Affordable Host: Can't afford them anymore

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Posted by Digital-Exposure, 04-12-2005, 09:23 AM
Ok so I don't like whining customers and I'm not a big fan of the kiss and tell posts. I will try to be as factual as possible. About 8 months ago I signed up with Hometown hosting, Greg seemed like a good guy and I got a great deal on a reseller account. We had a few email issues that "sort off" got fixed, mostly email related. One problem never got fixed: the catchall email for several domains didn't work, I had to set a new one and that did work. HTH was a pretty decent host with a lot of beginner problems. After a few months of tiny problems like the server dropping offline, email not working etc. I had no more paying customers left. But Affordable Host bought them so I figured lets stick around and see. All HTH customers got an emergency email stating they had to move THIS WEEK due to ISP problems. So I made sure we pointed all domains to their DNS server. Checked with support to make sure and was ready for the move. I figured I'll wait for the move to set up new customers. I had spend some time and cash on promotion figuring this new server deal would be more reliable, even got some of the old customers to come back. After a week of no news I figured we must have moved, but nope. "We will let you know" was the answer, a bit odd considering the emergency email. About a month later we finally moved, shame my prospects also moved... to another host 2 weeks before. Oh well my fault why trust emergency emails right? Bit unprofessional sending out such a panic email with no follow up to tell us whats going on. I met a few of the other resellers in the chat. All wondering what was up becaus they also waited for the new server before setting up new customers. I ended up on the callisto drama... sorry I mean server. This box has been a nightmare from day one: Services failing left and right, every account on a single IP causing major traffic jams and not a single week without a major fallout. I have included one of MANY screencaps of the service status page in cpanel. I have over 30 similar screencaps take the past 4 months. all showing the same thing: disks filled up and usually one or two services failed. So all my big plans of expainding and getting a couple more accounts on AH vanished simply because of their attitude. I don't mind services failing as long as it gets fixed. Sure I can understand support being busy and not taking any time to give you a real answer, just as long as things get fixed. But I do no accept it when: I send a trouble ticket letting them know the email server had died and 8 hours later they let me know "we look into it" MySQL dies and they tell me nothing, I host mainly php/mysql portal sites so you can imagine the flames I got from my customers. All domains vanish, must have been a DNS problem, they BS me and say "you don't use our DNS so we don't know what happened" I checked my setup a month before with Tina and it was setup exactly as it should be. There has not been a week witout domains dropping offline, email servers dying and major warnings on the services page. About 2 moths ago I moved my paying customers to hostingzoom and it has been heaven compared to that callisto crap from affordable host. To be honest I think AH suffers from the same problem HTH did: a dedicated ego driven motor called Tina that keeps things running but does not take critisism very well. And definately does NOT want ot explain to you what is actually going on. (the 20 or so non answers from support prove that I'm afraid) Perhaps there are some major setting problems inherited from my HTH Cpanel setup, who knows, but the fact nobody wants to figure any of it out, the drives keep filling up all the way to 100%!!! And the server I constantly at 50% all the way up to 120% server load (when I look) says a lot to me. My guess is this callisto server is giving them headaches as well and the real problem is: they pretend everything is normal, it is becoming harder and harder to be nice and polite to people who will do everything to suggest the fault must be with you. When my time is up I will gladly show them how well I groomed my middle finger and move everything to hostingzoom. Reading up on all the blah blah "8 years in business etc. 1000s of customers..." I figured they would be pro's: Perhaps they are but I have yet to see evidence for this being anything other then a bunch of kids with a hobby project. Attached Thumbnails Last edited by Digital-Exposure; 04-12-2005 at 09:32 AM.
Posted by UH-Matt, 04-12-2005, 09:35 AM
Looks like their going to run out of diskspace on that box too soon
Posted by The3bl, 04-12-2005, 09:40 AM
Going too Looks to me like they already did Cpanel starts doing flip outs at 85% on /usr or /var
Posted by Digital-Exposure, 04-12-2005, 09:56 AM
Oh they did several times, /Var was at 100% at least 3x I know off in Januari. I even told them on the live Chat but it took about a day before someone cleaned it up. It was always the same routine: Server slows down, I check the Cpanel stats and found services failed and disks full. After dropping into the chat and warning them about this for the 10th time I gave up and got another account somewhere else.
Posted by VanHost, 04-12-2005, 11:59 AM
WOW...that's all I can say. That's a bit extreme use on the server. Sorry to hear about your issues, and glad to hear you've found "heaven" in the industry. It does exist Give us a follow-up post in a couple months and let us know how HostingZoom is holding up when measured to your standards of hosting.
Posted by Digital-Exposure, 04-12-2005, 01:02 PM
Good idea, need to move a heavy load site to the new account, when thats done I have a nice way to compare the two. Not trying to twist the knife I put in the back of AH but... here is a screencap taken 5 minutes ago, this has been the state of the server for the past two days. I don't now what they are thinking, whatever it is it must be a secret or they just don't like to tell me On a lighter note: I did end up with HTH/AH because they got some nice reviews. Considering this has been going on for four months now makes me think they are drowning in their own succes at the moment. Attached Thumbnails
Posted by Tina J, 04-12-2005, 01:25 PM
Callisto has always been problematic, mainly due to some pre-existing issues that we couldn't fix without cutting off services that existing HTH customers were used to. Of course, any kind of downtime or outages is not something anyone wants, but its been a bit of a 'lesser of the two evils' kind of thing. Whichever way we go with that is going to make some people unhappy, regrettably. The current issue, has already been addressed elsewhere. But, to recap with a copy/paste: Starting approximately 48 hours ago, 6 of our servers' email processes are being maliciously targetted. Almost every account on these servers are being "Joe Jobbed". This means that someone is sending out 100s of 1000s of emails NOT from our network, but using our customers' email addresses as the return address. All bounced emails will then be returned to our customers. They are also hitting our SMTP servers with an attack. The fallout is, our customers' email and diskspace quotas are filling up and legitimate email cannot get through. Also, because of the humongous amount of bounced emails that are being processed, the servers are having a hard time keeping up and are running noticably slower. Outgoing SMTP connections are also having trouble because of the server load and many users are getting "too busy" erros when trying to send email. We are actively working to clean up this mess and we hope to have things back to normal soon. This is a deliberate and very malicious attempt to harm these servers and alot of innocent people are suffering because of it. I will never understand the mentality of people who feel justified in hurting so many other people.
Posted by UH-Matt, 04-12-2005, 01:31 PM
How did the attacker find out 6 server's worth of email addresses?
Posted by Tina J, 04-12-2005, 01:35 PM
They didn't. They find out the domain name and generate random email addresses. Surely, you know how a Joe Job works? --Tina
Posted by UH-Matt, 04-12-2005, 01:36 PM
No I dont... I dont get very involved with servers, but feel for ya!
Posted by Tina J, 04-12-2005, 01:40 PM
Ugh. Thanks for the kind words...I'll take all I can get right now! Malicious people will never understand how many people's lives they affect with server attacks. --Tina
Posted by ReasonSinger, 04-12-2005, 01:44 PM
I'm intimately familiar with how joe jobs work, and from my vantage, this seems like a rather incredible claim. I'm not saying it isn't true, but it would be a very rare event that almost every domain across six servers would be used in the commision of a joe job, and it's a stretch for me to believe that is the case. Considering that spammers do in fact tend to pick domains at random, picking a lot of domains from a single service provider at the volume claimed tells me that if what you say is true, Tina, someone has managed to access server level files in order to place those domains into the joe job mailings.
Posted by Tina J, 04-12-2005, 01:54 PM
This isn't about spamming or the normal Joe Job. Its about deliberately trying to take down the servers. Its not hard to take publicly accessible information and figure out a pretty good list of domains hosted on each server and then generate random email addresses for them. There is no access to "server level files" needed. Most of the customers on these servers are getting 1000s and 1000s of bounced emails and anyone on those servers can surely verify this information to substantiate this fact. People who do these things are no better than vandals who smash a brick through a store window and grab merchandise. --Tina
Posted by ReasonSinger, 04-12-2005, 02:06 PM
Yes, anyone who commits network abuse is no better than a street thug. But sorry, I'm just not seeing this. I can think of a dozen easier and more effective ways to target a server than through the commission of a joe job, all of which would render the server virtually unusable. Figuring out a "pretty good list of domains hosted on each server" using information available to the public is simple enough as well, but why go to all that trouble just to take out some servers? Why would a spammer pay for gold access to whois.sc just for this, and why would any service provider still allow whois.sc to query their nameservers? Why these servers? Why only six? I'd also think there would be reports in NANAE for domains hosted by you, since they would be mentioned in the headers, and haven't really found anything so far. Again, Im not saying it isn't true, but I am saying it really stretches credibility to believe that even a spammer, stupid as they are, would be this involved in picking all these domains from one service provider. That would involve actual work, you see, and we all know spammers hate to work at anything.
Posted by Tina J, 04-12-2005, 02:17 PM
Any other reason why only 6 of our servers would suddenly be subject to massive Joe Job attacks? They definitely aren't compromised and, using your logic, why only 6 of them if it is a compromise? Since all of our servers are configured exactly alike, why not compromise all of them? Why list them @ NANAE when they are Joe Jobbed emails...no one is stupid enough to list a forged replyto email, as far as I know. At least in all of my years of experience, I've never seen a Joe Jobbed email listed with NANAE. I'm willing to hear your ideas, but the obvious really seems like its the correct answer. I can't imagine why someone would Joe Job 6 machines at such a malicious and deliberate level unless it was for the purpose of taking out the server. --Tina
Posted by Digital-Exposure, 04-12-2005, 03:41 PM
The current Joe job does not explain the mediocre support, the BS'n me and why the server keeps failing. It might explain the current situation "a bit" It tells me this: You did not solve the HTH problems in 4 months and a customer needs to go on wht to get an explenation after asking for one to many times on the chat. Before the move we where told that accounts can now be on any server when the DNS is set properly, because your DNS will sort it out. If you ask me this means you could have moved accounts off callisto months ago and fix the problem. Instead of spreading accounts over different IP's on this horrible box. It also does not explain why you let it ride out all its harddisk space, time and time again. Not just for a couple of hours but days, up to 10 days at one time. I know what the amount of free space was when my account was setup on that server and it was passed any safe limit I would use. Personally I would have asked my ISP for a spare server, perhaps rent one for a month. Solve the issues and get on with it because AH used to be a pretty good name, now al sorts of s... starts floating to the top and it does not smell nice. When my time comes I'll be high and dry somewhere else and not even because of the server issues but simply because you and your staff always try to BS their way out of any resposebility. Your resposible for the servers, nobody else, I took a reseller account because i just wanted to deal with the customers and build sites, not keep up with the latest hacks. (hosted on my own RH and freeBSD boxs for 8 years) "due to some pre-existing issues that we couldn't fix" Who gives a ...?? When my customers run off because you can't handle your own servers I will go somewhere else, its that simple. In four months this disk space and CPU load problem was never solved, I don't think there is any excuse for that whatsoever. Anyway, good luck getting callisto sorted.
Posted by Tina J, 04-12-2005, 03:47 PM
From a customer's point of view I understand your frustration over the Callisto server. I really do. --Tina
Posted by Tina J, 04-12-2005, 03:54 PM
Just wanted to make sure that my quotes weren't taken out of context. "due to some pre-existing issues that we couldn't fix without cutting off services that existing HTH customers were used to" --Tina
Posted by PTNHosting, 04-12-2005, 04:04 PM
I Understand the situation, and it is very dificult to resolve that. Hope that that stops soon.
Posted by Tina J, 04-12-2005, 04:08 PM
Thank you! We're finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel. What a clean-up job this is. I wish it was actually worth it to track down those who do these sorts of things. --Tina
Posted by CD Burnt, 04-12-2005, 05:17 PM
I can confirm some joe-jobbing at one of my domains I have parked on an AH reseller. I have defaults set on my parked domains, to forward to a gmail account. over a few hours, over 6,000 spams accumulated. After some testing, I have two interesting conclusions: 1) the spam source is dynamic. adaptation to a target domain dns change (CNAME) began within three minutes. 2) the spam source can get over 50% of its (forwarded) spam past the gmail spam-filter, and into a gmail inbox. maybe it's the forwarding that makes it so effective; that, I don't know. Last edited by CD Burnt; 04-12-2005 at 05:21 PM.
Posted by Tina J, 04-12-2005, 06:45 PM
Thanks CD Burnt - I appreciate you backing me up on this. I think we are actually starting to get a handle on it now. --Tina
Posted by The3bl, 04-13-2005, 01:20 AM
Tina why not install the dictionary EXIM ACL that will stop 99% of that mail from ever getting to your server and filling mail boxes. Heck even setting all the defaults to :fail: would stop over half of it from ever getting to the server.
Posted by Digital-Exposure, 04-13-2005, 08:19 AM
Ok so you know how to play the forum game: ignore the serious points and just spamm some non-information. So here are some facts: -My sites are down because your mysql server has died. -Var is maxxed out for the 10th time in 4 months. -The same services that died 2 days ago are still dead. -You never gave me a real answer, not here, not in the chat not through support tickets. -In januari I got a "this is not how we operate honestly" e-mail but so far nothing has changed. -Nobody ever apologised for this horrible service or even offered a refund of some sort. -I have paid you for services that have never been reliable, the way I see it: you owe me money. http://www.digital-exposure.com/wht/...13_04_2005.gif Last edited by Digital-Exposure; 04-13-2005 at 08:25 AM.
Posted by Tina J, 04-13-2005, 11:51 AM
The server would still have to process those requests, even setting it to fail or blackhole - which is the problem. --Tina
Posted by Tina J, 04-13-2005, 11:53 AM
I don't know the specifics of your account. If you put in a HelpDesk ticket, I can work something out with you. --Tina
Posted by matcollins, 04-13-2005, 01:06 PM
Hi All, I'm new to this forum but felt the need to vent my frustration with the callisto server on AH, seeing as there is nobody from AH to answer my queries. Probably because they're busy posting on this forum. Word of advice, try getting your own chat or message board working so your customers can have some form of 'human' contact and before you say it...I have submitted a support ticket...6 hours ago!!!. So this is the situation, 6 hours ago I noticed that my website was down due to a mysql error, submitted a ticket but heard nothing. The website in question earns my fiance around £50 per hour so the current cost to me is £300 and it's continually mounting up. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE Tina, if you're reading this, get me off that server!!! This is costing far too much in lost revenue and I'm seriously considering jumping ship. 6 hours downtime is pathetic!! Last month you gave me a free months hosting due to exactly the same issue and that was only for 2 hours offline. Keep this up and you'll be bankrupt. Matt
Posted by Tina J, 04-13-2005, 01:10 PM
Callisto is being attacked...bigtime - we are working through this as fast as humanly possible. Tickets are being answered as fast as possible as well. Even with our copy/paste answer of what is going on with the attack, the HelpDesk tickets are coming in faster than we can reply. --Tina
Posted by VanHost, 04-13-2005, 01:18 PM
After reading the thread here since yesterday, I must say that I am a little surprised at AH and Tina's actions on this one. It seems that the largest concern raised in this thread, isn't that the server is down (which is a concern on its own), but that AH is not responding to tickets to inform customers of what is happening. Not everyone knows about WHT, and yet, Tina appears to be able to respond to any replies within minutes. If you took that same diligence with your helpdesk tickets, you probably wouldn't need to defend yourself against bad publicity here. Just my 2 cents.
Posted by Tina J, 04-13-2005, 01:26 PM
This will be my last post at WHT. --Tina
Posted by matcollins, 04-13-2005, 01:27 PM
Exactly what I was thinking Vanhost. Tina, do you really think 6 hours is a short time to wait for a response, even if it is a copy and paste one? I really don't care about all the excuses and reasons callisto is down, it's happening far too often and I for one am sick of grovelling to my clients because you can't keep your servers online and secure. I'm guessing you've taken your own message board down because of all the bad press you're getting. Matt
Posted by ReasonSinger, 04-13-2005, 05:15 PM
As I said, personally, I'm not inclined to believe this. That's me, though. I don't believe I said anything about them being compromised. There is still a difference between a server being compromised and some random party being able to read particular system files. Servers may be configured exactly alike. Sites, though, are individualized based on what the users are running on them. Maybe a site on each server is running the same application that allowed someone to read files outside the user's home. Maybe it's something else. And yet, just because you have never seen them, they do in fact get posted quite often. Not to complain about the victim, but to point out to the powers that be who run RBLs the actual location the spam came from, in the form of headers. Headers which would, in fact, contain the joe jobbed domain, which would resolve to one of your servers. QED. I myself have just as hard time believing anyone would use joes as the basis for taking out servers since there are much easier ways to do this on a larger scale that would involve the entire network where your servers happen to be. But again, that's just me.
Posted by Tina J, 04-13-2005, 05:19 PM
Okay, looking for help here...any reason why 6 of our servers would suddenly become inundated with Joe Job activity? Even if you don't believe it was a deliberate attack against our servers...any insight to this issue would be appreciated. Would love to hear any ideas. We do seem to have it under control now, but we're still cleaning up and hoping the "attack" is done. --Tina (edit) I did just catch the part about compromised sites. I don't think that's it, but will take a look. (/edit)
Posted by ReasonSinger, 04-13-2005, 05:26 PM
Reasons for attacks against hosts. 1. Dislike of the host. Terminated any customers lately? Annoyed someone in the forums or newsgroups? 2. Dislike of a site or sites hosted by the host (although this would usually be directed at a single site OR the whole network). Any controversial sites on those servers? Any that have been in the news or that have had active flame wars erupt? 3. Compromised machines inside the network (outbound attacks). Since you say the traffic is inbound and not outbound, unlikely. I'm guessing you have looked at the MRTGs to determine this. 4. Compromised machines on other networks, with direction toward your servers. Unlikely in this instance if you say the joes are not coming from one place according to the headers. Of these four, the first two would be the best guesses based on the information you've provided so far.
Posted by Tina J, 04-13-2005, 05:29 PM
Ugh - you said you didn't believe it was a deliberate attack. At least I thought that's what you were saying. I'm confused. I'm not looking for reasons, I'm more or less asking if anyone has any ideas on what would soften the blow of something like this. I've already asked in the Security Forum. --Tina
Posted by ReasonSinger, 04-13-2005, 05:32 PM
You asked what could possibly cause you to see six servers worth of domains subjected to joes. I answered that. It doesn't change my opinion on the whole thing, but I am capable of seeing all sides. I'm just brainstorming for you.
Posted by Tina J, 04-13-2005, 05:35 PM
Okay, I understand. I guess I"m not asking what the opinion is of 'why' it happened...I was asking if others have experience or what they would suggest to help. Anyway, it seems to have quieted down at this point. We're still seeing alot of issues with users' accounts full, etc. - but the brunt of it seems to have passed. --Tina
Posted by Aussie Bob, 04-13-2005, 05:45 PM
If you're earning "£50 per hour" with that site, then you might want to consider a fully managed dedicated server, from someone like Rackspace.com. Look to pay around $500/mth - $750.00/mth, but for a site that earns "£50 per hour", that's what you really need, and not a shared hosting account. That shouldn't be a problem if you're making £36,000.00/mth from the site.
Posted by matcollins, 04-13-2005, 07:10 PM
When I said £50 per hour, I was talking about our peak time which is when the site went down for 7 hours. The site was down practically all afternoon (UK time). We don't get £50 of orders every hour for 24 hours! I should be so lucky to be earning £36,000 per month, if I was I sure as hell wouldn't be paying £3.50 a month for shared hosting. I am considering another host though, mayabe in the UK. Matt
Posted by UH-Matt, 04-13-2005, 07:24 PM
Tina, why not take down the mail service just to keep everyones websites online and sort out the disk usage and server load.
Posted by Tina J, 04-13-2005, 07:25 PM
We actually have it under control now. --Tina
Posted by UH-Matt, 04-13-2005, 07:27 PM
great to hear, im sure it will be a relief four our £36k/month mega-store!
Posted by Tina J, 04-13-2005, 07:30 PM
Nah, I think he's decided to move on. With all the Callisto issues he's been through, can't say I blame him. You win some, you (unfortunately) lose some. We'll just have to try harder next time. --Tina
Posted by Aussie Bob, 04-13-2005, 10:28 PM
Yep, happens to the best of hosts from time to time. We're all just human afterall.
Posted by matcollins, 04-14-2005, 05:08 AM
Where do you get £36,000 a month. Don't you read posts?? What relief is there?? Callisto is constantly going down, I'm just waiting for the next time. All this could easily be resolved by either moving my account off this box or actually fixing the problem with the box regardless of any features customers may like. Surely it's better to have our site online than miss a feature of the account. What is that feature by the way? Matt Last edited by matcollins; 04-14-2005 at 05:13 AM.
Posted by UH-Matt, 04-14-2005, 05:12 AM
So sorry, I should have ended my post with .
Posted by matcollins, 04-14-2005, 05:48 AM
bit too early in the day for sarcasm my friend. Especially with a nagging missus having a go at me for her website being down most of yesterday. I've tried telling her these things happen but my excuse is wearing thin now, all I get is "I never had this problem with yahpooo" Give me strength!!
Posted by UH-Matt, 04-14-2005, 05:50 AM
Yea I do realise this probably wasnt the best time to be sarcastic. All the best with the site.
Posted by matcollins, 04-14-2005, 05:57 AM
thanks m8. If they could only fix the issue once and for all with callisto, then I'd be a happy bunny. In the most part I've been happy with HTH/AH, not too sure about them removing all forms of communication except the ticket system though, but the support in the past has been top notch. Jacob for one has helped me on many occassions. However, Tinas comment about not winning them all has me a little disheartened, she's willing to let me go without a fight. Maybe this is a game plan, wait for all customers on callisto to bugger off before kicking callisto into touch . Did I say I was a conspiracy theorist??
Posted by Digital-Exposure, 04-14-2005, 09:36 AM
They cleaned up VAR so we have MySQL again but nothing has changed as far as I can see. The same services as 4 days ago are still dead, two disks are still maxxed out. We had the same problems in Januari, Februari and March. Now if this was a joe job they should have figured out a way to protect themselves against it. If its a server config problem they had 3 months to solve it. Maybe I am crazy but when my server was getting attacked and I could not get the sites up within 2 days I told my customers and gave them a choice to move to another server or get a refund and find another host. (the guys who hosted my Box had serious network problems they could not fix) This is how i ended up on HTH with the few customers that decided to move with me. Sadly none of them have stayed after months of bad service from both HTH and AH. I think it is pretty pathetic: here we are with reasonable complaints on WHT while the server slowly commits suicide over a 3!!! day period. The MySQL problem could have been avoided. As for refunds, well this is more a moral issue because money wise its not a lot, the money I lost because of their bad service is a lot more but nobody is going to refund business lost so its a non-issue. And Matt: how DARE you being sarcastic without proper notice! Attached Thumbnails
Posted by Tina J, 04-14-2005, 10:58 AM
1) spamd is running, 2) there is ample free diskspace in /home, although more would be ideal 3) the amount of free diskspace in / doesn't affect anything since there is nothing writable there. If you'd like to move to a different server, just let us know and we'll work with you to make sure there will be no conflicts with your existing account on Callisto and the new server. --Tina
Posted by keith70, 04-14-2005, 07:57 PM
Human after all...Very TRUE!!!
Posted by bqinternet, 04-16-2005, 10:48 PM
It sounds like there are a lot of of problems to fix on that certain server. Why not replace it with a new one?
Posted by matcollins, 04-20-2005, 05:43 AM
No wonder tina didn't give a damn about sorting out callisto. She's sold the company to dotcananda!!! Let's hope this lot have the sense to sort out the server.
Posted by Digital-Exposure, 04-20-2005, 06:02 AM
That was one of my first suggestions, they boast many servers, thousands of clients and told us when we moved our DNS that "your account can now be on ANY of our servers" in other words they could have moved people off spread it amongts the other servers. Actually I think we now know why we got so much evading bs instead of action: AH was just sold to dotcanada: one of Canada's fasting (?!?!) growing small and medium-sized business web hosting providers. http://www.affordablehost.com/news/news_dotcanada.html And tina thanks trying to help me 4 months 15 trouble tickets and 5 screams for help late. Its intresting to see how much influence a public forum like WHT has on hosts. If you don't mind I'll keep moving to hostingzoom. You can keep the money and just remember. If you share your server with customers you have to treat them as equals, not morons. Because if they are morons, why did you let them on your server in the first place? Anyway hope you can get a nice holiday in the sun out of this, I know none of this was done on purpose and your are just human, but being more honest to customers would have saved a lost of us hours of frustration. Buy yourself a nice long drink on me. Last edited by Digital-Exposure; 04-20-2005 at 06:09 AM.
Posted by Necroist, 04-20-2005, 09:18 PM
Am I the only othe person here who feels that Tina is avoiding the main issues at hand? I used to think AH was a good reliable host, but after reading the comments here and Tina's replies, I'm not too sure anymore. No matter what the issue is, every support ticket MUST be resolved as soon as the representative can. From what I'm reading, Tina is posting on this board faster than replying to her support tickets. Tina, perhaps you could look into your piorities first. My current host (whom posts here but I will not name) has been wonderful in providing a nice cheap server and relatively fast support time when I first signed up. Now, I'm getting a 6-9 hour lagtime before I receive an e-mail. And usually the e-mail is from some support guy who doesn't seem to know how to solve anything other than saying, "Thank you, our admin is looking into the issue" or "I've transferred this support ticket to _____ dept." Really. Come on, are there only one admin who's competent to reply to my questions? What's the point of hiring a redundant staff? Anyway, I digress.
Posted by friendship7, 04-21-2005, 11:46 PM
well that's the way, i felt, but i was told i was expecting the impossible. by the way, is a cpu load of 7.75 high? what does it mean that exim fails? is it bad for /var to be at 92%? just wondering, these are current stats on some accounts at AH.
Posted by okihost, 04-22-2005, 10:57 AM
A load that high means there are some very serious problems, it could be a wide variety of things but from what I have seen it has been like this for days and I would imagine your sites are barely crawling at this point. At the very minimum I would suggest asking to be moved to a new server as soon as you can and also possibly check the load on the server over a day or two before moving to make sure it is not the same case though that does not mean it can't be down the road if things are not managed. In defense of AH I know they were under some type of attack recently which again could be one reason the load is so high.
Posted by friendship7, 04-22-2005, 11:42 AM
i'm taking steps to move to another provider, actually. seems like the safest bet to me. the attack was supposed to have been over last week and we've had no notice about what's going on. now cpanel is broken and ftp doesn't work. it was a great host for a while. i'm outta there. the server load is now 17.35 (1cpu).
Posted by kelvinklay, 04-22-2005, 11:55 AM
there are couple of host online who are very fast, try them.
Posted by ultra.net, 04-23-2005, 03:26 AM
Have you never looked at a list of domains based on the IP of the server ? There are services around tracking millions of domains, and can list the domains server from a single IP address for you... so a list of domains off 1, 5, 50 IP addresses would be simple... $15 a month buys into that service... only need it for a month to get the first 2000 domains per IP (I have done no research, but that's what the service I use offers, when you jump from 'free' to 'paying' user), and choose a few hundred at random. I remember getting near 50,000 messages one morning... mailbox was around 400 MB (ISP said they had much lower limits, but hadn't suspended it or anything... perhaps their monitor ran nightly. Anyway, I got the advertisers to stop sending, but I felt a bit sorry for them, as the spammer had generated a pile of random addresses and sold them in a bigger mail list, so caused me a nuisance and sold them (either partial or total) rubbish.... then they got some of my wrath, threatening them for sending me unsolicited commercial mail... giving a request for $$$ per item if they sent me any more! Had instant attention, I can tell you
Posted by Digital-Exposure, 05-02-2005, 04:30 AM
After 2 weeks the Cpanel server status Page on the AH Cllisto drama server is available again. I guess they got tired of seeing screencaps of that page here on this forum and decided to break it until things got fixed on the server. I guess now we just wait until their new owner moves everything to another server and it all starts again.

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