Useless Support

[blanco]

Well I have probably not met with more ignorant and non-caring support personnel in a long time. Coming from support my self at a world wide software company I know what "very satsified customers" means and what should be done in order to help the customers.

In Hostgators case it seems they use the "give him the runaround and wear him out tactics".

Over the last couple of days our site has gone from completely down due to what some technicians said was a routine maintenance others said it was a bug in the MySql database, to intermitently not loading pages across all sites that we have in the account.

The first "server down" took 3-4 hours to solve and I'm still not sure what the real reason was as I got 3 different explanations.

After this incident, continously, our sites in the account experience the same problems in that we have to refresh the browser for the page to load. When we enter the http://www.xyzsite.com we can see the metatitles in the browser top and then the status bar at the bottom just displays "waiting for www.xyzsite.com...." and nothing more happens. Sometimes the page loads after 1 minute, sometime it doesn't load at all but after hitting F5 a couple of times the page loads. This is happening to wordpress sites, static sites with plain HTML/PHP files and to Joomla sites.
I have compared and discussed this with a friend who is also hosting with Hostgator and using the same type of website as us and he says he never experience this problem on his server.

The difference between our servers are the last 4 hops in a route to the server from where we are sitting and ofcourse the server itself.

Now for one week trying to solve this with Hostgator I have been given the runaround from 8 different technicians always asking the same questions and saying the same things:

• Repair and optimize your tables - 3 brand new installations of Worpress having this issue. No posts has been made...
• Check with your ISP - my friend and I use the same ISP and I have tried from another ISP, same problem for me but no problem for my friend and his site at hostgator.
• Uninstall some wordpress plugins - The problem is not only with wordpress but also with Joomla and static pages. Both front end and backend
• You have 3 party pictures and flash on your frontpage - Again this happens in the admin console for both Joomla and wordpress as well where no flash or 3rd party pictures exist
• Check with your ISP
• Your server was abused but solved now - Uh... NO!
• What is your login - provided
• We have tested your server from different locations - Yes but the problem does not occur 100% of the time. How many times have you tried loading our sites?
• I can't see you login details in the thread - Already provided
• Check with your ISP

Well this is how it goes on and I have asked to close the ticket as noone really seem to give a ****, but still I am asked for login details even though they are provided already and visible in the thread.

What annoys me the most is that there are always different support techs replying to your thread so it means you have to start all over everytime and they don't seem to care reading what has been said earlier in the thread.

I am moving!

[GatorBrent]

Hello,


What is your ticket number with us? I'm the owner of the company and will be able to very quickly get to the bottom of your problem. thanks!

[blanco]

Hi

CIN-3555263 - This was the first issue when our site was down for several hours and I got the information that it was resolved but it wasn't, it was ongoing routine maintenance and also that it was a bug in the MySQL library

GKM-3569037 - This is the thread where I explain that we are continously experienceing pages that do not load. The metatitle loads and is visible in the browser, but nothing is displayed in the browser's main window. Just "waiting....."

Just this morning when posting information to one of the WordPress blogs the "post function" timed out after I clicked the "post" button, which has never happened before. I was presented with a page saying something that the page wasn't saved (I should have made a screendump). I remember some technician saying he could see a lot of MySql threads timing out at one point...

The problem is mostly annoying as you are just sitting and waiting for pages to load and eventually you have to hit F5 to reload for the page to come up. I have not experienced this before and it does not occur for any other pages no matter where they are located. If this happened to all other sites I am visiting, I would be sure that it is an ISP problem.

A friend of mine is on the same ISP and has several sites with hostgator as well and he says he never experienced this problem. This leads me to think that the issue is with the last 4 hops in the route to the server where his server is and my server is or with our server that we are hosted on. The ISP is the same for both of us but only one of us see this problem... And I have tried from another ISP as well as we use different ISP at home compared to the office and it's the same thing. I do not experience this problem anywhere else than on our our websites.

Thanks for looking into it.

[GatorCarl]

Hi,

I looked over the ticket and have a couple of ideas that might help. From the ticket, it looks like we are not experiencing the same slowdowns or timeouts that you are. This makes is harder to troubleshoot the issue. I understand your frustrations and would like to get this resolved for you.

Can you please respond when you get a chance?

[blanco]

What do you need me to reply to?

The questions in the last post in the ticket I have already answered many times already, both in the ticket and also here in this forum post.

[GatorDHanna]

You should be receiving a response from Carl in ticket GKM-3569037 shortly.

[blanco]

Replied to last post

[blanco]

Well moved to a new server but still having issues.. Will move to a 3rd ISP to see if it helps.. which I doubt as we don't experience these problems with any other sites no matter where they are..

Further, out of the blue we got other problems with another of the sites in our account.. some URL resolving issues with regards to PHP includes... Took 48 hours before it was fixed. Ticket FGX-3984448 (and also happened before in ticket NJK-3423660)

Today our main site has been down for 8-10 hours with a "mis-set" IP..
Chat Id: 338720

How can that happen???
I really don't know what to say at this point...

I am far from impressed with the service...

[GatorDHanna]

I'm sorry to hear that you're still having trouble.

I'm escalating your issues to a senior administrator right now. You should be hearing from us shortly. I will also check out that chat and see what went wrong and follow up with the employees involved to ensure it does not happen again.

[GatorChris]

I looked at your ticket and based on the previous responses, it appears as if this particular issue was related to the issue that was recently corrected with the IP addresses listed in Apache.

The full URL includes were causing it to look at the old IP address to call these files. Looking back at your ticket history, the IP address was set incorrectly when the account was restored from a full cPanel backup. This is rare, but can sometimes happen with a full cPanel restore because it can set the old IP address the account was on before as the IP address on the new server.

I have clicked through your site and was unable to find anymore errors from a few different locations at this time. I also assigned both tickets to me. Please let us know if you notice any other problems.

[blanco]

STILL having issues.. The other day our site resolved to 174.132.169.2 but today it resovles to 174.132.169.9

4 out of 5 computers are showing the "welcome to cpanel" screen and 1 computer is able to access the real site.. as reported in ChatID: 342739 where the answer was to wait for an answer to the ticket. What is the Chat support for?

I don't know what is going on at this moment and I really have to say that I've just about had it with all this..

[GatorFord]

Originally Posted by blanco

STILL having issues.. The other day our site resolved to 174.132.169.2 but today it resovles to 174.132.169.9

4 out of 5 computers are showing the "welcome to cpanel" screen and 1 computer is able to access the real site.. as reported in ChatID: 342739 where the answer was to wait for an answer to the ticket. What is the Chat support for?

I don't know what is going on at this moment and I really have to say that I've just about had it with all this..

One of our other upper tier administrators has updated this with the reason for the IP change. It appears the IP was changed by our IP rotation script which helps to mitigate the problems caused for other clients when a large DDoS hits a server IP. I've lowered the DNS TTL, Refresh, Expire, and other values as low as I can possibly lower them so that DNS propagation occurs as quickly as possible. The issue with cPanel pages should be resolved as soon as the clients are resolving this to the correct IP.

I'm currently showing all the tickets you have open are On Hold. I'd like to work with you if you have any further issues. Please let us know if you still have any lingering or remaining issues that we can address. Thank you.

[blanco]

Well currently it looks ok, but so it has several times before and you never know when things will hit the fan..

I wonder how many hours of downtime we have had over the last 2 weeks and how many clients we have missed as a result of this..

I know you were trying to solve 1 problem, but that solution created several others resulting in several hours of downtime of our site.

And what's the reason to have a Chat support if they do not know anything and you still have to put everything into the ticket system? If they were able to solve something it would actually be good but do start a chat and get the reply to wait for the ticket just makes you more frustrated when there is a problem...

[GatorDHanna]

I appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to get these issues resolved. I'm glad to hear that things are working well. If you do notice any further problems, please let us know so we can address them.

Chat is designed to handle most of our lower level support issues. For customers with simple questions or concerns, chat can be extremely helpful. It provides an easy way to get quick answers and simple solutions.

However, more complicated issues usually do require the attention of a system administrator and subsequently, a ticket. You likely contact chat with more complicated issues than most of our customers, which is why chat technicians have to submit a ticket for you more than either you or us would like (we obviously want to be able to resolve your issue the first time you contact us).

[blanco]

Well, today all our sites were in crawling speed mode for a couple of hours.

I contact the chat support to see what was going on and got the reply that there were maintenance being made on my server and I could read about it in the forum (didn't take the name or chat id).

I didn't find anything in the forum so I posted a ticket (BBY-4759899) and got the reply that another user was abusing bandwidth..

So what was it? A security upgrade or bandwidth abuse by another user? Or both?

How come you always get different replies depending on who answer?

[GatorDHanna]

Sorry about the trouble. I asked a senior administrator to look into the ticket and he told me the slow downs were caused by another user abusing the server (the user was suspended). This is the correct version of what happened and I apologize for the confusion.

The person you spoke to over chat might have been confused about what happened or what server you were on. I apologize that you were given the wrong information and wish you had the name or chat ID so I could track down the chat and speak to the particular person you chatted with.

[blanco]

Well today it is the same thing again... sometimes pages takes 2 minutes to load.

We have even changed our ISP in order to rule that out.

Yesterday we got "out of memory" problems on one site for 30 minutes and then disappeared again..

New ticket: BBY-4759899

[GatorDHanna]

I just forwarded your ticket ID to a level three administrator and he replied to you with some additional information. It looks like there was a site with some remote includes that was resulting in some delays. If you have any other questions or concerns, feel free to reply to that ticket and we'll be happy to happy you out.

[GatorBrent]

Hello,

Did you get the pm's I sent you?

[blanco]

Yes I just read it...

Well we have been thru 3 ISPs here and the issue is still the same. The reply from support is that there is a problem with the route to our webserver and that it is out of Hostgator's control, but then again we don't have the problem from our 3 different ISPs to other sites hosted at Hostgator...confirmed by one of the webmasters as well.

You moved our account once to a new server, but still the same issues (though I never understood why we weren't moved to the same rack as the domain we said we don't have any problems with..).

So, 3 ISPs and 2 servers and still the same problem whereas the site we always compare with never have these issues with any of the ISPs we are testing from.

Anyway, from our perspective it's not acceptable. We can't work like this.. taking anything from 5-60 seconds for the (most often) backend to load up in the browser.. for me it doesn't matter if it loads in 3 seconds from the US because we are not in the US. For our US or European customers it doesn't matter what rack or datacenter we're in, but for us who are using the sites daily it makes everything take 200% longer than normal. Consider that in a years time..

Thanks
Robert

[blanco]

Here we go again..

During the weekend our account was suspended because we were on the wrong server according to billing department. We were not supposed to be on a reseller server and so our account was without any notice just simply suspended.... just like that.. it was just luck that I happened to go in during the weekend to check something that I discovered that it said "SUSPENDED"..

How can this happen? We were transferred on GatorBrents order 1 year ago... and then out of the blue we're suspended.. Don't you have any security checks, check with the client or something before taking such drastic measures...?

Further today, after 3-4 years of running the same website we're once again suspended for violating something. Again without notice we're shut down and have now been without our business critical website for 3-4 hours.

I open live chat who is as useless as ever just referring me to the ticket system. Our server is down and I have to use the ticket system and wait another hour for a reply from some technician who doesn't give a .... about our business... except for saying that you should optimize your site.
The same site we have been running for the last 3-4 years. A standars Joomla site with open-realty installed... I think that the Open-Realty and Joomla developers will be all over you when they read it...

This is it.. your support suck big time!

I am out of here!

[blanco]

After 6 hours all our sites are still down. Even all the addon domains that has nothing to do with anything...

This is just unacceptable and this was the last straw!
I will never ever recommend Hostgator to anyone!!!!

[GatorJosh]

Our security team has just replied to your last ticket.

I have also sent you an email with more details on this issue. Please respond to my email and I will make sure this gets resolved and is prevented from happening again

[blanco]

I'm moving to a new host tomorrow.
Already paid for!

[GatorDHanna]

I apologize for the problems you've experienced.

We're going to be reviewing your ticket with the security team and doing what we can to ensure this doesn't happen again (to you or to any other customer). As Josh said in your ticket that is open with us, please let us know if we can help you in any way.