the awstats i was shocked to see how much bandwidth we have gone through in just 4 days.

5.24 GB Bandwidth, 228620 Hits, 4076 visitors and 1947 unique visitors.

Just one school, would love to see the traffic stats for our county web servers.

[FragglePete]

Yesterday they did a memory upgrade to a server at Telehouse (sites went off line for about 20 minutes at 6:00pm).

Whatever they did worked, website is currently working at this time of the morning when the previous two days it hasnt.

Pete

[bonjour]

Synetrix sites still seem to be down.

[FragglePete]

Well. Woke up to a fresh covering of snow this morning and get the call from the Head to delay the opening of the School.

Can I access the Website, can I **** I thought they had solved it but obviously not!

Definately look at hosting it on our own box now.

Pete

[bonjour]

Absolute joke.

Beginning the process of moving to a new host today.

It's not like Synetrix are cheap. They charge us £120 a year for 1GB space and 2 MySQL databases.

[speckytecky]

Well. Woke up to a fresh covering of snow this morning and get the call from the Head to delay the opening of the School.

Can I access the Website, can I **** I thought they had solved it but obviously not!

Definately look at hosting it on our own box now.

Pete

Same problem - SWGfL tell me it's going to be "intermittent" all day.

[localzuk]

We host ours in house, on a VM. Not had a problem. I have a feeling that these RBC hosts seriously overload their servers.

[Edu-IT]

Could be a nice opportunity for EduGeek to 'partner' up with a host to offer some nice packages to schools wanting to host simple websites.

[mpe]

Yeah, I wasn't happy either. Between the hours of 7am and 8:30am when parents were checking to see if you school was closed the Browser timed out. After a number of support calls

How did you get them to answer the phone before 8am?

Apprarently it was down to the Cache Server which was hit the hardest.

Which finally came back up just before 8am on the 6th. Also decided to take a two minute "break" at around 6:20 pm last night.

The reason we chose to host with the Grid is so they could cope with things like this and security.

Claiming that security was an issue dosn't make sense, unless they have dumped IIS.

I'm now looking to host our own. We've just gotten Frog in recently so may look to host the School website on that now.

Unless you have a very lightweight web page Frog's apache configuration dosn't appear to be up to processing lots of requests at once.