Monday, December 31, 2007
Happy New Year from Webmaster Sagas
Here's wishing you all a Happy and Prosperous 2008!! Hope that the new year brings you every good thing that you wish for yourself.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
The HastyHost Holiday Saga - Finis
So when we left off last night just after midnight my websites were still down and HastyHost still had not responded to my ticket. They finally did, nothing useful, just a lot of the same kind of talk.
Finally, when I woke up this morning my websites were all up and working, with a message from HastyHost stating:
Fantastic! We screwed you over and made you wait, so everything is fine now, but make sure fast! before we get rid of all your precious files. Never mind that we just inconvenienced you really badly, in addition we won't do you the courtesy of giving you enough time to make sure everything has been transferred over. What a way to treat your customers huh?
Anyway, I hope all is well now and I'm hoping I don't have to revisit this anymore. I have learned some valuable lessons though, and I will be sharing them in this blog.
As for HastyHost... what more can I say?
Finally, when I woke up this morning my websites were all up and working, with a message from HastyHost stating:
The MySQL Databases have been restored. Please check your account to make sure they are working properply. If not, please open a support ticket at: http://www.hastyhost.com/create/
Please check as soon as possible as the old server will no longer be available much longer.
Fantastic! We screwed you over and made you wait, so everything is fine now, but make sure fast! before we get rid of all your precious files. Never mind that we just inconvenienced you really badly, in addition we won't do you the courtesy of giving you enough time to make sure everything has been transferred over. What a way to treat your customers huh?
Anyway, I hope all is well now and I'm hoping I don't have to revisit this anymore. I have learned some valuable lessons though, and I will be sharing them in this blog.
As for HastyHost... what more can I say?
The HastyHost Holiday Saga Part 4
As you can see from the last screenshot, that ticket is still open, and has not been assigned to anyone, even though I made it a high priority ticket. It's been almost 3 hours.
And yes, I understand that it's the weekend, and it's late at night, but if you had a hosting company, and knew your clients were without access to their websites because of something going on at your end, wouldn't you and your support team stay online to talk to and reassure your customers?
I guess what they say is true, you get what you pay for. But for a company that's trying to please it's customers and lure them to buy bigger better more expensive things, and bring in more business, this should not be an excuse.
I am sorely disappointed, but I am hoping for the best, for my websites to get back online and for Hasty Host to take responsibility and stop trying to cop out by saying that they have no control over the server after the fact.
I will keep you updated, and will be back with more webmaster sagas. I do have some, really, this blog was not started just to talk about HastyHost, or else I would have called it "Why Hasty Host Sucks."
And yes, I understand that it's the weekend, and it's late at night, but if you had a hosting company, and knew your clients were without access to their websites because of something going on at your end, wouldn't you and your support team stay online to talk to and reassure your customers?
I guess what they say is true, you get what you pay for. But for a company that's trying to please it's customers and lure them to buy bigger better more expensive things, and bring in more business, this should not be an excuse.
I am sorely disappointed, but I am hoping for the best, for my websites to get back online and for Hasty Host to take responsibility and stop trying to cop out by saying that they have no control over the server after the fact.
I will keep you updated, and will be back with more webmaster sagas. I do have some, really, this blog was not started just to talk about HastyHost, or else I would have called it "Why Hasty Host Sucks."
The HastyHost Holiday Saga Part 3
So up to this point I have opened a support ticket and vented my frustration at the timing and lack of sense (in my opinion) of this migration. Robert was quick to respond and let me know that he had no control over what happened on that server, because it was a reseller account.
Now how is this my problem??? I know I paid HastyHost for hosting, no one else, so ofcourse I hold HastyHost responsible if anything happens. Anyway, I decided to wait and see what happened, and to be patient and accept that I was going to lose some business in the process. I know doing business is not easy, but I thought that that response was a cop-out and a refusal to accept responsibility. Had he told me when I purchased the account that he was not in full control of the server I may have rethought putting some of my more important and critical websites on that plan.
Nonetheless, today, December 29, 2007 at 11:49am, I receive an email stating that there is a problem with mySQL databases, and that it will take 2-5 hours to get all of them restored.
Sure enough, I check and this time all my sites that are on databases are showing the ugly Wordpress Database Error page, or the PHPNuke error page, or just a random database could not be found error! How annoying!
By this time I am so pissed off a little more anger is something I feel I can handle, at least for another 5 hours, so I wait, and wait, and wait, and wait... for 9 long hours of hitting refresh, clear cache, refresh, etc. At this point I am past pissed off, so I send off another support ticket, since my first one was closed.
As you can tell, I am NOT happy with Hasty Host.
Now how is this my problem??? I know I paid HastyHost for hosting, no one else, so ofcourse I hold HastyHost responsible if anything happens. Anyway, I decided to wait and see what happened, and to be patient and accept that I was going to lose some business in the process. I know doing business is not easy, but I thought that that response was a cop-out and a refusal to accept responsibility. Had he told me when I purchased the account that he was not in full control of the server I may have rethought putting some of my more important and critical websites on that plan.
Nonetheless, today, December 29, 2007 at 11:49am, I receive an email stating that there is a problem with mySQL databases, and that it will take 2-5 hours to get all of them restored.
Sure enough, I check and this time all my sites that are on databases are showing the ugly Wordpress Database Error page, or the PHPNuke error page, or just a random database could not be found error! How annoying!
By this time I am so pissed off a little more anger is something I feel I can handle, at least for another 5 hours, so I wait, and wait, and wait, and wait... for 9 long hours of hitting refresh, clear cache, refresh, etc. At this point I am past pissed off, so I send off another support ticket, since my first one was closed.
As you can tell, I am NOT happy with Hasty Host.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
The HastyHost Holiday Saga Part 2
So I had received a message from HastyHost that they would be migrating my account to a new server, but they didn't know if there would be any downtime or when it would be. That was on December 13,2007.
Fastforward to December 27, 2007, and I get an email from HastyHost saying that the migration is now complete, and that I should log into cpanel and make sure all is well. I log into cpanel, everything seems to be okay, except that none of my sites are loading and I cannot open my email accounts.
I shoot off a quick email to support and in response I get an email that says don't write to us, open a support ticket. Oh, and by the way, nameservers take up to 48 hours to set correctly, so wait until 48 hours are over and then send us a ticket. Here is that email:
Ofcourse, I was more than a little perturbed. It's the holidays, people are visiting websites to find deals and information, and you tell me, without any warning, that I will not be able to access my websites for another 48 hours, dead in the middle of the holidays?? I was not amused. So I opened a ticket:
Part 3 will follow shortly.
Fastforward to December 27, 2007, and I get an email from HastyHost saying that the migration is now complete, and that I should log into cpanel and make sure all is well. I log into cpanel, everything seems to be okay, except that none of my sites are loading and I cannot open my email accounts.
I shoot off a quick email to support and in response I get an email that says don't write to us, open a support ticket. Oh, and by the way, nameservers take up to 48 hours to set correctly, so wait until 48 hours are over and then send us a ticket. Here is that email:
Ofcourse, I was more than a little perturbed. It's the holidays, people are visiting websites to find deals and information, and you tell me, without any warning, that I will not be able to access my websites for another 48 hours, dead in the middle of the holidays?? I was not amused. So I opened a ticket:
Part 3 will follow shortly.
The HastyHost Holiday Saga Part 1
As I mentioned, the inspiration for this blog came from an experience I am going through with one of my hosts, HastyHost. I really am not in the mood to give them a link right now, so you can google them if you want to.
Picture this, I have twelve websites sitting in a hosting account, and just around Christmas, they all go down! ALL of them.
I created this account with them about 6 months ago after they ran a special ad on the Digital Point forums offering an unlimited account for $20 a year. It looked too good to be true, but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I signed on.
Everything was nice and dandy for a while, and the admin, Robert, was very friendly, responding to emails fast and resolving any and all issues. It was great! Unlimited, fast, good support, what more could I ask for.
A few days ago, HastyHost informed all clients that it would be performing a server migration. I emailed and asked if there would be any downtime, when it would occur, etc, so that I could prepare my websites to be offline, or redirect to another hosting account that I have to avoid losing visitors and revenue. The response I got: "We don't know." Here's the email communication from that encounter: (Click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image).
Part 2 coming next.
Picture this, I have twelve websites sitting in a hosting account, and just around Christmas, they all go down! ALL of them.
I created this account with them about 6 months ago after they ran a special ad on the Digital Point forums offering an unlimited account for $20 a year. It looked too good to be true, but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I signed on.
Everything was nice and dandy for a while, and the admin, Robert, was very friendly, responding to emails fast and resolving any and all issues. It was great! Unlimited, fast, good support, what more could I ask for.
A few days ago, HastyHost informed all clients that it would be performing a server migration. I emailed and asked if there would be any downtime, when it would occur, etc, so that I could prepare my websites to be offline, or redirect to another hosting account that I have to avoid losing visitors and revenue. The response I got: "We don't know." Here's the email communication from that encounter: (Click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image).
Part 2 coming next.
Welcome to Webmaster Sagas
After being a webmaster for a few years now, I have been through quite a few interesting experiences, some positive, some negative, and some simply unexplainable. And I have a feeling I'll go through many more. Actually, I'm going through one right now, as we speak, and this was the inspiration for starting up this blog.
I will be talking about different experiences I have as a webmaster, and will be inviting other webmasters to tell their stories here about their experiences with hosting, domain names, domain registrations, clients, webmastering, and anything else.
If you would like to contribute something, a story, an anecdote, a review, etc., please feel free to contact me.
I will be talking about different experiences I have as a webmaster, and will be inviting other webmasters to tell their stories here about their experiences with hosting, domain names, domain registrations, clients, webmastering, and anything else.
If you would like to contribute something, a story, an anecdote, a review, etc., please feel free to contact me.
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