Nightmare support experience on dedicated server

[ferryg]

It's with a heavy heart that I write this negative customer experience about ticket #CMJ-421321. Let me first say that I've always been reasonably happy with Hostgator, I've seen my biggest domain grow from shared in 2005 to semi-shared in 2006 to now a dedicated server account since January 2007, all on Hostgator.

But with growth came spammers, entire zombie networks targeting my domain. So far I've always been able to stop spam attacks through anti-spam wordpress blog plugins. But despite Hostgator staff back in January making the improvement of having the server automatically reboot itself if the spam made the server crash, the spam still arrived after all (before being stopped) and made the server unavailable for a few minutes while it was overloaded and rebooted (but it was better than it being offline for hours or days like what happened back in 2006, but I ended up upgrading, so I wouldn't call that a complaint but more of a requirement). At the start of this year they had suggested blocking entire IP ranges with the server's firewall, after asking around I discovered some of the suggestions would block entire countries like China and England! Obviously that wasn't the way to go and kind of an odd suggestion to make, so I left the issue for a few months.

As I got more visitors last month and the server became unavailable a few times one night this week, it became clear to me I had to contact Hostgator to talk about other ways to stop the server from freezing up or timing out before the end of the year holiday shopping craze would bring even more visitors and as a result... more spambots and more offline time. While I'm no computer expert, I asked Richard at Abuse for suggestions and Jamyn at Abuse replied and came up with a great way to handle multiple page requests at once and since spam attacks always come in large quantities, installing the caching/accelerator program (APC through Pecl module) sounded like a good idea and I asked if that could be done since I don't have the expertise to do it.

This is where the bad experience began (ticket #CMJ-421321).

Five hours later (early today) I read a response from Paul at Support saying the MySQL settings were modified to work well with wordpress, which seems harmless to me. So I think the problem came from the next email I got ten minutes later from Robert at Support who installed the APC (through Pecl) module for me, but mentioned the installation failed and to quote was: "diagnosing the issue now and will let you know when it is resolved. I will contact you again soon." That was NINE HOURS AGO. That's not soon to me and quite frankly a nightmarish support experience when you take the following into account...

What's worse is that after changes were made my domains weren't even checked by Hostgator's staff to verify if they were working, because for all that time all the pages on all my domains were showing BLANK PAGES, effectively putting the websites offline. Obviously I responded right away asking if it could be put back the way it was so it would work again, I let a few hours pass without response from anyone, and then emailed support with a new message (while referencing the above mentioned ticked ID) to ask if it could be looked at ASAP. But it even took an hour to get an automated confirmation that the email was received on Saturday morning.

So in the meantime I also contacted your on-site live support and was told he couldn't do anything and that calling Hostgator's phone number wouldn't solve or speed up anything either, so I'm dependent on Hostgator staff emailing me back... but after how long, hours, days? It'll probably be half a day that will pass before anyone even sees this message.

For someone like me who's income depends on my domains being functional online, I'm not just losing a big part of my daily income, but I'm at risk of losing my website sponsors and regular readers when they can't reach the domain.

Please know I realize the none of this was done on purpose and that everyone involved was just trying to help me, but I had to type it all out to show where things went awry through either a mistake or miscommunication between Hostgator's staff. Please contact me here or via email not just to see how this can be solved soon, but I'd also be happy to help improve your customer support by answering any questions you might have about the happenings. I'm not giving a negative review because I want to leave, but because I hope as my domains grow Hostgator will be able to host them and right now mistakes that could be prevented are being made.

Thank you for reading.

Hi Ferry,

Your ticket was updated with specific details, right around the time the problem was resolved. Please let me know if you didn't receive my reply. Thanks.

[ferryg]

Review update: Since a couple of fellow dedicated server customers and Hostgator themselves asked me to let them know how the issue ended once it was fixed, here I am adding to the review above. Here are the main happenings:

1. 18 hours after the mistake was made by two technicians it was fixed on the night from Saturday to Sunday. Jamyn who first suggested what to do (caching) to help my spam problem (but did not make these changes, since Hostgator's ticket system passes tasks along to the next available person) he came back to work to fix my issue and my domains were back to normal fast.

2. But by that time the damage was already done and it's not something I can just shrug of as a minor mistake since my business relies on the domains that were down. I've emailed Hostgator and would like us to restore trust and they said to make it right with me, so I'll await that. So while the experience was in a way a nightmare, the support themselves were helpful, explained everything, and Jamyn would've even called me if it wasn't in the middle of the night.

2. That said, my review remains a negative not because I don't appreciate what was done by the employee to fix this, but because the weekend support is seriously lacking manpower. It came across to me as if no one was at work and any problems that pop up on a late Friday and the rest of the weekend won't get fixed until Monday unless they are as serious as my effectively offline domains. I'm pretty sure internet business is 24/7.

What happens if the Hostgator.com website goes offline for almost a full day? How many customers, visitors, sponsors and with them income and trust do you lose, would that ever happen? What I mean to say is that while accidents happen, when you work years on a project all the above mentioned fallout I just had to deal with isn't pretty, but I'm taking it as a learning experience and would like to see Hostgator do the same with weekend support improved, as it feels like you've outgrowing your support capacity as a company.

[GatorBrent]

Hello,


You are 100% right to post a negative. This wasn't a lack of man power on this issue, it was a lack of common sense which is very hard to come by when you hire someone.


Chat techs lacked common sense because...

If a site is down common sense is you get an admin to get it up you don't tell the customer to wait. I just sent out a news email informing them all whoever doesn't help will be fired.



I just banned tweaks from being made. Your problem has nothing to do with spammers, and there's no tweaks in the world that's going to solve your problem. Every time I see an admin do something to tweak our already tweaked dedicated servers it never helps.

I checked your server load, and the amount of traffic you are getting.
And within seconds I knew this was simply an overloaded box that's not going to be helped by tweaks.

You are getting a huge amount of traffic and your only solution is to upgrade to a faster box with more memory. If this isn't an option then please realize tweaks aren't going to do anything but break your site. I'm going to give you a call tomorrow if you don't mind to discuss this more with you.

[ferryg]

Brent, I was hoping to hear from you last week, I've now been waiting for 8 more days... can you email me instead to try and make this right and offer any suggestions you have?