AverageForumUser

I completely understand - offering differently priced tiers to fit different requirements is probably a good idea, thank you for that. Regarding your question about if an automatic (DNS-based) failover service would even work in a scenario like this: Yes, there absolutely are ways to do that. I have sort of built my own system by combining several external services, like Amazon's Route53 DNS service. With a bit of customization, it can do health checks that watch not only if a server is reachable, it can also be confgured to monitor if the actual website is available. This works without having to update the monitoring system every time you update your website. I hope this helps, feel free to post any more questions you might have. I know this is an issue for many people, I see it as a kind of insurance - hopefully one never needs it, but it's there for you in case of an emergency, and it definitely improves one's quality of sleep

Thank you for mentioning my idea - and sorry for my late reply to your thread. There are possibly ways to offer this for less than the $7 or $8 a month I have mentioned in the other thread, one would just have to find ways to still do it with enough redundancy to make it very reliable. But maybe I'll think about this a bit further and come up with a solution that's easy to set up for everyone Thanks again!

Yep, I can confirm this is the exact error/bounce message I received when sending email messages from an outside server to my accounts during the outage.

Thank you for taking the time to create the screenshots, good tutorial. Mike has said they'll look into some solutions, I'm hopeful there'll be some way of doing automated backups.

Good advice, thank you for posting this.

Thank you for taking the time to post this, much appreciated.

You're welcome. OK, in that case just try again tomorrow, maybe things have settled down until then. Keep us posted.

Depending on the account size it should be pretty quick, mine usually is done in less than 5 minutes. Try checking Cpanel - Backup - Click "Download a Full Website Backup" and look for files listed under "Backups Available for Download", assuming you started a local backup.

I have kept quiet on the forums as I wasn't terribly affected by the outage, but this issue actually got me thinking and that's why I wanted to post here: I currently don't make money from my websites, but I still implemented a failover solution that automatically switches me over to a standby site on another host as soon as my shared hosting at MDD goes down. In case of longer outages I still prefer to switch email to the other server manually, but my web site was down an estimated 2 minutes or less when all this happenend. We as clients should always have external backups, as Mike has posted as well. I want to emphasize that I'm not trying to put blame on anyone, stuff happens and I'm sure MDD as a company will emerge from this stronger than ever. I will stay with them. Now then, why am I writing this: I've been in the hosting industry for a time over a decade ago and I know that those automatic failover systems can be daunting for the not technically inclined, with all the external DNS settings, TTL times, different IPs, server health checks etc. That's why I'm thinking about building a failover service that would be easy-to-use by anyone with any level of expertise as well as affordable. A sort of "insurance for better sleep" haha. It could switch over your website to a customizable standby site (similar to "Sorry, we're experiencing technical difficulties and will be back soon.") automatically as soon as it detects an outage on your main server as well as forwarding your email to another account, so you don't lose any messages in the meantime - because the impression I've had in the last few days browsing this forum was that people care about lost emails WAY more that if their website is fully operational, which I completely understand. Here's my question to you guys: Would you be interested in such a service? What would you be willing to pay for it? Would $7 or $8 a month be too high a price for such a system? Any way, just a small idea. Thank you for taking the time to read this. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thank you Mike & Eric, much appreciated.

As always, thank you Tim for keeping us updated.

Thank you very much Mike for keeping us updated, always appreciated.

Thank you Michael, definitely interesting.

And once again, MDD delivers - thank you guys.