Forget about 99.9% uptime guarantee! [resolved]

[regan]

I have been on a reseller plan with HostGator for over a year now. I haven't had too many complaints over this time. There have been a couple outages where the CPU was maxed by another account on the same server. Those issues were resolved quickly by contacting Support via Live Chat. The only thing I warn you about is when you do have an outage (they happen), good luck getting HG to honour the 99.9% Uptime Guarantee.

What happened was the httpd service failed on the server (sonoma) that hosts my accounts. This meant that no one was able to access my websites for over an hour. I notified Support via chat and after a while was told to submit a ticket so a system administrator could look into the issue. From the time I discovered the issue and notified Support to the time the issue was resolved was well over the 43 minutes and 48 seconds guaranteed by HG.

I contacted the Sales department in order to get my refund for the month and was told:

"We do not cover software problems in the 99.9% uptime guarantee. Only network issues, and an actual server failure in the hardware. Because we have no control over your users, and no control over the security or setup of the box we can not provide a refund for any server-based problems such as apache going down."

First of all, what is the point of an uptime guarantee that doesn't cover apache failures? I mean, besides email, my accounts were useless... no one could access my webpages, nothing.

Second, I am the only administrator under my account. I don't know who else you are hosting on sonoma, but that SHOULD NOT BE MY PROBLEM!

Third, why don't you have any control over the security or setup of the box?!? It is yours, isn't it??? I assume you don't just throw a server in a rack, turn it on and dump a bunch of users on it, never to touched again. I would expect that you are patching the server with the latest security updates, etc, on a regular basis.

I am not the least bit impressed with this experience. I thought I would share this so anyone considering HG knows what to expect if this ever happens to them.

[GatorWesley]

Can you please provide the ticket number where this was discussed?

[regan]

Thanks for your reply. The ticket number is FNK-831068. There is no record number for my chat conversation, but here are the details that were sent to me after the session ended:

Chat start time Dec 24, 2007 7:30:42 PM EST Chat end time Dec 24, 2007 7:48:28 PM EST Duration (actual chatting time) 00:17:46 Operator Joseluis R.

[GatorBrent]

Hi Regan,

I'm shocked that you are actually right. Jason Weisman completely provided you wrong information. I contacted him and he apologized saying he got mixed up and thought you were on a dedicated server which we wouldn't honor.

Here's the deal on this issue.......


The server was up and even apache was up so it wasn't actually down. The apache connection limit got maxed out meaning while it was up new connections couldn't connect because it was at it's limit. This type of downtime while not "technically down" is down as far as how we advertise our uptime guarantee. It's the unhonest hosts that play the server was up game to get out of honoring.

With that said it's been so long the error logs don't exist now to verify how long the connections were maxed out for. We can see how long apache was down which was only a few minutes.

Considering we can't prove it wasn't at this point due to our own employee providing you wrong information I'm going to go ahead and give you the free month. On top of that I'm going to give you an additional free month for the trouble. This is a very embarrassing. mistake made on behalf of our company, You now have two months free.


Please let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.

[GatorJay]

Hi Regan, I show everything has been resolved for you but I wanted to personally apologize for the mistake. Based on the ticket I somehow believed you were on a dedicated server, any other time I would have moved the ticket to support to find out the exact downtime of the server, and give you any credit due. Again, I am glad everything is resolved and if you have any other problems please contact me directly at sales@hostgator.com, ATTN: Jay.

[regan]

Hi Brent and Jay,

I appreciate your apologies and efforts that were made to resolve this issue. This was a very distressing situation and once again you have gone beyond the call-of-duty and ensured that your customers are well taken care of.

Thanks again for your great service! I'm looking forward to spending the coming years with a host I can truly rely on.

Regan