If you visited the Techzim website on Saturday, you were probably met with an error indicating the site couldn’t load. It wasn’t just you; we were down for most of Saturday. The issue was a hosting one, and it’s the longest we’ve been offline because of hosting problems since launch. We’re sorry for this and we’ll be working with the host to reduce the chance of this happening again.
It doesn’t look like a malicious attack and we didn’t lose any data.
A big thank you to all of you kind people that gave us the heads up via Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and telephone. We owe u 🙂
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So hosting issues remains a worldwide headache considering where your servers are!
Anywhere, it happens. Its part of the progressive curve.
Don’t usually get on your site (or I should rephrase that to our site) over the weekend (I try to keep away from the net). For me its sufficient that you are almost always up during the week. You are doing a great job and we will continue supporting you and wishing you Always Stay Up,
I am genuinely surprised that you do not monitor your website’s uptime! There are tons of free services that do this and alert you to any problems via email (or SMS on premium service). Pay monitor.us a visit.
A heads up in this case means he already knew the problem and in the midst of solving it but people kept informing him whats actually happened before or what is happening when they looked at their browser.
For example, there is no software l know which tells you people are freaking out because their browser are saying unknown certificate of google labeling it as a malicious malware site.
You seem to be basing that on information that is not in the article.
I was strictly talking about uptime (which is the issue at hand); talking about certificate errors seems a bit random. Perhaps you mistakenly thought my original comment was in reply to your comment? It was not.
to me if you ping a website and it respond, it means its up! Based on that, the website was up because it was pingable and traceroute was working perfectly, only the http side of things was not working hence people couldnt browse.
So yes, my basing looks like Kabweza never mentioned it in this article.
You’re playing a little loose with the terminology: you do not ping a website; you ping a host. The host was up but the site was down.
yes you can, try: ping http://www.google.com(website) then try: ping 8.8.8.8(host)
http://www.google.com is in fact, a host server.There is a difference between a host server and a service. http://www.google.com is a server* (more than a website: you can FTP or ssh into it if Google chose to add those services), but the server also provides the website (typically on port 80). Pinging is independent of whether or not the server is serving a website. For instance, you can ping google.com (no www), but you cannot visit the website at google.com (you’ll be redirected).
Let’s agree to disagree.
* This is a simplified explanation: in the case of Google it’s not really a single server, but probably thousands behind a load balancer + DNS load balancing. but for each request/ping, it’s equivalent to resolving to a single server
I did a traceroute to http://www.techzim.co.zw when it was down and got expected respond not timeouts. That was good enough for me!
I’ve been avoiding commenting on this. My take on it is that ping is used to check the availability & response time of a node, regardless of what is running on it. There isnt much information returned from it that tells if a web hosting application/service is running or not as that is more granular. The most it can do is tell you if the host is unreachable or not. If you ping a host and there is a destination unreachable response, then it certainly is down/physically disconnected. But, as @Tapiwa said, you can ping it and get a reply(host is reachable) and yet website is down (could be the app, the service etc)
Ping is one of tools in the tool box, which is the most preferred by command line warriors.
If l was interested to find out, l would have followed it with telnet targeting specific ports of interest. Then depending with the respond it gives out, l can tell wether a service is running or not.
Bt you gui warriors hav a different approach as l can tell from your arguments.
Funny chap!
pingdom can check HTTPS and report SSL errors like that, google malware is something that should be alertable in google webmaster tools as well
l would even request it to be in Zim so that that people can enjoy those promotions like one from telecel which doesnt charge local data browsing.
A lot of people are browsing techzim thinking its in Zim whilst its hosted in Oakland City, Atlanta.
But again nyaya yemagetsi neinternet yemuZimba marwadzo!
+1 Didnt know about that round trip.
Last time I compared USA and UK hosting, USA hosting seemed more appealing because it was more mature(services and support) and very very cheap. Not sure how things stand today
Any recommended UK hosts?
Outages!
It doesn’t look like a malicious attack and we didn’t lose any data – Means it was an attack just not a malicous one or is it just me reading it wrong
Reading wrong…even the best hosts world wide have their hiccups. I use inMotion hosting and though its extremly rare, I have seen a downtime occurance though this lasted only about 2mins as the site prides itself in getting what you pay for and we pay alot!
Limbikani – maybe hosting in Zim with ZOL isn’t so bad after all! Do you want to revisit the debate 🙂
😉 Yup… skills still an issue here
WOW, funny debates here.!! Its like debating whether a phone infront of you is a cellphone or telephone!!!
Despite all, TechZim is representing big time. Heads up for you guys