Site down for 20 minutes this morning. Lucky I noticed.

[learncomputer]

Last month, I had a nightmarish experience with my site (http://www.learncomputer.com) hanging every few clicks. It was finally resolved after plenty of new gray hair on my head. You can read all the juicy details here: http://forums.hostgator.com/every-fe...5.html?t=66665.

But the "HostGator" experience just gets "better" and "better"! This morning, my site was down for AT LEAST 20 minutes (that I noticed of), probably longer. After submitting a ticket, the problem was resolved with this message:

I apologize about the site issue, it has now been corrected. It seems there was a user on the server that was abusing the system resources. This has now been corrected and your site is loading properly at this time. Once again I apologize about the frustrations this may have caused you.

Earlier last month, I had this response:

I apologize for the previous terse responses. I actually believe I found an issue on the server with another user using techniques to hide abusive high traffic levels. I've taken care of this issue, and I've verified that the issue does appear to have been going on as long as this ticket, so it is most likely the problem (the abuser opened an account on the server just 2 days before you opened this ticket).

In both cases I WAS THE ONE reporting the problem, not HostGator finding it independently. This leads me to believe that had I not spotted the downtime this morning, I would end up with my customers and Google AdWords reporting it to me and disabling my ad campaigns.

I have to say, this just makes me SICK! I wonder how many times it's been down without my actually noticing. I don't know what else to add here other than this is just NOT ACCEPTABLE!!!

[GatorJoshL]

Hello,

I do apologize about the issue this morning with your site. I looked through the history of the server and noticed that there was an account that one of our Administrators suspended for pirated software. We do monitor all our servers, this issue was not taken care of from our server monitors because it was not causing a high load on the server. The site was actually just serving tons of pages and using lots of bandwidth which slowed your site down.

I am on the server now and will continue to monitor the server to ensure it stays online. I have also responded to the ticket and will personally take care of any issues that you might have. I tried to give you a call at the number listed in the ticket to discuss this in detail however there was not an answer.

Again our apologies for the issues and please check your ticket for an update.

Thank you,

[learncomputer]

Josh, what can we do to ensure this stuff doesn't happen? My business livelihood is COMPLETELY based on my site being up and responsive 24/7. By allowing some punks to interfere with my site performance at will YOU jeopardize my business. Is there a more permanent solution to this? Having you "monitor" the site AFTER it has been down for some time just isn't a solution.

[GatorJoshL]

Hello,

Per the ticket, I have asked you to provide me a number to call you on regarding this. There is a better solution then shared hosting. It is not that we "allow some punks to interfere". You are on a shared server and sometimes in shared hosting environment's issues like this come up. It is rare and unfortunate especially with our dedicated monitors, but it does happen.

Please respond to the ticket with a # to call you back on and I will explain this more to you and see what we can do to ensure this does not happen again.

[learncomputer]

Ok, I'll reply to the ticket with my number. But just for the sakes of this thread, this happened twice in the span of last 30-40 days. To me, this is definitely unfortunate, but hardly "rare".