two-pot screamer dot com

I’ve had a few problems with my Virtual Hosting company. Here are the ones I can remember off the top of my head…

Access to CPanel disabled due to lack of disk space.
This was the first ticket I raised with my provider. They thanked me politely for informing them of the problem and promptly fixed it. The turn-around time on this ticket was around 2 hours. I was pleased with their excellent support but a little worried that they clearly had no tools which would automatically inform them when disk space was running low on a server. I have used several commercial tools that do this, and I am sure that there are some free ones available.

All files missing from website.
I started getting 404 errors on my website, so I logging in via FTP to see what was wrong. Every single file and directory was gone. It was pure virgin webspace. I logged into CPanel and found that my addon domains and all the email accounts I had set up were also gone.

Still buzzing from that “oh fuck” shot of adrenaline, I raised a ticket saying that all my files and settings seemed to have been deleted, and could they restore them from their backups.

They wrote back that I must have given my password to someone who had deleted all my files. They ignored the “please restore my site from backups”; I suspect that they do not keep any.

I was a little annoyed by this stage, so I decided to do some detective work. I eventually worked out that my domain name was pointing to a new IP address. All my files were still on the original server. I raised another ticket telling them that the A record for my domain name had been modified on their name servers (moving me to a new server without telling me?). They changed the record back reasonably promptly once they knew what they had to do.

File permissions changed causing server 500 errors.
Several sites that I manage were running Movable Type (which is a well known resource hog when it rebuilds pages, which it does every time anyone leaves a comment). The first I knew of a problem was when people started complaining about server 500 errors on certain pages. I investigated and found that several of the mt-comments.cgi files had somehow lost their execute attributes. I changed the file permissions back, and everything was working again. The same problem happened a couple of days later. I tried to change the file permissions back, but I found that the files were no longer owned by me.

I raised a ticket asking that the file permissions be changed back and ownership of the files be reverted to my account. I also pointed out that it was inappropriate for administrators to be casually breaking customers’ websites. The files were fixed, but I got no comment on their unprofessional conduct. If they have a problem with certain applications being run on their servers they should note it in their terms of service or stipulate an acceptable level of resource utilisation per customer. I suspect that the admin may have just chmoded any file he could find, because at the time none of the websites were getting more than a couple of comments per day, so they could not have been thrashing the servers.

HTML files with file size of 0 bytes.
One website started returning a blank page when the front page was requested. I had a look at the file system and there were several files with a file size of 0. After my last experience I suspected that an incompetent admin may have been over-writing large files to try to save some disk space or something.

I raised a ticket and asked what was going on. The support people said that the server had run out of disk space earlier in the day and, since these static html files were created automatically by a Perl script, the generation of the files will have failed.

I selected the option to rebuild all the blogs and the problem was fixed, but the hosting company clearly hadn’t learnt anything about managing their servers.

Addon domains missing.
One day all my addon domains (domain names that point to a directory under my master domain) disappeared. The files were still there, but the domains were just giving 404 errors.

I tried to re-create the addon domains, but CPanel returned an error about not being able to find the name servers listed in the DNS record. I could successfully do a name lookup using them through CPanel (on the same server), so I knew that the name servers were running and could be connected to from my server.

I raised a ticket, and support created the addon domains for me, but offered no explanation as to why it was not working.

lynx disappears
I decided that I wanted to import an RSS feed for the front of my blog. With Movable Type, the imported RSS feed would be updated every time I posted in my blog or when someone left a comment and the front page was regenerated. Given that my blog was spectacularly unpopular and I wasn’t going to post or regenerate a couple of times a day just to keep a feed current, I decided to have it automatically rebuild itself every 6 hours.

This should have been easy to set up. Someone had written a Perl script to regenerate Movable Type blogs, and it is a simple matter to set up a cron job to run the script any time I liked.

The first hurdle I ran into was that I couldn’t find Perl anywhere. It certainly wasn’t in #!/usr/bin/perl and looking for it was a little painful as shell access was disabled, so every time I wanted to run a command, I would set up a cron job in CPanel and have it email me the output.

I eventually concluded that maybe they just didn’t have Perl installed and put the script in my public_html directory and ran it with my web browser (at this stage I didn’t care about the security risk). I automated the rebuilding of my front page by invoking lynx (a text based web browser) on the server with my cron job and pointing it at the Perl script.

This worked fine for several weeks until the administrators removed lynx…which is fair enough, but once again they are making changes to their servers that impact other people. They get a big fat F for change management.

Overall, this is not a company I would recommend. It’s not just that they are bad at managing the technical details of good web host, their customer service is also poor. I have had tickets (that required a 5 minute action on the part of support) changed to in-progress and then left sitting for more than 24 hours (do you think that someone’s Key Performance Indicator had something to do with the number of unhandled tickets?). When I wrote a letter of complaint I received no reply, and my ticket history (audit trail) disappeared.

Something this company is extremely good at thought, is taking your money. Perhaps they should find an industry where they could focus on what they do best without having to provide any actual service…like sending Nigerian scam emails or something.

Update (January 14th, 2005)

Now that this website uses dynamically generated pages that hit the database each time a page is requested, I am noticing that the database server falls over more than a one-legged man on a bender.

I’ve had to put together this error page. Bonus points if you can pick the source of the image.

Error establishing a database connection!

This probably means that the database server is down (again).
You can try again in a few minutes or, if you need the information right now…

• Check the Google cache, or
• Try the Wayback Machine

If you are still having problems after a couple of hours, let me know by emailing stuart at twopotscreamer dot com.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 4th, 2005 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.