Being brushed off by support time after time

[lipofuse]

Seems like hostgator service quality have really dropped so much over time. I have been trying to bear with the response it am getting from the support staff for quite sometime. I understand that there is a hurricane and the support are short handed at the moment, but i am talking about tickets before the hurricane hit. The support is really poor and it seems that most of the time, they try to shift the responsibility back to you or just make a comment like "This is how the system works and you have to live with it".

For example, recently, one of my sites keep getting exceeding maximum processes allowed per account and got taken offline until me wrote in to support for help so that they can kill my processes for me. I communicated with the support staff and after several emails, the response I got is I have to check scripts in use on the account and make sure that they are fully compatible with PHP 5.

For goodness sake, the scripts I used come with Fantastico and I have to debug them myself??!?

Before this incident, I wanted put a wild card for all my undefined subdomains so that anything *.mysite.com goes to mysite.com and got the answer from the tech support that it is impossible to do it without mod rewrites. I was thrown a bunch of links and that all the support i got. Ended up, I found the solution in the support forums from other members. All I have to do is just create a * subdomain and it solves all the problems. I am wondering why do we need to have the support staff if their answers are just to point you in circles and of no help?

Seems that there are quite a few members that shared the same experience with me. Anyone here have a better webhost to recommend?

[GatorDHanna]

I'm sorry to hear about the negative experience. We definitely don't want you to feel like you're being spun in circles and that we don't care. Our employees do care and we care as a company.

In terms of response times, our queue is currently very low actually. Our support tickets are getting replies within 45 minutes and sales is about 2-3 hours. Security is also about 2-3 hours.

Sometimes things get miscommunicated or misunderstood and unfortunately there is more disparity between different employees than we'd like (something we are improving with new training procedures).

With that in mind, if you'd like to provide your ticket number, I'd be more than happy to have a senior administrator look into your issue and ensure that it is completely resolved and that you get the answers you need.

Once again, I apologize about the inconvenience. I'm more than happy to help in any way I can.

[lipofuse]

These are the two recent tickets with the same problem

BDS-2969068

FKU-2947295

[GatorFord]

After further review of both tickets it appears response times on both tickets and all responses was within a reasonable amount of time and with accurate responses. The main issue on your account(which appears to be ongoing) is that your scripts are running for an excessive amount of time and upon strace'ing these processes they are just hanging in an flock state attempting to lock or perform a file lock operation which never appears to complete. Further investigation of the script source itself indicates the script is dated back to 2005 and is quite outdated and I would recommend upgrading this to a more recent version of the script to try and resolve this issue. I don't see any issues with the server itself nor are any other customers on this machine experiencing any similar issues so I'm pretty certain this is isolated to the script installation on this domain.

Also I see that you began having issues after the move to PHP5 on this server which may be related. We can place .htaccess directives in place that will revert you to PHP4 on this server if you'd like to try that to see if any different behavior occurs. Please update one of these tickets or submit another one if this is indeed the case so we can perform this. Thanks.

[lipofuse]

I admit the reply was fast what I am surprised is the response. It seems that I have to bring up the issue of PHP 5 then your staff will echo the same sentiments as me. I mean I have been with hostgator for sometime and as far as matters that we have solutions, we do not trouble the support staffs. But when encountering problems that we are clueless, we hope that hostgator can give more insights into the problem. The response I get from the support are mostly, "We have killed all the processes, your site is running now." or "monitor your site if the problem persist". Are there other users that are also using the same script? Am I the only one with such problems?

[GatorDHanna]

We run into these sorts of problems with outdated scripts a lot. They are often buggy and are often tough on servers in regards to the number and intensity of processes they use. They haven't been optimized, which is why you're running into the problems that you're running into.

Without us going in and recoding the script to make it efficient, the solutions we're offering (killing processes, etc.) are the simplest and most reliable ways to fix the problems at hand.

Ford's suggestion about using PHP4 might be a good thing to try. If you give that a shot, it could help control the situation and make it far more manageable. I'd definitely suggest updating the support tickets and asking them to try that out.

[GatorBrent]

BDS-2969068 was answered correctly two minutes after it was submitted.

FKU-2947295 was responded to in less then an hours time.

This is going to keep happening until you fix your coding issues that are causing the problem. Have you done this yet? Would you like us to oursource one of our programmers to you to try and track down the issue?

[GatorBrent]

Moving to support forum until I hear back. thanks!