back to article Do Moan! MONSTER 6-day EMAIL OUTAGE hits Domain Monster

Fed-up Domain Monster customers are still waiting for the company to fix an email outage that has been going on for six days now. In the last hour, the hosting firm has been forced to embarrassingly tell its subscribers that it was still in business, even though the outfit's email service remained titsup. As The Register …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Maybe the Monster service was disrupted when a Monster Crab cut the cable like the Crabzilla of Dunstable?

  2. Lee D Silver badge

    Yeah, there's a reason I like to run my own servers and just have domains "point" at a particular server, and not rely on any one provider to receive my email. I managed to switch from Hotmail to self-hosted to GMail to GMail forwarding from self-hosted and nobody who emails me was ever aware.

    6 days is too much - you will have lost that email forever and the sender will likely never know, now. I'd pull my domains from them after 24 hours - forcibly if necessary.

    This is why I quite like domain hosts that let you change DNS (MX specifically but sometimes even nameserver) settings yourself on an automated interface - putting in a couple of backup MX's is no hassle and even changing them in an emergency is pretty do-able. But the MX pointing only to the people who host the domain for a couple of quid a month? No thanks.

    Sure, it's no guarantee to even do that, if the domain-holder or nameserver goes offline, but then you are quite literally into "tear the domain back from them" Nominet territory. The last time I had someone had troubles with my domain was... er... never... and I'm able to repoint everything to a new VPS in a matter of minutes (plus 24 hours for DNS propagation, but even that's a lot quicker nowadays).

    Stop hosting email with cheap junky outfits. There's no excuse that they can't provide a skeleton email service in the meantime (even if it means routing their MX to a third-party that they hire) while they fix their mail-servers and catch up with lost email. 24 hours and out. Hell, I get a little jumpy every time I have to change MX or other DNS settings or even just wait for a ten-minute outage to catch back up. Six days is inexcusable.

    Hell, buy yourself one of the many backup MX services in future for your domain - god knows why this place can't do exactly that for you while you wait.

    1. Ian 55

      It's the money

      Providing gullible domain registrants with premium (i.e. expensive) email addresses generates a pile of money.

      We know how to run our own servers, but lots of people don't and allow themselves to be persuaded that 'sucker@gullible.ltd.uk' is a better email address than gulliblesucker@gmail.com too.

      See also: hosting single domains for more than it costs to have a complete VPS.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    'sucker@gullible.ltd.uk' is a better email address than gulliblesucker@gmail.com too.

    yup got to love those @lycos,co.uk and @freeserve.co.uk addresses.

    The reason you have a dedicated domain address is when you get pissed off with a hosting method, be it your own or a mega corp, it's (hopefully) easy to change your MX record and get it moved away, a lot easier than contacting the many (10's or 100's) of thousands of people that have may have your current email address and asking them to change it.

    1. Doctor_Wibble

      > 'sucker@gullible.ltd.uk' is a better email address than gulliblesucker@gmail.com too. yup got to love those @lycos,co.uk and @freeserve.co.uk addresses.

      Nooo! Burn the heretic! You are not allowed to say that gmail is just another webmail provider because it's *swoon* google and somehow a gmail address is not the sign of someone whose business attitude is "meh, good enough".

      (Disclaimer :p own extreme low volume mail server)

      Back to FTA, "faster and more resilient" means either "we tried to be too clever and fckd up" or "one of the machines we 'streamlined' was the one with the mailboxes on it". Depending on what OS/etc they use behind the scenes maybe all the libraries had to be recompiled for clustering support, or the database was not cleanly shut down, or Exchange still won't properly restore to a different machine even if you have absolutely identical hardware. Or 'something else', no point listing options without a default...

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Tech Question

    Are these articles being written by an actual human or bot-generated? If it's not the latter, it really should be, as it's a perfect fit.

    1. Announce that $company->something goes titsup.

    2. Break paragraph.

    3. Copy and paste rand($aFew) Twatter / Farcebook posts from $company.

    4. Break paragraph.

    5. Copy and paste rand($aFew) Twatter / Farcebook posts from $company->customers->findAngry()

    6. Break paragraph.

    7. Close off with sarcastic comment.

  5. thesykes

    Strangely, their emails to me, saying my domain was due for renewal, got through fine.

    My email hosted elsewhere, obviously.

  6. Youaintseenmeright

    Lack of communication

    The outage (or very slow delivery of mail) is bad enough, but it's the amazingly poor communication from Domain Monster that is adding to their woes.

    Either they don't know what's wrong and can't fix it, or they do know what's wrong and can't fix it.

    Or is it that they do know what's wrong and can fix it, but are just keeping quiet because that's the best option?

    After 6 days, are they just going with "pick the least worst option and run with it"?

    Shame really, They've been very good over the last few years, but this is really hurting them.

    1. Lee D Silver badge

      Re: Lack of communication

      Clearing the spool on a mailserver that receives any significant amount of traffic can take, literally days.

      It's like the old newsgroup servers. Even today, it can take several weeks to catch up if they go offline for a short period.

      If your email server isn't handling a fair amount of traffic all day constantly - why not? What's the point of having it?

      If your email server IS then getting 6 days behind and being asked to catch up WHILE also handling the normal traffic you always used to handle is a LOT to ask. Not to mention the number of test emails people will fire and the pings people will do to "see if it's up yet". It could take 6 days to get back up.

      That said, there is NO excuse for not being able to provide basic MX service in the meantime while you clear the spool in the background (there are companies that you could set up in seconds and just point your MX records at until everything died down). Unless, of course, you actually lost data. In which case, good luck continuing to host people's email...

  7. Steven Burn

    ...

    Got fed up waiting for them to sort the damn thing out. Already run my own internal server for outgoing mail (prefer keeping incoming and outgoing separate, only reason I had incoming through them) for the last 8+ years, so just switched the MX and disabled the auto-renew.

  8. simonds

    Domain Monster - the clue is in the name.

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