a big mess up by site5 hosting

Update, I got the following reply from site5:

——————————–
Hi Tal,

This maintenance was only supposed to last an hour to two hours and unfortunately during the process a problem was found which is what caused the delay. It is also what the DNS zones for your addon domains to go to the wrong location which should be all fixed now.

Let me know if you have any questions, at the end of the month you can email [email protected] to request a credit for any downtime that goes over our guarantee,
Thanks, Ben
———————-
Ben Welch-bolen
CEO
Site5 LLC
https://www.site5.com

Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: SYH-692572
Department: Customer Retention
Priority: Normal
Status: Waiting on customer reply

I apologize Tal, it was not something we had planned, it went wrong and it took longer than we anticipated to fix.

thanks, Ben

Although this post is a month old…

@talgalili

These things happen sometimes. Seriously… you’d used them for a year without problems and then you encountered one little issue which they responded to, and explained to you, and offered you a refund and yet you’re dissing them? This could have happened with ANY host. Even if you were paying $100 a month instead of $7.95.

Hi thisisedie.
I want to separate between the technical problem and the support problem.

I will credit Ben for his great support, after he entered into the picture. But notice that to get to the point of knowing who to contact, I had to talk with 3 chat agents until to one of them gave me the contact info of someone who actually helped

Also, have a look at this discussion on lifehacker about hositng:
https://lifehacker.com/5124856/most-popular-reliable-and-affordable-web-hosts
One of the people their also comments how site5 was soled and resold and their support has been going downhill.

I hope I won’t have to go away from site5, since it is a headache to leave a hosting company. But I must confess that chasing support was not fun.

Time will tell if it was a one timer, or a general rule. and either way – it is worth reporting.

Cheers,
Tal

Oh, and thisisedie, one more thing:

This was not “one little issue” – all my sites where down for over 24 hours. where their landing page didn’t say “maintenance” but leaded to someone else’s website.
Some of them where “down” for over 48 hours.
They took their time in responding. and gave (public) promisses of time tables which they didn’t fulfill (which by itself is fine), and then they disapeared from the discussion board, rather then admitting and letting there clients know what is going on.

Also, I think that the price I pay for the hosting is not the point. I don’t choose a hosting that promisses 99.9% uptime, because otherwise I get a refund. I choose it because I want the uptime.

Perhaps you are right and they are fine. But I didn’t get a good taste from the entire experience.

I want to separate between the technical problem and the support problem.

My statement was based on what you said in your first 2 posts. You said nothing about not being able to get help from support. In fact you said after checking with site5 you found out they were upgrading apache which sounds like you WERE in contact with them about the issue. You didn’t say that you had to talk to 3 people before you received help, or that some of your sites were down for 48 hours, or any of the other stuff you just mentioned. ALL you said was that you’d been using site5 for a year without any problems and that that morning you’d encountered a problem. Then you posted an email from Ben explaining the situation which also stated the problem had been rectified. That to me does not indicate an end-of-the-world catastrophe or a reason to be hating on your host.

This was not “one little issue” – all my sites where down for over 24 hours.

Again — my statement was based on what you wrote in your first 2 posts. You didn’t say the sites were down for over 24 hours (because at the time you wrote the first post it had been LESS than 24 hours) or any of the other issues you mentioned in your LAST 2 posts. Had you followed up, or explained more in your first post, I’d have known. Sorry, my ESP was out of service when I read your complaint.

Perhaps you are right and they are fine.

I have no idea if they’re fine or not. I’d never even heard of them until I saw this thread.

Hi Tal,

You are getting some very bad information here. First off Site5 has been under the same owners since 1998 when it was first formed, myself and my business partner Joel bought Site5 October 22nd 2008. I’ve known the owners for a long time (Matt and Rod), and worked with them over the last three years. I also have been in the hosting industry for the last ten years and worked for a number of larger hosting companies.

Second, I don’t know what you mean about not able to get support, we have staff available 24/7 via our support desk which you can email or submit in BackStage. Live chat is also available but for level one issues and not something like this which is a unique problem that if submitted to our support desk would be escalated to an admin, especially if it was related to the migration we were doing at that time. I hope that makes sense. Our live chat should have told you and I apologize if they did not, they have been retrained quite a bit over the last 30 days. For further information I also recommend reading our Stage of Site5 post for Feb 1st (https://weblog.site5.com/articles/2009/02/01/state-of-site5-for-february-1st-2009/).

Also your sites were down was actually a DNS error, that happened to around 0.5% of those we migrated and I am very sorry for that! Unfortunately we had know way of knowing which sites were affected and we just needed you to make a ticket or email support and the fix would have taken 5 minutes. I apologize greatly for any issue you had, this migration was needed to get all our customers to our primary data center and new servers, full details of why we did this can be found here (https://weblog.site5.com/articles/2009/02/01/state-of-site5-for-february-1st-2009/).

They took their time in responding. and gave (public) promisses of time tables which they didn’t fulfill (which by itself is fine), and then they disapeared from the discussion board, rather then admitting and letting there clients know what is going on.

That is not true at all, we were on the forums and I was personally, if you look at my posts you will find I was online and working to help clients around 15 to 18 hours a day. We also pulled in additional staff to help with the increased load and to help check everything as best we could that we had not automated. Please let me know what you mean here as we were all over the forums and very active during this time.

Thanks, Ben

Dear thisisedie:
In my first post I reported the situation as it was. In the second one I gave an update about it – for people to have the knowledge that such things happen.
To be clear on two points:
1) if I was really mad at site5, I would have wrote the traditional “site5 sucks” which I noticed became a good trade mark of finding out if a hosting is being problematic(try “godaddy sucks” – and you’ll see what I mean)
2) It seems I was not exact. During the last year I DID have tickets and issues that have sprung in site5 hosting, but they where all not serious enough for me to report as “problems” but rather a normal hosting occurrences. so I felt fine with saying site5 had no problems (I should have added – no serious problems)

Now –
Dear benwb,
I wish to start by saying that all in all I am pleased with site5 performance. both as a hosting service and you’re support.

Regarding the information of the hosting ownership – I thank you for your clarifications, I believe you will update the people in lifehacker as well (a bigger place then this tinny thread ?? )

About “not able to get support”:
1) The 24/7 support desk – is fine, but they can take several hours to respond – and when a bunch of my websites are down, I feel that this is not a good enough response time.
2) Live chat support in the day of the problem, was not available. I was able to leave a massage.
The way I got to your help, was through sales.
And the reason I got to you, was after the third conversation I had, I thought of explaining the entire issue I had to the sales lady, as something that happened to me on my former hosting service, asking if site5 will not act the same. She said they wouldn’t, and then I explained that I was describing site5 to here – so please be so kind to give me direct e-mails. She was ??
I am glad to hear that they have been retrained quite a bit in the last 30 days…

“They took their time in responding. and gave (public) promisses of time tables which they didn’t fulfill (which by itself is fine), and then they disapeared from the discussion board, rather then admitting and letting there clients know what is going on.”
My memory claims I am saying the truth. The promise was for two hours, after longer then that (over half an hour over then that), nothing changed, and the next update, on the thread I was looking at, took several hours to get there. I also don’t remember seeing you on that thread, so I am not sure we are talking about the same thing.

In any case, the fact that you care enough to comment here and explain your side is admirable, and I am glad to see such willingness from your side in communicating with your clients (me, for that matter). This thread, even if we have some points to clarify, is all in all very reassuring to me.

And one final note, I still have in site5 a ticket “open” for about three months (!) regarding payments from affiliate money site5 owes me, and even that the system recognizes that I deserve the money, It doesn’t show in my balance.
I would like to see that “tiny” money issue resolved. If you are in power to help, I would be very happy for your help.
The ticket number is:
FPI-850625

Again, thank you for your responses – it means a lot in terms of my trust in site5 services.

Tal

Hi Tal,

Thanks! Yep I found those posts on LifeHacker and updated them as well, I missed that post actually as I read LH pretty dang often.

1) The 24/7 support desk – is fine, but they can take several hours to respond – and when a bunch of my websites are down, I feel that this is not a good enough response time.

Yep that should not be the case any more, our average response time for the last two months has been around 20 minutes and we have hired 5 new people in the last months. Also the issue with your problem was not server downtime as we have a totally separate team that handles server problems so the minute a server is down a alarm sounds and they come running. Your issues was a missing or corrupt DNS zone and I’m sorry it took so long to fix, if you can email me with the ticket ID to look over to [email protected].

2) Live chat support in the day of the problem, was not available. I was able to leave a massage.

During the migration we had a few times when live chat was full and then it gives a message option that goes to support. We have 1 to 2 operators on there so once they get up to 10 chats its not possible to do any more. This is rarely a problem though and only happens if there are some very big problems going on.

My memory claims I am saying the truth. The promise was for two hours, after longer then that (over half an hour over then that), nothing changed, and the next update, on the thread I was looking at, took several hours to get there. I also don’t remember seeing you on that thread, so I am not sure we are talking about the same thing.

If you can let me know on that as we don’t provide support over the forums so that is surprising. We did have a DNS problem that occurred which this sounds like where we fixed it, that update takes 30 to 60 minutes to go live usually but then it didn’t go through.

And one final note, I still have in site5 a ticket “open” for about three months (!) regarding payments from affiliate money site5 owes me, and even that the system recognizes that I deserve the money, It doesn’t show in my balance.

I checked FPI-850625 and Taylor last responded is why it is closed as he seems to have made a mistake and not set it to waiting a reply. I’ll open it back up. Please if you ever have an issue not getting a response email back on the ticket or email me.

Thanks, Ben