City Update

[dutcheagle]

I just talked with live support.

"your site will be up soon" THEY HAVE NO CLUE!!

P was 7 hours ago, now on T

Whoever made the decision to restore while granting everyone access; This was a BAD decision !!

<<--- cursing removed --->>

[chaloupe]

I have remove my post so users don't have too much to read.

Turning accounts on while restoring is not a bad idea at all. Obviously it takes longer to get to the usernames close to Z but for the other users it's helped a lot. Please understand we have thousands of servers and more than one customer. We're the leading provider in the Web Hosting industry and plan to keep it that way with your support. Unfortunately the chat representatives cannot give you an exact time but what they can give you is their dedication and assistance in any which way possible. We take our business very seriously and will continue to do so. Things like this can't always be prevented but they can be prepared for and as you can see HostGator was and is well prepared for this kind of issue on any of our servers. If you have any questions please send an email to support@hostgator.com and someone will be able to assist you. Please keep the bashing out of this thread as we're simply using this thread to keep everyone updated and I'm sure our customers do not want to read through 3 pages of replies to see where city stands.


If you have any questions, concerns, or complaints please email support@hostgator.com

Thank you

[dutcheagle]

I work in IT and I know this happens, nobody's fault. I also know that I'm on a shared server and all that stuff bla bla bla.

I know it has to be restored when data is corrupted.

However a 30 hour or longer restore could have been prevented by isolating the server and give the restore a high priority. Now everyone is using the server, its hooked up to the network, all processes are running and restore takes forever.

Somebody made the wrong decision.!!

That's my point, not the yada yada of Hostgator is so great and have patients they do what they can, I know that. I did shifts of 24 hours and more because of stupid hardware.

I'M just NOT HAPPY !! OK?

[dutcheagle]

It appears all sites are running again. (thanks Hostgator for updating us?????)

I'm not that mad anymore but still firmly believe in my comments and not taking any words back as i belive I was honest and did not rant for the sake of ranting.

I opened a ticket with support about this restore procedure but they returned a message that was just a cut and paste of the most general message they have at hand.

Sending some PMs to a staff member did not help either they just IGNORE you, shame on you (you know who you are)

I have to complement the people who WORKED on this to not go insane and doing a good restore job. I found some setting in cpanel for the websites i'm hosting were not completely the same anymore but could fix that easy.

Also i like to compliment Hostgator to have backups. Not only they have backups, the best thing is a restore actualy works. If you know something about backup software and the trouble you can run into you must know it is a challenge.

So to conclude I'm NOT negative I just try to be honest and only say what i believe in.

(and for the readers of my privious messages, I never cursed for real)

DutchEagle signing off.

[webprop]

Hi HG staff and fellow clients

Great work in getting everything up and running ! My compliments to you for working round the clock. I still have some issues with my accounts, but I will sort it out.

I'd like to add to some of the comments some of the users and staff made as a summary:

What did we us clients learn from this?
a. If you start to earn money and serious money or you have serious business which cannot afford downtime, go on :
*Dedicated machines
*Get a backup machine and replicate data with rsync
*Do a DNS check with some DNS provider like zonedit.com that if a machine go's down, it will switch to the other machine
b. make own daily backup's - we can't expect the hosting provider to do everything for us at the low rates we pay them. Some of the risk is for us.

What did HG learn from this?
a. Possibly to take the advice of Dutch Eagle to isolate the server while restoring. I'm in the IT business for 25 years and thats what I would have done. There are advantages and disadvantages. All in all you cannot start a restore while users are hammering the server. What if the restore fails and you have to start again? Politically and physically you are worse off then.
b. Do a thorough investigation of what happened. Is it really hardware or some buggy software? Why did the RAID1 fail? Or did it?
c. What can be done to prevent this issue in the future? Other hardware? Discs?
d. If the backup runs every sunday, why can't it run everyday? Because the backup system is used for other purposes during the week or is it sitting idle?


Lets trust HG get to the bottom of it and can prevent further issues. All in all I'm very happy with the dedication and work done by HG. Thanks guys!

regards
Paul Wolsink
24veo.com

[fuzzfree]

Hello dear fellows,

I am not on city, but I observe this thread as I want to know what will happen when my server gets into a situation like this.

Situation like this always happen to any host. The point is to have the customers less angry than you can. Although a restore can take many hours, it is very disappointed that we are going to have a 7 seven days old backup (in the worst case). This means our data is no safe with HG. And although HG is a leader in reseller/shared hosting, with situations like that proves that our data is not their first priority... I do know that HG keeps only weekly backups (I had signed though when they kept only monthily I think), but HG must reconsider the disaster plan.

If we keep daily backups the problem is that we might cause high load on server and unfortunately HG will boot us! ... ....

I would advise Hostgator to make daily backups in order to avoid situations like these, keep downtime as little as possible and keep the customers less angry.

[webprop]

Hi Serra
Yes, I totally agree and that is also what I meant with daily backup is backing up only that what change. Owners will/should know that a website only changes once in a while and should keep an off-line backup. To backup a total website is a waste and anyone doing that should be shot on the spot
Only the databases will change during the day. (and email)
The WHM SQL is getting exported in anyway automagically already and send by email to me.
It shouldn't be to much of a stress factor to export the SQL data.
regards
Paul

[novatempus]

Hi!

What about the 99,9% uptime guarantee? There will be an automatic refund/credit for all the city users or we must apply it?

Regards!

[vtrain]

Originally Posted by novatempus

Hi!

What about the 99,9% uptime guarantee? There will be an automatic refund/credit for all the city users or we must apply it?

Regards!

Usually you have to apply for it. It was like that for me when the server where i'm hosted had problems.

Vt.