BWD Server down (host.bwd-graphics.com) - RESOLVED

May 24, 2022 6:27pm EDT - BWD server is down. Determining cause, and attempting reconnection.

May 24, 2022 6:35pm EDT - Server is back online; self-resolved. Investigating potential cause.

May 24, 2022 6:38pm EDT - Server load looks fine, potential traffic issue with one user. All is well.

RESOLVED

The primary BWD server is being upgraded! This will involve a complete data migration to the new server, which will require downtime - up to three hours of downtime, actually. The migration is currently scheduled for 1:00am EDT Saturday, April 4th. This time should allow for the least disruption for everyone on this server.

Nothing will be changing for your account (logins, settings, etc) but the hardware will be improved. Here's what the hosting company said about the migration:

Why are we doing this?

The upgrade offers many benefits such as safer and more secure environments, increased stability and overall better quality of service. 

What will happen during your VPS server migration?

During the migration, your VPS server will need to be offline while we migrate your disk storage data. This means your website(s) will not be available. The migration will not require a change in your IP address or server name. No data will be lost in the migration.

If you experience any issues following the migration, please let me know and I'll address them as soon as possible.

Again, sorry for the inconvenience of website and email downtime, but the service improvement will be worth that inconvenience going forward.

BWD-Graphics.com Server Offline - May 2 [RESOLVED]

The main BWD hosting server is down since ~5:30am EST today, May 2nd. The technicians are aware of the issue, and working to resolve it. At this time there is no solid estimate for when the server will be back online. Will update this post when it has been restored.

RESOLVED: Server is back online at 7:15am EST

Server Offline - July 14th, 2015

The data center where the BWD server is located is currently offline. Top-tier support techs are working to restore service. It should be back online "within the hour" (not sure which hour).

Will update this post when service is restored.

UPDATE: Service restored at 4:05pm ET

Data Center Down—Sites Offline

Wednesday morning, November 26th, 7:15am ET, the data center hosting all BWD sites (and email) is temporarily down/out of service. The current status predicts the service will be back online "within the hour”.

UPDATE: Issue resolved 7:17am ET.

Server Offline - Reboot in progress

There were some mail server issues today (dropped connections, webmail inaccessible) and subsequent attempts to restart/repair services were also ineffective. An attempt to restart the server was made, and is currently in progress. The Tier II (and higher) techs are currently working to restore services.

UPDATE: 4:00pm ET:

Four hours later, and still "in progress". Very sorry. I am assured every time that the resolution will come soon, and I'll be notified once the server is back online.

FINAL UPDATE: 4:40pm ET:

The server is back online, and should be functioning properly. Please contact me if you are noticing any further connection issues.

The official response from the server techs was this: "...it seems there was an issue with the IP address associated with your account and routing. Our system administration team routed the IP correctly and this issue isn't happening anymore, we apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused."

Sadly, this was caused by their reconfiguration of *another* issue they were attempting to correct.

My apologies for the down time.

ALL SITES DOWN - Hosting Server Company change IMMINENT

To all BWD clients—

*****************************

ALL SERVERS/ACCOUNTS are temporarily offline.
I am not sure when this will be resolved. I will do everything I can to expedite the recovery of your sites and email.
*****************************

Unfortunately, the hosting company I have used since 2010 was sold last year to an awful, horrible (greedy, unscrupulous) internet mega-company (Endurance Int. Group - the same company that owns iPower, whom I last left because of similarly shoddy service/support)

Since then their service and customer support has plummeted. It is beyond frustrating to me, and I am certainly aware that the same is (likely) true for you. I am very sorry for this inconvenience. I was hoping to ride it out a bit longer with the current company, but as I am aware of the business practices and philosophy of their parent company, I am certain now that it will NOT improve.

Please stay tuned to this page, and your email. I will be in touch soon about the transition to a new host. As much as is possible, it will be a transparent, seamless transition for you. (You won't notice it, if all goes perfectly.)

Thank you for your continued business.
Let's hope the next server company does not sell out to the same sort of mega-business that does not care about service and customer support.

Greg Campbell
BWD

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UPDATE: All sites are now back online. The migration to a new hosting company will happen today, if possible.

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NEW UPDATE: All sites are back offline, and have only intermittently been online today. I am in the process of moving everything to a new hosting company. That should be completed by Monday morning, August 5th.

Slow or Offline Websites/Email ** UPDATED **

Hi folks

You may have noticed that your website or email have been fairly frequently going down the past few weeks. We have been investigating and attempting to correct as soon as we become aware of it (which has been sometimes nearly instantly). The hosting company has also been very quick to respond, and has assured me every time that the culprit is not a BWD-hosted account. (All BWD-hosted accounts are on a shared hosting server, meaning there are other "accounts" on the same machine. That's where the problem was originating.)

The culprit appears to be some malicious (and over-active) scripts on another account on the server. They've been deleting/removing them as soon as they discover them, but they have not successfully removed all of them until (they are fairly certain) today. Here's the message from the hosting company.

There have been so many script problems on your server recently. I see that we disabled one script on the 13th and two scripts yesterday. I was seeing a higher than normal load on your server right now and I contacted one of our team of experts that monitor your server. They found yet another script to disable. The load average is coming down and things appear to be getting back to normal. He is not seeing any other problems at this time.

I'm very sorry that you are having to deal with other users' script problems. Our team of monitors are viewing our shared servers around the clock, making sure that all services are running and users are "playing nice". Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you.

Sorry for the inconvenience. I know that some of you have had trouble sending email (hitting the mail server at one of the times it was overloaded/down). Hopefully the problem has been (finally) completely corrected.

Thanks,
Greg Campbell
BWD-Graphics.com

UPDATE: Issue Re-Opened

The issues are apparently not completely resolved. I am working directly with level II tech support with the hosting company to resolve this as quickly as possible. Again, the issue is not with any BWD-hosted account, but with a handful of other accounts hosted on the server. When the source is discovered it is immediately disabled, but the original source has not yet been discovered as new scripts are constantly surfacing and bogging down the server, at least hourly or more! Will update again when a final resolution has been reached.

UPDATE Jun 23 10:55am ET: The server was down AGAIN today... this issue has obviously not been corrected. Working on it again with the hosting company. Very sorry for the inconvenience.

Servers Down

It would appear that as of about 1pm ET the BWD server is down. I am checking into it, but am unable to reach tech support at the moment. Past experience says that this will be remedied in 5-10 minutes, but I'll keep on top of it and update this post if I learn of any more delay than that.

Thanks,
Greg Campbell
BWD

UPDATE:
A couple bad signs are that the tech support line is "busy" (or, when I did get through a message said they are not accepting calls at the moment) and most of their own access points are down as well. So it's the hosting company, or a large chunk of it, not just the BWD server.

UPDATE:
And, right on cue, at 1:06pm ... the server seems to be operational once again. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Continued Server Issues

As you may have noticed, there was another good chunk of time that the [old] BWD servers were down/inaccessible today. That will be the last straw. About 40-50% of the BWD accounts were moved to a new hosting service over the past several weeks. Tonight and the rest of this week I will move ALL accounts to a new hosting service.

Ideally you will not notice the change. If you have changed your email password since I created it for you then I will not be able to set that up for you. That will be a simple password "change" once the domain is pointing to the new server. You will not miss any mail. I will send you a link to check mail on the old server in case any does get directed there.

(In fact, I'll post it here: http://bwd-graphics.com/webmail ... login there with your email address and password to get any mail sent to the old server once the domain points to the new server.)

I'll send an email to everyone once all have been officially moved.

So sorry for the past month of at best inconvenience, at worst giant headaches. (I know I have one...)

Thanks for your patience.
Greg Campbell
BWD

Server Downtime [Conclusion?]

The hosting service has decided that the problem is a hardware issue that is not repairable, and are currently moving ALL of their accounts (including all BWD accounts) to brand new servers. This will result in a bit more downtime this weekend, but by Monday, all should be smooth sailing.

Here is their message in response to a support ticket yesterday:

I am transferring your sites now... Your nameservers for ns1.bwd-graphics.com / ns2.bwd-graphics.com will be updated towards the end of the transfer. Please note that it could take some time for propagation, and it will probably be a rough transition as a result of the old server occasionally going down, but when it's all done it should be very nice.

Because of this, I have suspended any migrations that were in process to the other hosting service. Probably about 20% of BWD accounts have been moved from the company who has had the hardware trouble for three weeks now to the new hosting company. You have been notified if yours was one of these accounts.

I will be watching very closely over the next week to see what will happen with the current hosting company (on the new hardware). If there are still issues, I will have to continue moving accounts.

If you would prefer me to move your account anyway, just let me know. Use the email address in the left column of this page.

Thanks.
Greg Campbell
BWD

UPDATE:

FYI, as of this afternoon (Jul 10), All BWD accounts have been moved to the new hardware (but with the same hosting company, except for those mentioned above who have been individually contacted about being moved to a new hosting company). There may be some domain name server propagation issues (being directed to the wrong server) but overall it seems the switch has been made and this should resolve all of the downtime and slowness issues. Please contact me if you're still experiencing problems after Monday. (A couple of days to make sure any name server issues are resolved.) Thanks.

MAJOR Issues Continue - Moving Accounts

The main BWD hosting company has not resolved the issues that have plagued the servers hosting most BWD hosted websites and email accounts, and though we have a long-standing and excellent relationship with this company, it has been nearly a week of intermittent connectivity (plus a day where the sites were inaccessible for a couple hours just before this past week) and many times the sites and email have been completely down for even hours.

This problem does not affect everyone, but the highest-traffic sites are being moved over and configured so that you will experience very little (or no) server move related downtime. Hoping to have all such sites moved to a new hosting service by the end of this weekend.

If you are having issues, please contact me using the alternate address in the left sidebar.

So sorry for the past week of very sub-par service. Looking forward to using the new faster, more reliable service.

Thanks for your patience, and your business.

Greg Campbell
BWD

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.

---

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.

BWD Hosting Down: 9:30am ET 03 May 2010

The BWD servers are currently completely down. Web and email is inaccessible until service is restored. Will continue to monitor the situation and provide updates here.

UPDATE: 10:05am ... just after I posted the initial notice, the service has been restored. Please contact me if you are having any continued connection issues.

Server Down - Feb 13 [RESOLVED]

The BWD server was rebooted earlier today (about 1.5 hours ago) to correct some issue, but unfortunately, that seems to have caused greater issues. The server is down and they are working on getting it back up. As of 6:50pm, still not back up, but will update this post when the issue has been corrected. Sorry for the inconvenience.

UPDATE: (7:31pm ET)
This is a very serious issue. We will continue to monitor it and update you here.
The following update was posted by the hosting company:

February 13, 7:20 PM (NY time)
ACCELEX SERVER UPDATE:
The server had to be rebooted due to an overload. Unfortunately, the reboot left the file system of the entire server in a state of disrepair, which has led to a loss of data for all web sites on the server. At this time, the DC techs are attempting to repair the damage and recover the data. More information will be posted here when it becomes available.
If the data can not be recovered as-is, we will begin restoring the most recent backups available. Please note that the MySQL partition was not damaged, so database information will still be up-to-date. It is only files that will have to be restored.

February 13, 8:42pm (NY time)
The file system check is currently at 43%. Updates will be posted as they become available.

February 13, 10:42pm (NY time) (BACK ONLINE)
The server had to be rebooted due to an overload. Unfortunately, the reboot left the file system of the entire server in a state of disrepair, which led to a loss of data for all web sites on the server. The DC techs were successful in repairing the damage and recovering the data in a relatively short period of time. Thank you for your patience while the problem was resolved.

Server Down

It appears that the main BWD server is down at the moment. Perhaps began around 1:50pm ET. Will continue to investigate and update this page when the issue has been resolved. It is affecting both email and websites.

Updates to come.

RESOLVED 2:20pm ET. Servers are back in operation. Sorry for the down time.

Email Problems (Premium Hosting Accounts)

If you are a BWD Premium Hosting account holder, you may be experiencing some issues with your email today. (My account is repeatedly having trouble connecting to the server.) Here's the official update from the hosting company:

Update: Incoming Email

Update: Network engineers have identified the cause of the issue and have taken steps to resolve the issue. Mail should be back to normal within 30 minutes at the latest.

We are aware of an issue that may cause email sent to mailboxes hosted on our platform to be returned to the sender with a bounceback error indicating the retry limit has been exceeded. Our network engineers are currently looking into the issue. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the bounceback errors. More detail will be posted on this issue as it becomes available.

- 11/23/09 at 14:12 ET