WebCentral hosting suffers a late Friday fail

Dedicated and shared customers lose service.

Melbourne IT-owned hosting company WebCentral  experienced another outage on Friday afternoon.

From 2pm AEST on Friday September 11, customers of WebCentral's dedicated and shared hosting services were without service. The outage has continued to impact customers well into Saturday morning, but appeared to have been resolved later in the weekend.

WebCentral was contacted for comment.

Managed SharePoint and Corporate Exchange customers were also without service in what appeared to be a related issue.

The outage gave WebCentral customers their first need to use the web host's service page, implemented after a three-day email outage left it unable to contact customers about technical difficulties in May.

The outage, blamed on an IBM storage array, saw the company's chief technology officer promise "significant changes to the way we deploy and manage our storage environment".

Today's service status, while acknowledging which services were impacted, did not detail its cause.

"Some customers may be experiencing issues accessing their dedicated and 10 second server services," read a note on the service page.

"We are aware of this problem and our Technical Teams are working to resolve this issue at the highest priority.

"We regret that at this time we cannot provide an estimate of when this service will be returned to full operation, although we will be updating our service status page with progress reports as work continues.

"Thank you for your patience while we work to restore your services."

A WebCentral reseller who spoke to iTnews on condition of anonymity said the service page was inadequate to help him deal with his customers' demands.

"They only advised that 'we are experiencing problems'," he said.

"When my DSL goes down, I can use the website to click on the map, drill down to street level and see that it's an isolated issue with my exchange.

"WebCentral never advises what's wrong or a time to fix it. I had to get my info from your articles the last few times we had major meltdowns."

Melbourne IT was earlier this month chosen by VMware to be the Asia-Pacific hub for the virtualisation company's foray into an Amazon-like infrastructure-on-demand service.

Beta access to this service remains online.