awmawm Posted November 23, 2013 Share Posted November 23, 2013 (edited) a2hosting is a recommended partner of Prestashop which was the reason why we chose them for a new Prestashop install. With a customer base in Europe, we decided to go with the shared SSD server in Iceland. Unfortunately, since we started out two weeks ago, there were already two outages, the most recent one today lasting 8 hours and STILL counting. What e-commerce shop can afford to be offline for straight 8+ hours? Apparently, they had an "unrecoverable failure" and now have to reload from their "most recent backup" (whatever that means - https://my.a2hosting.com/serverstatus.php). While they advertise RAID 10 on their shared SSD servers, their response as well as the time it takes them to restore service gives me the impression that they do not use RAID 10 even though they prominently advertise it on their website. Based on our today's experience with a massive outage of 8+ hours without an end in sight, I strongly recommend to look at other options first. Edited November 23, 2013 by awmawm (see edit history) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bsm Posted November 23, 2013 Share Posted November 23, 2013 I followed prestashop recommendation and moved to A2 hosting (SSD Iceland), and now my websites are down for 12+ hours, and nobody know when it will be restored (if any!). Absolutely disaster - 5 shops with xmas gifts Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awmawm Posted November 23, 2013 Author Share Posted November 23, 2013 It is now 18 hours and the server is still down. Technical support now says that it will take until the end of the day for the service to be back up - that will be somewhere between 30 and 36 hours of down time! They claim to use RAID 10 but I was told that ALL data is lost and that they do a restore from a backup. At this point, they could not even tell me how old the backup is other than stating that it is 1-2 days old. In other words, once our Prestashop is back up and running, it will NOT have the data of the time the server went down. Luckily for us, we have not yet gone live so we will not have customer orders/data that might be irrevocably lost but anyone live Prestashop who hosts on that server will face that disaster. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awmawm Posted November 23, 2013 Author Share Posted November 23, 2013 Sorry to hear that, bsm. The server actually went down at 1:30pm EST so it has been down for more than 18 hours by now. Do not expect it to be up before the end of today (U.S. time) - that's what technical support told me just a few minutes ago. When I asked why it takes that long to restore, I was told that they have to restore several hundred TBs of data. For a live store, the situation is not only disastrous for the fact that it has been down for 18 hours and will likely be down for 30-36 hours (assuming that they will restore the service by the end of the day) but also because any orders from the time of the last backup (they restore from) and the time the server went belly up will be lost. Unfortunately, they do not communicate at that point the date and time of the backup they are restoring from... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
a2hosting-andy Posted November 23, 2013 Share Posted November 23, 2013 Hi guys, Definitely understand your frustration. We share it with you and are doing everything we can to bring the server back online as quickly as possible. This incident is getting all of the resources we can possibly put towards it to shorten the amount of time it takes and to recover as much and the most recent data possible. We will post more information on our notice page as it becomes available: https://my.a2hosting.com/serverstatus.php -Andy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awmawm Posted November 23, 2013 Author Share Posted November 23, 2013 Andy, I was told by technical support earlier today that all data on the server was lost despite a RAID 10 setup. Besides this puzzling answer (why do you have RAID 10 and loose the data on all disks in the array?), I am wondering what the date and time of the backup is you are restoring from (this is really crucial information for anyone with a Prestashop installation). I asked technical support earlier today and they could not give me an answer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bsm Posted November 23, 2013 Share Posted November 23, 2013 only me and awmawm using A2 hosting? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
koconborz Posted November 23, 2013 Share Posted November 23, 2013 (edited) only me and awmawm using A2 hosting? And me too. Almost 24h downtime with my Prestashop stores... so no orders during this time. Edited November 23, 2013 by koconborz (see edit history) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dolke Posted November 23, 2013 Share Posted November 23, 2013 Im in the same position like you guys...hopefully this will be fixed soon! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awmawm Posted November 24, 2013 Author Share Posted November 24, 2013 11/23/2013 6:00pm EST - Data is still being copied back over to the server. We believe we should have most of the data restored within the next couple of hours if it continues at the current rate. 4 hours later, it is still down... And what exactly do they mean with "most"? Not helpful at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awmawm Posted November 24, 2013 Author Share Posted November 24, 2013 35 hours downtime and still counting.... And I just learned that the latest backup they did is 16 days old.... And this is one of the hosting providers Prestashop formally recommends! Unbelievable! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
koconborz Posted November 24, 2013 Share Posted November 24, 2013 35 hours downtime and still counting.... And I just learned that the latest backup they did is 16 days old.... And this is one of the hosting providers Prestashop formally recommends! Unbelievable! It seems the host is back... but I lost all my files, databases and settings. I migrated a week ago so it is a week orders and users for me... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dolke Posted November 24, 2013 Share Posted November 24, 2013 this is the current status: 11/24/2013 6:22 EST - MySQL databases are still currently being restored. We expect them to finish within the next few hours. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awmawm Posted November 24, 2013 Author Share Posted November 24, 2013 Talked to a a2hosting rep a few minutes ago. They still do not have an ETA... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dh42 Posted November 24, 2013 Share Posted November 24, 2013 For those of you with backups, if you need help getting them up and running pm me and I will give you a hand. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bsm Posted November 24, 2013 Share Posted November 24, 2013 all of my daily backups were stored @A2 server I'm afraid all gone Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dh42 Posted November 24, 2013 Share Posted November 24, 2013 Oh, I hate to hear that. Sorry about that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bsm Posted November 24, 2013 Share Posted November 24, 2013 just new update posted by A2: 11/24/2013 5:03pm EST - httpd is down and is being worked on by our engineers. Web sites are not accessible at this time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
a2hosting-andy Posted November 25, 2013 Share Posted November 25, 2013 For those of you affected by the outtage on thss1 - you should have received this email, I am posting here as well. As the email notes, this is an incredibly rare incident, only the second time in our 10 years that we've had an incident of this nature. We're incredibly sorry of the loss of data, time, and effort on the behalf of you, our loyal customers. On a personal note - I've been on the other side of an event like this. Many years ago, a hosting provider I was using had a catastrophic failure on their email server. Every email account on the server was lost, along with every email in them - which for some of my customers was over 5 years of emails. The host turned off their phones, stopped answering tickets, and didn't even officially acknowledge the problem until over a week later. It was a mess. I know what you guys are having to deal with as a result of our failure, and on behalf of everyone here at A2 Hosting, I share with you our deepest apologies. I hope you will give us the opportunity to regain your trust. Sincerely, Andy Melichar Community Manager A2 Hosting -------------------------- Dear A2 Hosting Customer, On the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 22, we experienced an error on the server thss1.a2hosting.com which resulted in an unrecoverable loss of all data on the server. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the event our redundancy systems such as RAID 10 were not able to assist with prevention, since the problem was not of a failure in hardware but of an unrecoverable deletion of the filesystem. We will be reviewing the root cause of this event and will put the necessary systems in place to help prevent a future occurrence. In over 10 years of hosting here at A2 Hosting, this is only the 2nd time we've had an event of this nature occur and as many of you are new customers, we apologize profusely for the event, and assure you this is an extremely rare occurrence. Upon initial investigation and realization that the data was unrecoverable, we directly started planning a recovery from our disaster recovery backups that we keep of each server in the case of such an event. While reviewing our backups we realized that due to a malfunction in backup reporting, the latest full backup for thss1.a2hosting.com available was from Nov. 8th. We are and will be investigating the nature of this occurrence and how we can enhance our disaster recovery backup system to ensure we have more current backups in case of any future issues. At the current time, the server has been restored from the Nov 8th backup, including files and databases. If you are experiencing any problems with files or databases from this backup date that we have restored, please let us know. Unfortunately all files and database updates after this date are not recoverable. Any configuration changes on the server will also need to be recreated. We always encourage that customers create their own offsite backups on a regular basis in case of a rare event such as this. We apologize for the length of time required for restoration but the amount of data, files, and databases that were required to be restored and configured were massive. As we previously mentioned, this is an extremely rare occurrence and we hope that you will give us a chance to earn back your trust. We would like to provide each of you a 6 month free hosting credit for the trouble which you can request by submitting a ticket to the Billing department. Sincerely, A2 Hosting Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dolke Posted November 25, 2013 Share Posted November 25, 2013 (edited) Thank you for posting this Andy.I spoke with Mr. Ross on the phone and we arranged everything for my account over the ticket to L2 stuff.Also thank you Lesley for offering your help. Edited November 25, 2013 by Dolke (see edit history) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
koconborz Posted November 25, 2013 Share Posted November 25, 2013 With the same settings that I set it up before I got the following error: "Link to database cannot be established: SQLSTATE[42000] [1203] User flornatu_cenzi already has more than max_user_connections' active connections" Something is not ok with the mysql server after the outage. It seems very slow and sometimes it flies away with this error message. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bsm Posted November 25, 2013 Share Posted November 25, 2013 don't panic, just try again after few seconds. You're absolutely right - it's still something wrong with a2 mysql server - I've experienced the same today. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dolke Posted November 25, 2013 Share Posted November 25, 2013 You are lucky then... my website is still down. Showing 500 internal server error. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
koconborz Posted November 25, 2013 Share Posted November 25, 2013 You are lucky then... my website is still down. Showing 500 internal server error. Try to delete your htaccess file, maybe it'll helps. Now I got 508 Resource Limit Is Reached error. The cPanel shows Entry Processes 35 / 35. Something is really not ok... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dolke Posted November 25, 2013 Share Posted November 25, 2013 (edited) Didnt work. They are still working on this server from what it looks like... Edited November 25, 2013 by Dolke (see edit history) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bsm Posted November 25, 2013 Share Posted November 25, 2013 (edited) it wasn't end of troubles... I'm getting below errors Does anyone know what could it mean: Warning: require(/home/xxxxx/public_html/../config/config.inc.php) [function.require]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/xxxxxx/public_html/index.php on line 30Fatal error: require() [function.require]: Failed opening required '/home/efunkyba/public_html/../config/config.inc.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in/home/xxxxx/public_html/index.php on line 30 Edited November 25, 2013 by bsm (see edit history) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bsm Posted November 25, 2013 Share Posted November 25, 2013 any ideas? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bsm Posted November 25, 2013 Share Posted November 25, 2013 ok, solved Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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