I've encountered it starting yesterday evening (intermittently) on our .NET professional site. It's been more and more constant all through today. Makes working on the site kinda hard to do as the entire thing is down...

I have an open ticket since this morning but haven't heard anything since. These consistent outages are killing our business and the boss is looking for answers - of which I dont have.

Another month, another round of outages

"Our .NET Professional hosting plan offers the highest level of availability in the industry, which is backed by our 24x7x365 live support and 100% Network Uptime Guarantee."

If anyone can recommend a better solution for ASP/SQL 2005, I'm all ears. But something's gotta give. This is too much.

This has now gotten out of hand.

Our company has been with HostMySite a long time, and to this day experience nearly flawless uptime with the 'regular' Windows hosting accounts.

We had some clients that needed additional resources, but a VPS or dedicated server was a bit excessive. So when the "High Availability" (.net professional) service came out, we signed up immediately.

There were problems from the beginning. It appeared the "High Availability" environment still had some issues that were overlooked at launch. After these issues were explained and fixed, things were great for a number of months. The past month or so, things have been horrible.

The environment has now gone offline more times than I can count, but I have a support ticket and email history as proof if need be.

What is most irritating, is the night/day difference between the cheaper standard Windows hosting packages and the "High Availability". The regular environment has nearly perfect uptime!

'High Availability' environment is still down for multiple websites, not just for myself but for associates I know that host there.

It's just so frustrating because I started with the .NET professional level back in May hoping it would solve all of our problems.

Looking at my ticket history, it's the same issue at least once a month...

06/09/09 = "Site Down"
07/27/09 = "Site Appears to be Down"
08/24/09 = "Site Down with error HTTP/1.1 New Session Failed"

I've been loyal up to now cause the support people seem to listen, but whatever setup HMS has for these sites is atrocious. My other, more basic DB-driven (ASP/Access/MSSQL) accounts purr like kittens. The "High Availability" site farts like a rhino.

It's night and day. I mean these are BAD outages that hurt and no amount of apologies will do. It just shouldn't be this way.

So the downtime this time around cost us 3,300 unique visitors as Monday's are some of the most highly-trafficked days for our site.

Ouch.

HMS shouldnt be advertising High Availability 100% Uptime hosting as a viable product. It's just not ready for anyone.

Be prepared to take some major lumps, lose customers and decrease your company's earnings.

I am on a .net High Availability plan, and I haven't had a single problem since they got the new SAN. But at the same time I have moved two of my VPS clients to Dedicated Boxes with Godaddy. I would only recommend the Godaddy Dedicated boxes for people that know what they are doing, and will never need support ( other than manual reboots ).

If you are not used to running IIS, and configuring ports, then get a dedicated box with HostMySite.

If your sites uptime is worth that much to you then a dedicated box is the only way to go. Within a year, I might just buy my own box and colocate at a local datacenter here in Houston. They quoted me $80/month for 1 U rack colo with 100 Mbs and 500 GB tranfer. Only downfall is I am getting a 52 ms ping time, and this is when they are only 12 miles away ( disturbing ) I recently found that bad server performance has more to do with Ping times than with the actual hardware. I wrote a full write up here Using PING times to pick your hosting provider

Bad sessions could be a number of things. But in my experience the biggest cause is BotNets that do not maintain sessions, then try to POST their crap into your submit forms. If this is the case I recommend you checkout Projecthoneypot, and their APIs. They have an HTTP DNSBL, that has done wonders for my site.