Continued Downtime for BWD Servers

The BWD servers have been slow again this evening (10:44pm ET)and are currently completely down. This means your website and email hosted with BWD are completely inaccessible. The hosting company continues to work on the issue, still promising to have it back to normal "soon".

Please contact me here, or at the email given in the sidebar (or by phone) if you have some urgent need that has been interrupted by this prolonged outage. Steps are being taken to eliminate these problems completely.

More soon. Please visit this blog page if your email is not connecting (incoming or, if you use BWD servers, outgoing) or if you find your website is running slowly or just completely down. I'll keep this updated as often as I can.

Very sorry for the inconveniences. Thanks for your patience.
Greg - BWD

BWD Servers Down for up to Four Hours

If your site relies on databases to deliver some or all of your content, you may have noticed today that that delivery is quite intermittent. We have been looking into any and all reasons this might be occurring, and the data center finally decided it could be a hardware problem. This will require shutting the servers down for up to four hours today.

VERY sorry for the inconvenience. Things break, to be sure, but added to the ongoing issues described below, this has been a very frustrating week for everyone involved.

Will update this post as updates are available.

Thanks,
Greg Campbell
BWD

UPDATE - 5:04pm:
The servers have been restored, and there do not appear to be any more database-related errors. Again, sorry for the inconvenience and downtime. Let me know if you are noticing any more issues.

More Downtime for BWD Servers

The BWD servers are again offline, and this time a cause has been discovered. This is the second time this week, and third time in the last couple weeks. Very sorry for the inconvenience. It is likely no BWD accounts that are the cause of the problem, but unfortunately, we have been the victims of it.

Here is the message re: the downtime from the hosting company:

Causes / Solutions of Recent Downtime (BWD Server)
The BWD server has been down or unreachable 1 to 2 hours per day. There are two primary causes for this.

1. Continuous brute-force attacks
   
2. Frequent customer-inititated backups outside the normal automated backups.

The brute force attacks are very sophisticated and are coming from multiple locations around the world, most likely computers which have been compromised. Each attempt creates a number of log entries, which literally filled up one of the partitions on the drive (the cause of yesterday's downtime). The data center has been tweaking the firewall above the server to thwart these attacks as much as possible. Meanwhile, Platinum Server Management is working on tweaking server security.

The customer-initiated backups are most likely a result of the downtime itself. When there is downtime, there is a tendency for everyone to start generating and downloading backups on a more frequent basis. This uses up a lot of cpu and overloads the server. In short, fears about a crash become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I have no doubt that the issue will soon be resolved. In the mean time, thank you for your understanding and your patience as we work through these issues.

The servers are currently still down as of 4:55pm ET. Will continue to monitor and update here when all is back online.

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UPDATE: The servers are back online as of 5:45pm ET.

BWD Hosting Down: 4:14pm ET 23 Jun

It has come to my attention that the BWD hosting servers are completely unavailable at the moment. Websites and Email are down until the service can be restored. I'll update this post as there are any developments, or when the service is restored completely.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

RESOLUTION:
At about 5:15pm, service was completely restored. Let me know if you're having any trouble with website access and/or email sending and receiving.