Frustrated with lack of communication

[Pitrow]

Well I've been a customer of Host Gator for almost a year now, it'll be a year next month. So far I have been very happy as they are much better than my previous host, however there is one thing that is lacking.

There is an obvious lack of solid communication between Host Gator and it's clients, especially when something goes wrong. They seem to take more of a reactive stance to communications than a proactive one. Details of errors and what is happening are few and far between, and typically only come when you specifically ask for them.

For example, while the servers were being fixed this morning I asked for an update and my response was:

Hello,
Well, I see the site in both IE and firefox so it looks like the issue has been fixed on your server.


Regards,
Richard F.

This is very typical of a support response. No real information, other than "it works for me." Not a very professional response in my book. Had this have been me I would have taken a little extra time to respond with what is/was wrong and what's happening/happened to fix it. I realize that they are probably busy answering thousands of these emails, but it only takes once to write up a decent reply and copy and paste it.

Host Gator, please improve your communication skills.

FYI - Ticket ID: IKS-156010

[Pitrow]

As an update, what really takes the cake is that I received an answer back from "tech support" (if you can call it that) blaming this whole server crash issue on the cpanel update, when it had been announced in these forums (by Brent no less) for at least 4 hours that it was an attack on the servers.

Hello,
We are aware of this issue with Internet explorer being unable to load certain pages/images on various sites. It has been caused by a cpanel update that has modified a key line in the apache configuration file (httpd.conf) in this manor...

The correct configuration line is:
AddType cgi-script .cgi .pl

However the recent cpanel update has changed it to:
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl

This causes certain requests to be processes improperly and is what is resulting in the errors you are seeing. We have repaired this on all servers, however since it is being caused by a cpanel update, every time cpanel is updated the issue is reoccurring. At this time we do not have a permanent resolution, but we are working towards one. Should you encounter your problem again simply submit a ticket with the subject "yourdomain.com needs AddHandler fix" to ensure that it will be handled promptly.

Our most humble apologies for this grave issue. Your cooperation and understanding is GREATLY appreciated while we work towards a final resolution. If we may be of any further assistance, or if you have any further questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Thank you for choosing HostGator!

This type of communication is almost worse than no communication. I really wish that everyone on the tech support team would get on the same page and have the same information, so that when they do finally give out information it is correct information and not just a guess.

[GatorRichard]

I think you missed the big news all over slashdot and digg about the fact that there WAS a CPanel update that borked everything on our servers. Or that there WAS an IE exploit that affected our users through this CPanel update.

There *were* two different issues going on simultaneously here over the weekend. Many of us here (including myself) worked the entire weekend while this was going on just to make sure that our users would stop having problems.

I see that you didn't like my reply to your ticket when what the root of the issue *was* was given to you in a previous reply. This isn't a lack of communication on our behalf to our users nor to our own employees, but a lack of time /to/ communicate due to serious influx of ticket, chats, calls, and the lack of staff on-hand.

[Pitrow]

Originally Posted by hgrfoshee

I think you missed the big news all over slashdot and digg about the fact that there WAS a CPanel update that borked everything on our servers. Or that there WAS an IE exploit that affected our users through this CPanel update.

No, I didn't miss it, I had been reading the threads in here all along. And thank you for belittling me, what a great way to treat your customers. I guess I didn't make myself clear enough in my last post... what was missing in your response is the entire fact that there was an exploit and it was being taken advantage of by hackers. Your response makes it seem that everything is all and well and that it was a simple error in an update script that caused the entire thing. Please go back and re-read your own reply if you think I'm wrong on that. No where does it mention Exploit, hacker, attack, or anything of that sort. In case you don't want to do that, I'll quote you here:

It has been caused by a cpanel update that has modified a key line in the apache configuration file... This causes certain requests to be processes improperly and is what is resulting in the errors you are seeing.

Originally Posted by hgrfoshee

There *were* two different issues going on simultaneously here over the weekend. Many of us here (including myself) worked the entire weekend while this was going on just to make sure that our users would stop having problems.

Thank you and everyone else who helped to get this fixed. I don't doubt your efferts in trying to get the issue fixed were above and beyond the regular call of duty, however that doesn't excuse the fact that there needs to be good communication with your customers, many of whom are trying communicate with our own customers why their services aren't working.

Originally Posted by hgrfoshee

This isn't a lack of communication on our behalf to our users nor to our own employees, but a lack of time /to/ communicate due to serious influx of ticket, chats, calls, and the lack of staff on-hand.

Isn't that my point to begin with?

[GatorBrent]

Did you see the forum thread we had going explaining everything as it was happening? I updated this myself every second I had even the slightest bit of information.


Cpanel had a root exploit that affected every cpanel server in the world. However only a few hosting companies were targeted with this root exploit us taking the blunt of it due to our reputation and size.

[GatorBrent]

I'm moving this to the suppor forum due to lack of response. Please respond back so we can move back. Thanks!

[Pitrow]

Originally Posted by GatorBrent

Did you see the forum thread we had going explaining everything as it was happening? I updated this myself every second I had even the slightest bit of information.


Cpanel had a root exploit that affected every cpanel server in the world. However only a few hosting companies were targeted with this root exploit us taking the blunt of it due to our reputation and size.

Yes Brent, as I posted earlier in this thread I was reading everything in the forums as it was being posted.

Apparently I'm still not making myself clear. I am aware that there was a cpanel exploit. I'm aware that Host Gator was the first to be attacked by this.

What I'm frustrated with is the lack of communication that we as resellers can pass on to our own customers as to why things aren't working as they should. While this was happening there were prolonged periods of zero communication with anyone. Unless you count the guesses and mis-information given by some tech supports (as was noted in the various threads on this board that were subsequently deleted).

As I posted earlier, that even after you had updated here in the forums that this was an attack, I got an email from support suggesting that this was mearly a bug in the update of the cpanel software. Which, while technically correct is lacking a lot of vital information that I need to pass on to my users and clients, such as it was an attack and that they (my users) could potentially be infected with a virus due to this attack. This information was not included in any email or ticket response I got from HostGator, and could only be found by coming here to the forums.

As I've stated before, using this forum as the only outlet for vital information is a serious mistake in communications with your clients. You should be more pro-active and take the initiative to email them with ALL the relative information instead of making them come here to the forums to find out what's going on.

[Serra]

Originally Posted by Pitrow

You should be more pro-active and take the initiative to email them with ALL the relative information instead of making them come here to the forums to find out what's going on.

Emailing all of HG clients is a huge undertaking and not something that can be done during a crisis. I'm fairly sure that any communication issued globally by HG would need to be reviewed by the legal department, which is likely an off-site 9-4 consultant, not an onsite person. Then the review would take several hours if not 24 hours. By then, the crisis is over.

Updating a forum is very easy, as the posts can be deleted or changed if they are found to be legally a problem. Once an email is sent, its gone.

[Pitrow]

Originally Posted by Serra

Emailing all of HG clients is a huge undertaking and not something that can be done during a crisis. I'm fairly sure that any communication issued globally by HG would need to be reviewed by the legal department, which is likely an off-site 9-4 consultant, not an onsite person. Then the review would take several hours if not 24 hours. By then, the crisis is over.

Updating a forum is very easy, as the posts can be deleted or changed if they are found to be legally a problem. Once an email is sent, its gone.

Very true. OK, I cede that point.

[Serra]

Originally Posted by Pitrow

Very true. OK, I cede that point.

That isn't to say that an the instant message system they were thinking about would have the same problem. A short one line message could prompt users to go to the forums to check out the problem. Like "Gator 32 experienceing email problems." or something.

Email isn't the solution, but there is a solution!

[GatorBrent]

Nobody knew what was going on for a while. We believed it was many different things before we found out what was really going on. It's hard to communicate something you don't know about and we kept this forum up to date by the second with any information we had or didn't have we thought would be rellevant.

[Serra]

Originally Posted by GatorBrent

Nobody knew what was going on for a while. We believed it was many different things before we found out what was really going on. It's hard to communicate something you don't know about and we kept this forum up to date by the second with any information we had or didn't have we thought would be rellevant.

In this case that is true and I understand that it was a difficult problem and it was hard to know what the problem was until you figured out how to fix it. So, in this case, I understand. However the larger issue of not communicating problems still exists. Not everyone can check the forums once a day. Often notification of changes, downtime or whatever are posted 24 hours prior to the event. A better notification system should be provided.

[gwyneth]

An easy solution might be enabling or rigging up a check box here similar to the ones many forum packages offer for notification by email if a topic gets a response.

That way, HG could continue to concentrate on whatever problem support was trying to fix and those who wanted/needed to know would get the automatic email that a topic had something new. A whole lot easier for HG than rigging up an entirely new line of communication, and just as up-to-the-minute as IM.

Users here who feel frustrated should think about unintended consequences. Think about the general ratio of user types: for every one person who knows what s/he is doing and would actually benefit from the pre-notification, there are five to ten who know enough to be dangerous and a hundred or more who are actively clueless.

Imagine the responses of the second category getting an email that Floobar 13 would be down for a couple of hours, and how support would have to handle them (both then and later, due to how these geniuses work around things and 'fix' them themselves).

Then think about the last category and how many would immediately email back "do I have Floobar 13?" "Will this mean..." "is that why I can't start my computer?"...and so on. Just the effect of hundreds of people suddenly using their cPanels for (maybe) the first time could have a serious ripple effect.

Now think about this effect in conjunction with several trigger words, such as 'virus', 'attack', 'corrupted', etc. It would take a parallel fulltime team to handle the panic and the questions about whether this is why some 900k image takes so long to load.

What I'm trying to get at is that some system intended to offer marginal benefits to a few could easily produce vast disadvantages for those same people.

[slapshotw]

Originally Posted by gwyneth

An easy solution might be enabling or rigging up a check box here similar to the ones many forum packages offer for notification by email if a topic gets a response.

You can easily subscribe to a topic on the forum and get emailed notifications with updates.

[Serra]

Originally Posted by slapshotw

You can easily subscribe to a topic on the forum and get emailed notifications with updates.

It defeats the purpose of being notified, if you can subscribe, you are already aware of the problem. It does allow updates to be seen.... but..

[slapshotw]

That's the same problem his proposal had though; I was just saying the functionality is already there.

My old host had a status page that let us subscribe to two things-- server wide announcements and specific server announcements. We'd get them by email. I get the impression HG used to have a non-forum based system but discontinued it.

I'd love to also see servers get RSS feeds for status updates.

-Matt

[gwyneth]

Two things.

First, I didn't mean that forum readers would have to subscribe to the specific thread--and I think Matt grasped what I was getting at. Something like the 'notify of response' feature, but without having to know that the thread exists. But with that kind of functionality...possibly an auto-notify for the category of threads rather than a specific thread.

Second, Matt, if by 'he' you meant me, you truncated the string by a character at its start.

[Pitrow]

Originally Posted by gwyneth

Two things.

First, I didn't mean that forum readers would have to subscribe to the specific thread--and I think Matt grasped what I was getting at. Something like the 'notify of response' feature, but without having to know that the thread exists. But with that kind of functionality...possibly an auto-notify for the category of threads rather than a specific thread.

The functionality for that already exists. You can subscribe to seperate forums by clicking on the forum and going under the Forum Tools button and choose "subscribe to this forum". The only problem with that is that you only can choose a daily or weekly email and all it does is send you an email stating that a new post was made. I'm subscribed to both the General Annoucements and the Network status threads. Here is an example of what you get, from this mornings email:

You are subscribed to the forum General Announcements, there have been 0 new thread(s) and 1 updated thread(s).
http://forums.hostgator.com/forumdisplay.php?f=9

The following threads are new:


The following threads have been updated:
************
Anyone Running a CMS Here?
http://forums.hostgator.com/showthread.php?t=6210
In forum: General Announcements
Started by: Krim
Last post: 10-12-2006 11:44 AM

As you can see, it's not very specific, nor is it very timely. By the time I got this email this morning the post it notes was almost 22 hours old. But it is better than nothing at all.

[slapshotw]

Originally Posted by Pitrow

As you can see, it's not very specific, nor is it very timely. By the time I got this email this morning the post it notes was almost 22 hours old. But it is better than nothing at all.

That's because you probably have "digest" instead of instant notification. I get mine instantly.

Instead of subscribing to the forum, HG could make a separate thread for each server, and then an "everybody" thread. People could subscribe to whatever applied to them.

-Matt

[vtrain]

Originally Posted by Serra

[snip]
However the larger issue of not communicating problems still exists. Not everyone can check the forums once a day. Often notification of changes, downtime or whatever are posted 24 hours prior to the event. A better notification system should be provided.

24h ?
well this server upgrades are being posted less then 24h before:
http://forums.hostgator.com/showthread.php?t=11234

Fortunally the server where I am was not one of the first ones so I can subscribe this thread. BUt will HG update always on this thread?

Vtrain