my dreams are becoming nitmares

[tiger]

in the past week i have had 2 major problems that could of been handled much better.
First horrible experiece:
I called to ask about a free service you advertise. This was something you left me on your 24/7 instant help forever without giving me an answer. YOu finally told me i would have to email support with my "problem", (simple question really). I was horrified to come home from work and find soo many emails from my customers about thier sites being dead. When i got ahold of you via phone you where supprised at the problem since you 'SIMPLY CHANGED MY USER NAME' !
Current horror story:
im getting many emails again, customers sites are down, i research and then get you on your instant help desk, all at once everything comes back on. mabe just a passing glitch??
One hour latter, the sites are down again, i get on help desk, in 40 minutes i get a total of 3 words equalling 8 letters from you, 2 oks, and a yes. none of which answered anything. after your answer of "yes" that made no sense i asked for something to give my customers more than a 3 letter word. do you have any time estamites? You coldly answered ok, (now a 2 letter response), and cut off communication. This bold and in my book very unproffessional response is losing you a customer that was on verge of upgrading.
edited/added later;
my sites are now up, if a simple "we will work on this and let you know as soon as its done!" was so hard for you to say??? my sites where only down for about 3 hours but your total lack of communication made it seem so much longer. Out of 6 months of service with you guys my only real complaint is in the way you handle questions. I really dont just blurt out questions, I actually research personally to make sure its not simply something on my side.

[GatorBrent]

I'm assuming you are on jeep. We were beyond flooded by every reseller on the server contacting support today. I agree I'm not sure why you didn't get a "we our working on it" response. I know I was telling this to everyone I spoke with on the phone and the tickets I read said it. Do you have a ticket number I can review? And find out who dropped the ball on this? Thanks!

[tjenkins]

Im not on Jeep but having the same issue. I just get: Yes,ok,wait a moment, and I will have to forward to tech support. Usually it's becuase my server is down. Its always server issues. (Tomcat)

[saturnus]

I think you are unfair with hostgator.i think they always find a solution.
isn't it like that?

[onsite]

No I wish it was. Their customer support leaves a lot to be desired. It's almost like they don't want you bothering them. Well in this business when people are calling me I need to know what to tell them other then welll they said it would be up soon. That does not work. I'm having problems once or twice a month now. I have not asked for a free month but I think that whenever it's down too long I'm going to ask for it.

Originally Posted by saturnus

I think you are unfair with hostgator.i think they always find a solution.
isn't it like that?

[GatorBrent]

If a server is down there is no way to know why it went down because it's down.
We could easily lie which most hosting companies do but we don't we are honest based on what we know on the problem.

You can rest assured any time any server has a problem we are working on it within a minute. Practically every downtime we've ever had was a result of a script in some shape or form.

Spammers = exploited user scripts they usually drive server load into the 100’s causing us not to be able to login until server is rebooted.

dossers = scripts
crashers = scripts that can crash a server in a split second leaving no trace, and happen randomly. We had a server crash the other day from someone importing mysql database and doing something funny.

Hostgator doesn’t cause downtime, reseller’s sites they host cause the downtimes. It's then our job to find what can sometimes be a needle in a haystack. We manage over 70 boxes so a server is bound to have a problem now and then. When a server has the same problem multiple times believe it we know and would pay thousands if it meant the problem being fixed. It has nothing to do with servers being overloaded, us not knowing what we are doing etc. They are servers that usually don't tell you what the problem is. You watch the processes running and the server crashes within a split second booting you out of the box.... crashing the server before anything can log before the process even lists in what your viewing. It's not always an easy task. We think we finally got the site that's been crashing jeep but we won't know for another day of waiting.



Tiger requested sitestudio which requires an email to be sent in requesting it. His username was taken so we modified so he could have the sitestudio. His site was linked to mysql which was linked to his username. People who request site studio don't have a site since this is a site builder. If you already have a site if you used site builder it would over write your site. Thus we had no idea modifying his username would cause a problem. He called in and we fixed it for him.

tjenkins your server has never been down other then kernal reboots. The jsp service goes down because jsp isn't a stable language, and requires frequent restarts. Jsp isn't going to get any better because it's jsp. Perhaps there's a hosting company out there that doesn’t have this problem with jsp like we do, we admit it, and it's going to need to be restarted now and then. Please don’t blame us for something we tell you is going to happen.


Onsite your more then likely on jeep...
Which we've been spending 5+ hours a day on since the problem started. We want it fixed much more then you could possibly imagine. It crashing for a few minutes every day is a major problem to us. There was a user we suspected when it all started. (reseller)

We suspended them they swore it wasn't them saying "prove it" since the server was crashing instantly there really wasn't any proof to go on other then small signs so we had to unsuspend. Today we actually got a view of a cron job of theirs the second the server crashed for it's daily few minutes.

They have been suspended and the problem hasn't reoccurred yet. Might be to soon to tell but it looks to be them, and original hunch was correct to begin with. We deal with 10+ sites a day that have hacked scripts, server crashing scripts, or spamming scripts. You know what the first thing all of them say is? "not me" 2nd thing is "prove it"

Proof is almost never a smoking gun. It's not like we can just ban these people. Most of them are innocent but clueless. They upload insecure scripts that are exploited. They almost never know how they got there we fix it a month or so later it's suddenly back. They usually have trojaned computers, virused computers, or keep installing insecure scripts that half the exploiters in the world are scanning for. Phpnuke is the worst when running older version.

A server has thousands of processes a second running. Imagine trying to find one process that crashes a server in a split second. (it’s crashed you have no access to track it)


Resellers act like we have a party when a server goes down, that we don’t care, to busy to care… That’s far from it. Within a minute of a box going down we can get a over a dozen phone calls. Dozens Of chats and emails. We get flooded. Everyone asking “why is the server down!!” If the server is down that means we have no access so have no idea till we get access and can trace it. We do our best so when there is a problem please be patient with us.

[TeeJaa]

If anyone has any doubt if your websites are being probed, just go into "awstats" and look at your "pages not found".

I only been with Gator for approx. 3 weeks, and I have more probes to my CGI-BIN for any type of form mail, email program made out there, and then some.

I don't even like using the formmail that comes with the server.
So, if you put any unsecure script in there, your leaving all of us that are on that server to a lot of down time.

[oblomov]

Originally Posted by GatorBrent

We think we finally got the site that's been crashing jeep but we won't know for another day of waiting.

Hello to everybody.
I think GatorBrent might be talking about one of our sites (http://www.vagabondo.net/) as it has been suspended because suspected of crashing jeep server. I'd like to say something about what have been said insofar.

Originally Posted by GatorBrent

We suspended them they swore it wasn't them saying "prove it" since the server was crashing instantly there really wasn't any proof to go on other then small signs so we had to unsuspend. Today we actually got a view of a cron job of theirs the second the server crashed for it's daily few minutes.

They have been suspended and the problem hasn't reoccurred yet. Might be to soon to tell but it looks to be them, and original hunch was correct to begin with. We deal with 10+ sites a day that have hacked scripts, server crashing scripts, or spamming scripts. You know what the first thing all of them say is? "not me" 2nd thing is "prove it"

This is great logic! Suppose you are jailed for killing a man, but you happen to know you are innocent, what would you say? ...and then the guard in prison goes like "yeah... yeah... they're all innocent...". Ok, apart from jokes:

I've never claimed I'm sure it can't absolutely be our site, we do mistakes (as you do). I've claimed different things:

1) IF it is one of our site, then it is completely uninintentional, we are running several sites at our reseller account, some "hobby sites" and some "bussines sites", we have economic and personal interest in having our site running as you have your interest in having your server running (and it happens our sites are on your server...).

2) Our site http://vagabondo.net// is an online community that has been on since 1996, it's not a script kiddies site, nor a fake site covering "dirty" activities.

3) I did not just say "prove it", I said "prove it" after you claimed the following things (partially contradictory)
a) that we are attacking external sites
b) that we purposedly crashing your system
c) that somebody is attacking our site in 100's different ways
d) that 100's of processes were running owned by our users
e) that our accounts were being mailbombed

In your post you claim a different thing:

a) There is something wrong on jeep
b) You don't know what is going on but by suspending the site we found the problem might be this reseller account

This is much more reasonable than the histerical claims I've received by mail from you and sales dep. I would have never complained that much if you would have just said that "there is something wrong with your site, it has been suspended, we are investigating further" and maybe some infos/questions about what scripts are we running ecc. ecc.
This would have been a much more honest and positive approach to the problem.
It would have been easy then to understand if we were trying to cheat you or something.

4) What I have been asking for (what you call "prove it") is not "legal evidence" but any kind of support for your claims in order for me to help you find if there is any of our scripts to blame for it. As soon as you gave me some (really small) hint I gave you feedback about a possible guilty script. Again: it is in my interest to have my site back online...

Originally Posted by GatorBrent

Proof is almost never a smoking gun. It's not like we can just ban these people. Most of them are innocent but clueless. They upload insecure scripts that are exploited. They almost never know how they got there we fix it a month or so later it's suddenly back. They usually have trojaned computers, virused computers, or keep installing insecure scripts that half the exploiters in the world are scanning for. Phpnuke is the worst when running older version.

It's years we did not upload any new web script in our site (and no, we do not use phpnuke or any software like that). We just run a very basic forum and a simple script to subscirbe/unsubscribe form a newsletter on vagabondo.net while we run egroupware on sivat-biz (but that is a very seldom used site, very few hits).

The only script I've added recently (a month or so) is a cron job executing daily and nighttime, it is a commercial log analyzer (http://summary.net/), it can be quite intensive in resource use but from the report I get it does not run for more than 10 minutes a day (very often less than that). I'm using the same software for analyzing dozens of website logs on a simple single processor x86 host and never had any problem.

This is all the information I can give you to help you debug what is going wrong.
I remember you that last time our site was suspended as suspected for crashing the system it ended up that our scripts had nothing to do with that and that we were being mailbombed (that was your diagnosis and not my conjecture).

At the moment it's almost 24 hours our site has been suspended, moreover I don't have access to CPanel to make backups of our sites. Hope you did...

I could go on with details about this sad story but at the end I just want to say that I don't understand your attitude towards customers, just thinking everybody has evil intentions, is a script kid, cracker or whatever, before even knowing what is really going on on your server, why? This really has no meaning to me, it is a very unfair an unprofessional behaviour.


Best regards.

[onsite]

I'm not on Jeep. I'm on supra. At least I was the last time I checked.

[GatorBrent]

Supra hasn't been having repeat problems.... We guarantee 99.9 and stick to it with a refund. No server in the world has 100% uptime so those expecting it from us won't receive it. A problem isn't a problem till it's a problem and at that point the server is already down with us working on it.

All refund requests received within a week are honored if the downtime was greather then .10


I'm closing this thread. If anyone has any concerns feel free to contact me at brent@hostgator.com