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Old 18 Aug 2003, 09:40 AM   #31
sjk
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Quote:
Originally posted by Jeremy Howard
Now that it's happened, we are considering lowering the fastmail.fm TTLs so that we can show such a page more quickly.
Thanks! Else I figure we'll see a repeat of this discussion if there's another outage.

So we know, is Edwin's round-robin DNS suggestion (or similar) worthy of FM's consideration at some point?

And what are the costs you implied, elvey?
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Old 18 Aug 2003, 10:22 AM   #32
Edwin
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Interesting "big provider" failures...

Here are a few examples from the last few years of when the "big" players suffered major problem.

1. Yahoo! Groups (mailing list service with millions of subscribers) collapsed for nearly 24 hours:
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-851276.html

2. MSN Messenger (75 million users) went down for 6 hours due to a power outage:
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-979303.html

3. Yahoo! storage and Yahoo! Photos outage for over 12 hours (for many users):
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-868780.html

4. Some of Excite.com's 4 million email mailboxes unaccessible for 5 days:
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-803872.html

5. Hotmail down again (Jan 2001) - article emphasizes that many users didn't even realise the outage was widespread because the service had been so unreliable and intermittent anyway:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,3...2083966,00.htm

6. Many Hotmail users locked out for several hours due to server problems:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,357293,00.asp

There are probably a bunch more such examples, but that at least gives a "taste" of some of the issues faced by the Big Boys...

Ironic aside: There were more candidate examples on my list, but CNET's News.com site just went down (I tested it independently from several locations - it's definitely off the air right now)
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Old 18 Aug 2003, 10:53 AM   #33
sjk
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I've been wondering if any NYI client outages make "mainstream" news. I doubt FastMail wants or needs that sort of publicity.
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Old 18 Aug 2003, 03:45 PM   #34
Shelded
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Treat this anecdotally, meaning that I don't recall all the specifics, but my IMAP service went down at Mochamail (webmail was OK) and POP yifan.net was down while the power was off in NY. Fastmal was not the only mail service affected.

GMX was fine, of course, and MyDomain (located on west coast) was up so I tweaked my mailforwarding to deliver to GMX at the time.
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Old 18 Aug 2003, 03:51 PM   #35
Shelded
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RE: Interesting "big provider" failures...

I call that perspective. You could count the DDOS attacks, too, which Y! has had. That's one drawback to being big, you have a really big bullseye on you.

FM is a high performance product and you have to accept some additional risk in that case. Ever notice how race cars are always blowing transmissions and tires?

But if you want rock solid simplicity that can be done elsewhere, I don't ask FM for that. I use GMX POP as a backup.
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Old 19 Aug 2003, 04:48 AM   #36
aminm
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Re: Interesting "big provider" failures...

Quote:
Originally posted by Edwin
Here are a few examples from the last few years of when the "big" players suffered major problem.
Forget about Hotmail and Excite. Yahoo mail however is more reliable than Fastmail based on my personal experience of two years of use. I did not experience any downtime on Yahoo mail during the past two years nor I read about one. For the period before that, I don't know.
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Old 19 Aug 2003, 05:32 AM   #37
lunastrixae
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Re: Re: Interesting "big provider" failures...

Quote:
Originally posted by aminm
I did not experience any downtime on Yahoo mail during the past two years nor I read about one. For the period before that, I don't know.
While the site front end was up, yahoo had a several server outage , perhaps a year ago, for about 2 days (with unknown cause). Not only was I out for 2 days, my email was GONE and I NEVER got it back. I had no response from tech support. I never got my mail. I can deal with an outage. I cannot deal with no data backups!

I used to also get a lot of those "your mailbox is busy doing something....be back soon" messages that would last or an hour or more.

I was also getting sick of the ads (especially the CONSTANT creepy stalker X-cam ads and the anorexic weight loss ads), spam and the bait and switch where they suddenly start charging for services that used to be free.

Since fastmail switched from NY, I think they are better then Yahoo performance wise.

Last edited by lunastrixae : 19 Aug 2003 at 05:35 AM.
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Old 19 Aug 2003, 06:24 AM   #38
hadaso
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To be honest, I don't think I was ever affected by an FM outage, but I cannot be sure, since I always know if there was even a 5 minute outage while I was sleeping or something... it screws up any comparison with any other service I know of.

With FastMail if there's a 3 minute outage, there would be at least one thread in the forum about it. Then FastCheck would show that the connection e\ws interupted... so even if I'm not there I am aware there was an outage.

With other services I never knew if the fact that I cannot make a connection is their fault, or my system, or my ISP???
Usually the way people solve things on Whindows systems is disconnect then reconnect, and then if it doesn't help - reboot. Then you get the connection and you say to yourself: "Oh, it was my computer!" or "Oh, it was my ISP!", though perhaps in some of these cases no reboot or reconnect was needed, and in fact the only reason the connection was reestablished was that time has passed.

To do a real comparison one would either have to have access to both services server logs, or run software that checks both services at equal intervals for a very long period (at least several months).
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Old 22 Aug 2003, 02:29 AM   #39
pmkaiser
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Thumbs up Thanks!

Hello...

I just wanted to say thank you to Mr. Howard and his 'people' for keeping us FastMail users updated on what was going on. It is very cool to see that the programmers/owners are making sure us users are kept in the loop.

Kudos!

MK
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