site suspended backup

[oblomov]

my site has been suspended on around midnight of 18/8/2004 (I may post later on how and for what reason). Since then I've been asking for a full backup of the site as I can't access CPanel or the ftp area anymore for the site.

It is now almost 62 (sixtytwo! 2 days and a half!) hours I'm waiting to have access to this backup, I' written several times to sales and support and to another address they gave me to have it, last news was Brent that write me 20 (twenty!) hours ago saying "You should have a backup shortly".
It takes a few minutes to complete a backup.

What should I do?

Welcome to hostgator folks...

[GatorJustin]

oblomov, I understand your concerns and apologize for the inconvenience. I have sent Brent a message regarding this and we will get it straightened out for you. In the meantime, I would appreciate it if you would please review This Thread and provide the information mentioned so that we can better serve you in the future. Thanks in advance.

-Justin

[GatorBrent]

You did not request a backup until yesterday. Please read all the emails you sent. Since the 3rd when we first suspended you you've been fighting with us claiming your site can't be the reason. You talked us into unsuspending you a few times each time we did the server had more problems. The server has now been stable for over 24 hours without a single problem after having issues for weeks / multiple down times.

We tell you we gave you all the information and all you can do is demand we give you more information or unsuspend. Now you’re coming on our forum posting in every customer experience thread that you can saying it's been days since you requested a backup which is not true. You've been arguing with us for weeks that you site can't be the cause. The server running smoothly after your account being suspended isn't enough proof for you. The cron job setup by you that ran the second the server crashed one of the times wasn't enough proof.
The chances of a server going down the second your cron runs after we've been suspecting you for weeks is close to nilch. You get mail bombings etc....

I don't know what you’re doing on your site but w/e it is it's causing your site to be the target of tons of attacks or you yourself are doing things to bring down the server in multiple fashions. You tell us because it *might not be you causing it and it could be bad people we should let everyone on the server have daily downtimes rather then kick you. I know if I had some plague driven virus given to me by terrorist group that had no cure and would wipe out humanity I wouldn't be saying to the world "you can't lock me in isolation because the terrorists gave me the virus. It's not fair let me Rome the world killing everyone"

Any negative post you make about us will be moved to this thread you started. Since you like to email the same message to multiple HostGator email addresses, as well as post the same negative comment all over the forum. It's unfortunate your site had to be suspended, but we had no choice, and we couldn't allow everyone on the server to keep having daily outages for the sake of it being unfair. What's unfair is that our customers lost $1000's in business, lost emails, hostgator reputation was damaged, countless hours of our time spent on this issue and much much more.


What do you suggest we should do? If you have a solution that is plausible we will do it.

[oblomov]

I tried to open a different thread for this problem: a extremely slow resppnsivness for having a backup but as you keep commenting on other things I'll reply.

Here are my comments regarding the backup question. You just don't know (or pretend to not know) how things went:

Originally Posted by GatorBrent

You did not request a backup until yesterday. Please read all the emails you sent.

My site was suspended 18/8/2004 at midnight (CET = Central European Time), the first thing I would do when suspending a site is to give access to backups, anyway:

at 2:32am (just 2 and a halfhours after) 18/8/2004 you wrote me:

Originally Posted by GatorBrent (from email to me)

Please backup all sites within the hour we tried working with you but this is beyond acceptable.

that does not make much sense to me but the I interpreted as a reasonable "make a backup of all you sites". So I was expecting a possibilty to make or have these backups.

Having seen that I had no possibility of making backups nor I was receiving any I wrote an email about backups:

Originally Posted by Me (from email to sales)

It's hours I can't even access our CPanel to make a full backup of our site. It seems CPanel and WHM access is down for all sites on server (no answer on ports 2083 and 2087)

As a reply I was told to write to lyron, that I did but with no reply.

On 20/8/2004 17:56 (almost 48 hours after site suspension!) I wrote to support trying to solicit a procedure that sould take minutes to complete.

On 20/8/2004 18:33 you replied to me

Originally Posted by GatorBrent (from email to Me)

You should have a backup shortly

So you see that when I received you reply I had ben waiting this backup for almost 48 hours.

As I've finally received my backup today 21/8/2004 at 19:51 your "shortly" meant more than 24 hours!!

Here below this thread you can find a person complaining for a 15 hours delay to have a backup. It would have been a paradise to me 15 hours...


These are my comments to the other things you said:

Originally Posted by GatorBrent

Since the 3rd when we first suspended you you've been fighting with us claiming your site can't be the reason. You talked us into unsuspending you a few times each time we did the server had more problems. The server has now been stable for over 24 hours without a single problem after having issues for weeks / multiple down times.

We tell you we gave you all the information and all you can do is demand we give you more information or unsuspend.

This is completely false. I've never told you "give me more information or unsuspend". I've just always said you should invetisgate further on the problem because the information you had and your diagnonsis was (and still is) very vague and unclear. As I know I'm not intentionally crashing the system and I've been using this scripts in many other environments without any problem I though (and think) it wasn't mine an my scripts direct responsability.

Originally Posted by GatorBrent

The server running smoothly after your account being suspended isn't enough proof for you.

This is very naif: obviously it's not a proof! If somebody is attacking my site this isn't my site responsability!!!

Originally Posted by GatorBrent

The cron job setup by you that ran the second the server crashed one of the times wasn't enough proof.

If you suspected this cron job (and I gave you infos about it as soon as I knew you suspected it!) you could just suspend this cron job and see if this ws the problem: this is a way to have a more precise diagnosis!

Originally Posted by GatorBrent

I don't know what you’re doing on your site but w/e it is it's causing your site to be the target of tons of attacks or you yourself are doing things to bring down the server in multiple fashions.

Would you realize that these are two very different things?
If one of your customer sites is under attack it's your responsability to protect it and to protect your server! also because the same attack could be brought to other sites in the future. If one of your customer is intentionally crashing your server you just kick him off.

Originally Posted by GatorBrent

You tell us because it *might not be you causing it and it could be bad people we should let everyone on the server have daily downtimes rather then kick you. I know if I had some plague driven virus given to me by terrorist group that had no cure and would wipe out humanity I wouldn't be saying to the world "you can't lock me in isolation because the terrorists gave me the virus. It's not fair let me Rome the world killing everyone"

You keep inventing sentences that I would never say and that I've never said! You should learn to read and to argue honestly without inventing what you think other people have said.

If you suspected my site had to do with jeep problems you did the right thing suspending it, I did not protest for the suspension but for the accuses of being somebody that intentionally was crashing the server and for the refuse to investigate further (see above).

Originally Posted by GatorBrent

Any negative post you make about us will be moved to this thread you started. Since you like to email the same message to multiple HostGator email addresses, as well as post the same negative comment all over the forum.

I see no reason for this, this thread is about your incredible delay in providing me with backup for my site. I'd like to discuss better the whole problem of my site suspension in a separate thread because there is much more to say than this, ufortunately.

Originally Posted by GatorBrent

What's unfair is that our customers lost $1000's in business, lost emails, hostgator reputation was damaged, countless hours of our time spent on this issue and much much more.

This is ridicoulous. Any damage to your server and to your customer bussines (and I AM ONE OF YOUR CUSTOMER) is to be accounted to who is managing the server or to the possible attackers. Unless you think I was the one damaging the server intentionally, that is not.

Originally Posted by GatorBrent

What do you suggest we should do? If you have a solution that is plausible we will do it.

These are the steps to take

Suspend the site.
Investigate on the problem.
Have a precise diagnosis.
If the problem is a malicious site script kick off the owner
If the problem is a non malicious site script warn the owner and erase the script and unsuspend the site
If the problem is somebody attacking in any way the customer site take actions against the attacker (and not against the customer!!!!) and unsuspend the site

You stopped at the first step.
This is very unprofessional.

[GatorBrent]

We did everything we could for the last month on this investigating, blocking attacks etc. Over a 100 hours of ours has been put into this. We aren't making any progress at all the problem has only magnified. Surely you can understand we've done everything in our power, and it was only getting worse. You can be mad at us for not solving it, but not for putting a 110% effort into this as we did. If you had an idea of how many nights of sleep half of the employees of hg lost over this you might be a little more understanding. I myself got out of bed over a dozen times in the middle of the night to check on jeep, monitor processes, get services back online, and investigate.

If you get a dedicated server we will be happy to work with you more on it, but we just can't allow any more downtime to the sites on jeep.

[oblomov]

If you say you've spent a lot of time trying to fix this problem I cannot but believe you but you see, that just shift the problem a little further.

After having claimed I was an evil hacker, and that my scripts were crashing jeep now you just say you don't know what this problem is about. It would have been more honest to say to me from the beginning "we don't know what it's going on but somehow it looks it has to do with your site so we are suspending it" this is something different from the accuses you made by mail and in some posts on the forum.
I also remind you that if "it has to do with my site" but it's not "caused by my site", meaning it's an external attack or something like that it's your responsability to protect my site and your server, even taking legal actions against attackers.

Moreover, you said it's weeks this thing has been going on and you said it's 100s hours of hg employees time, fine but what attempt have been made in these weeks?

Again: what should we do? well this is what you haven't done for sure:

1) In some other posts (and by mail) you claimed the cause was one cron job of my site, fine: you could have wrtten me one of these weeks asking me information about it and suspending the cron job, not the entire site, to see if that was the problem.

2) You could have written me telling me that you were suspecting some of my script was consuming too much resources and then disable php support from my site instead of suspending the entire site.

Obviously I would not have been happy for this but it would have been better than to have ALL MY SITES (and not just the suspected one!) suspended and ABOVE ALL this would have been an attempt to understand where it really was the problem.
You should know that until you don't exactly spot a problem on a server this problem can arise again in the future, you just don't know why and where because you don't know what's the problem and it may have to do with my site as mush it has to do with your server.

I should add that there are other posts on the forum where hg claims the recent problems on jeep where caused not by my site but by spammers and by people giving publicly accessible CPanel demo accounts.

This offer of getting a dedicated server was made to me about a month ago from sales claiming my site was having a incredibly high number of hits.

Originally Posted by Mail from support

Your site was doing 20 apache requests a second. That is extremely high and crashing the server. If we hadn't suspended all your sites would still be down and we'd be getting heat from you and the rest of sites on the server.

Bandwidth and disk space don't matter . It's cpu and ram usage caused from extreme amount of hits. You aware of how many hits a day this site is getting?

Well no, I did not know but it looked strange to me to have so many requests. At that time I said well fine, maybe my site is having a incredibre visitors raise so I went to see yours (YOURS!) stats... unfortunately they clearly showed that even during peak hours in peak days the number of hits was about 1/10 of what sales told me! I protested for this and after a few mail support answered me that I was right and that the problem was elsewhere, my site was mailbombed.


Obviously I can't get a dedicated server for a problem you can't solve especially with this kind of support and attitude toward customers. At the moment the site (http://www.vagabondo.net) is hosted on a different server. It's a server with good bandwidth but with poor hardware (just a normal athlon XP 2600 1Gb RAM and IDE disk, no RAID). The server hosts about 200 sites and 4000 mail accounts, and it uses the same cron job I was using to provide stats for many of these sites. After more than 12 hours it has not had any problem, I'll let you know.

As a last thing: being a sysadmin is a difficult job. I've been a sysadm for years, had my lost night of sleep and all kind of problems that can happen managing servers. This is just what the job is about: making servers works, it is a difficult and sometime frustrating job but you can't blame cusotmers for this unless you know for sure that somebody has done something intentionally to damage a server (in that case you are not facing a customer, you are facing a criminal and you should report it to the authorities in charge for this type of crime in your country).

Yesterday was a tiring workday for me but I had to stay up until 2:30am in order to reestablish my site full funcionality, this is due to hostgator service.

[GatorBrent]

I give up ........

Feel free to assume we did nothing, and were a horrible host. Amazingly since suspending your site the problems on jeep have stopped. Were now on day 3 of no outages. But then again we could be making everything up for kicks. We love when servers go offline, we love losing business, we love being yelled at by 50+ people on the phone every single outage.

We told you multiple times we weren't reallly sure. That wasn't acceptable answer then and we just told you again and it's still not an acceptable answer. There's nothing more we can do other then offer you a month refund and let you cancel your account.

[oblomov]

I don't think you did nothing (as I already said in my previous post) I just think you have been doing the wrong things. This should have been clear by reading my previous post.

I don't like flames, I don't like fights, I don't like spending my time writing long posts quoting from your previous posts and emails I'm doing this because when I claim somebody has been having an unprofessional and unfair behaviour I think I must support this with facts as much as I can as it is a strong claim.

You give up without having answered any of my comments and questions I made on this and previous posts, just because you don't have an answer you just try to find an escape by attributing me things I've never said.

It is now almost 24 hours my site is hosted on a new server without giving the slightest problem. I'll keep you informed about it.