Dathorn's downtime

[BrandonBCF]

At first I was very happy with Dathorn.com

The price was good, the tech support response time was good, and it had the features I needed like unlimited addon domains.

However, Dathorn my opinion has now changed.

After a few emails to tech support that Andrew answered I realized that he wasn't exactly the friendliest guy, which doesn't really bother me too much...although in the hosting business (which is ultra-competitive) you should go out of your way to be overly nice.

But then I realized that he wanted to be able to clear the support queue more than he wanted to dig for an answer to the support. I could deal with that, it just meant that my first support response was always a waste of time because no matter how much info I would give, he would always ask for more. For example in my last support request I said "I still can't access my sites, this has been a few days now." Andrew responded by saying,

"AndrewT - 10/26/05 @ 09:47:09 AM CDT
Please provide us with specific domains."

He has my name, account number and the sever my site is on, but wants me to do the work and respond again, making the total time to get my sites back online even worse.

Now with this recent downtime i am leaving dathorn.

The final straw for me was not the downtime, I know that servers go down. I install Mac servers and do tech support for a school district...I understand the computer problems.

My breaking point came after all of my understanding, and this downtime is a sign of a bigger problem.

You see, I don't check all of my sites on a daily basis, I have over 50 sites I run myself, at multiple hosts on different servers. However, about 30 of them were hosted with dathorn.

When the server went down, dathorn got it back up and running pretty quickly, but I never received and email or phone call letting me know that ALL of my 30+ sites were offline.

I had to realize this by logging into my google adsense account after 2 days and seeing my income cut my about 95%.

As a result Dathorn has caused me financial losses of over $100. My search engine rankings have suffered as well, especially with MSN. This could have easily been solved if they had concern for their customers...why not just send an email?

instead of trying to get all of the sites back online, they just posted a message in the forum...they didn't even try anything to get my sites back up and running....they didn't care.

Then the post in the forum says basically I have to start over and recreate my accounts and addon domains for over 30 sites...which should take me about 4 hours to complete.

Then I have to setup my email forwarding again...another 2-3 hours.

Then i have to chmod all of my directories and php scripts which should take at least 2 hours.

That makes the total cost of have dathorn as my host during this crisis over $100 and 9 hours of my time.

Not acceptable to me. Midphase.com gets more of my business. I have had sites hosted with them for 2 years and have NEVER had anything like this happen. I have had downtime, and server crashes, but they always did the work themselves to restore data and get me backonline.

They did the work instead of telling me to do the work myself...isn't that part of what I pay for?

Brandon

[AndrewT]

Actually, most users did not have to do much of the stuff outlined in the announcements forum thread once the cPanel issue was resolved (chmoding, recreating e-mails, forwarders, etc. - most of these were restored without problems). We had no way of knowing that your other sites were offline, because they were all addon/parked domains of an existing account and needed to be re-added via cPanel. It seems a bit odd for such a problem to occur and to not even check these 50 other sites that were addon or parked domains onto a single account. Just checking one would have immediatley brought forth the problem.

Just stating the other side of the situation here.

[BrandonBCF]

Andrew,

That is how I found out that the sites were down. I checked my account, saw the drop in income and then started trying to figure out why. I found a majority of my sites down after seeing the drop in income.

I guess I'm just the odd user that had to do everything since I don't create WHM accounts for all of my sites.

Brandon

[AndrewT]

Let me just re-iterate something else as well. I do apologize that this even occured. We've never had a problem this serious as far as hardware failure goes, but the fact is that it does happen. No matter what you try to do there is always a chance that a severe problem like this will occur (albeit very small). We're still looking into what may have specifically triggered this in the first place. But in the end, over 4 years and many servers later, this is the worst failure we've run into. It could have been much worse.

The scary part is that only 1 customer on cpanel21 pays for our backup service. Our backup service saved this customer several minor problems since the previous days backups were readily available to fully restore. Backups are important regardless of how they are done.

[Frank Hagan]

For anyone reading this thread, you can set up free monitoring services (or pay for more extensive monitoring services) from companies like siteuptime.com and easymonitor.com

They ping the site every 30 minutes with the free service. So you know if your site goes down. It works with parked and add-on sites as well as regular sites on the shared servers.

[BrandonBCF]

For anyone reading this thread, you can set up free monitoring services (or pay for more extensive monitoring services) from companies like siteuptime.com and easymonitor.com

Also for anyone reading this, I have never seen a host not alert their customers that their sites would be down and they would have to recreate them.

You both are sidestepping the issue. I understand hardware failures happen. I am not upset that the sites went down. i keep my own backups and have backups that are current.

The problem I have, stated above although not addressed, is that I was not sent an email saying that your server went down and brought my 30+ sites down with it.

I pay for hosting, and if you are not providing that at that exact time, I should be alerted. I never asked for reimbursement, never got an apology until a few posts ago and have not sought anything expect what I thought should have been obvious, a direct email or phone call...not some obscure forum post.

Brandon

[openbox]

The problem I have, stated above although not addressed, is that I was not sent an email saying that your server went down and brought my 30+ sites down with it.

Dathorn has never used email as a means of notifying customers of maintenance our outages. That policy has been stated and upheld numerous times around here. The forums are the mechanism (right or wrong) that Dathorn uses for customer notifications.

[Pedja]

One of the recent topics on this forum pointed out that dissaster resolving is Dathorn's weak point. This is the situation where we occasionaly loose account setup information and we can do nothing about it.

However, using forum as the main form of allerting customers on urgent events is ridicilous.

It very often that people complain they do not get proepr respond when they ask for help on this forum, and andrev always respons with explanation that forum is not meant for support but ticketing service, and on the other hand, he demands us to monitor forum for alerts. This does not go along: either forum is meant for support or not.

It bothers me that usualy some third party spolutions are offered as resolution of problem, especialy for essential stuff.

I am speaking from the point of view of someone, who does visit this forum, but anyways got alerted about problems not by forum or admin notification, but from upset customers.

it would be good if dathorn is able to do frequent bakups, not of our site contents, but configuration data. That is essential. We al have our site contents backuped, but we have no access to configuration data and when it is lost it is lost, an that is something we are not able to control but we have right to expect from hosting service provider to maintain.

[james]

You could always try subscribing to the announcements forum, then you'll get an email when new announcements are made.

[AndrewT]

Offering support via the forums is far different than handling notifications through them, they absolutely are not one and the same. Our policy on this has always been crystal clear and it will remain this way. If you subscribe to the announcements forum you will be notified via e-mail when new threads are posted. It is not even reasonable to offer support via the forums that would require posting sensitive user information which simply doesn't need to happen.

Furthermore, if you do pay for our backup service, your account data along with much of the configuration data is backed up.

[BrandonBCF]

This is exactly my point...you guys are not willing to help in the situation of YOUR servers going down, but you want us to go the extra mile to either use a 3rd party notification site, or get a bunch of emails about unrelated announcements.

Why aren't YOU willing to go the extra mile to keep customers (like me) instead of losing me to your competition, who by the way does send me an email if one of my sites/accounts goes down and it is their fault.

Then again, I don't have an account with dathorn anymore so I don't know why I care...feel free to consider the matter resolved for me.

brandon

[ThomasW]

This is not true, at least for me.

"If you subscribe to the announcements forum you will be notified via e-mail when new threads are posted. "

I get notifications about any new threads around 1:00am EST. Can we change this so we get the notification email of a new thread when the thread is created?

[ChrisTech]

***nevermind that forum doesn't have that option..odd...

I visit the forums quite a few times durring the day (morning, while @ work (work has an account here too), lunch @ work, home in th evening, before bed, ect). It's faster than checking my email to see if there has been any updates (via bookmark toolbar in firefox).

[AndrewT]

This is not true, at least for me.

"If you subscribe to the announcements forum you will be notified via e-mail when new threads are posted. "

I get notifications about any new threads around 1:00am EST. Can we change this so we get the notification email of a new thread when the thread is created?

I was unaware of this. They should now be sent out hourly.

[Bill_Gates]

Yeah I agree Brandon

My site and income disappeared as well. I had no idea until I saw a drop in income also. I was told my site was suspended due to a bot sending emails from one of my forms. This may have been my fault I never did look into the form in question.

I know it would have been difficult to contact me and let me know about it.
It may have even taken an email.

Dathorn was a great starter account for me but I can't in good faith host any more clients websites if I can't get as much as an email when something terrible goes wrong.

Is it our job to check the forum for announcements? Maybe it is the status quo here but not in the real world.

I will keep my account here for now, as I have been happy with the price. But how much extra could it cost us for a simple email notification?