I have been renting servers from SM and TP for over a year now, having experienced a good service overall. I am planning to get 2 more servers to serve static files via HTTP and wanted to buy the load balancing service for redundancy. However after reading the posts in this forums I felt discouraged. I guarantee 99,99% to my clients so I can't do with a service that has 8 continuous hours of downtime, as I read in a post.

Has this changed? Is the service realiable now?

I am already doing load balancing with TP servers, but I rolled out my own solution using heartbeat + ldirectord. It works fine, but the servers must be cross connected and also share the same block of public IP addresses. I can't add more servers to an existing pool and so I need to look for other solutions.

Thanks,

Nicolas

Sorry, no.

In a ticket about the issue, I was told that they are working with Zeus (the software company) to get the load balancing machines upgraded to the latest version to rid themselves of the issues they're having at the moment. I would say the load balancer works about 90% of the time (probably a generous figure).

The short list of problems you can incur are:
- Messages that your nodes are unavailable when they are
- Provided Urchin logs not being available (Planet has said this is caused by accounts with very large logs that are getting stuck, but have yet to rectify the problem.)
- Complete loss of service

Whether the upgraded software fixes the current problems without introducing new ones is yet to be seen. I'm still waiting on an ETA for the upgrade (and associated downtime).

I can second that, although it has been a month now since I have noticed any issues.