SMTP is still down on my server... And yes, I'm using the correct connection settings.

Well thiessen... then you may live your life slogging through a frustrated haze. Especially in this industry. This company is a good deal, but if you're so concerned about 99.9% uptime, then you obviously need to look elsewhere, and may need to shell out a few extra bucks for the kind of service you seem to expect.

I saw that 99.9% uptime statement next to the price and said "yeah, right." But I weighed the pros and cons and decided to give it a shot. Hostony should probably eliminate that statement from its ad copy, because I know of no server that never, ever crashes. But I came into this with that "grain of salt", and I've been relatively happy with what I've gotten for my money here. Even though yesterday completely ######ed.

What are you doing hosting really important sites on a bargain basement server with support staff based in the Ukraine? Think about it.

shouldn't you be able to afford something more than hostony then?

You almost got my point. Performance and Advertising should match, whether you're in the basement or Ukraine.

99% uptime means they will have 3.65 days of outage.

For the same price as Profi?

- Jim

and what happens to reseller accounts, i do not have a profi account

I think in a way resellers got more damage, since they had several websites and several clients for their accounts; I think they should also receive an upgrade.

Mub.

I have now sent no less than 478 emails and made 72 posts on this message board and still get no reply! What's the deal? Why can't the entire company stop to answer me?

I have found a bunch of negative reviews on the internet showing that this company is bad! Never mind that the only time anyone writes a review is when they have something bad to say, I take this as fact! I will immediately begin looking for other hosting, as they will use the SUPER MEGA COMPUTERS that somehow are impervious to any kind of malfunction that every other computer on Earth is susceptible to! That is the ULTIMATE PLAN!

danimal, i don't think it's necessary to make the people asking for compensation feel like ###### by making comments like that.

many of us have lost a considerable amount of money over the last 30 hours, not to mention the rotten task of spending all day dealing with screaming clients and most of us haven't been hounding the staff with a barrage of email and trouble tickets as you seem to be implying.

in a situation like we've just had, it is *not* unreasonable to ask for some small gesture of compensation.

personally i don't feel the need for an account upgrade since, as you have so eloquently pointed out, these things happen and the guys at Hostony had a day that none of us can even begin to imagine as a result of the problems.

most of us here understand very well that technical problems hit hosting services and we aren't ranting and raving about moving to other companies and we aren't demanding refunds... that would obviously be unresonable due to the nature of this business but a gesture would be greatly appreciated from Hostony ... I fully expect to do the same for my own clients and I'm quite sure that if you're running your own business and you care about keeping the clients that you have, you would too if the situation warranted it.

My client's account was upgraded, and I think that was a very nice gesture. Thanks. And 99% uptime does = 3.65 days of downtime I suppose, as a guest pointed out. Unless my math ######s. So, by that calculation, we've got around 2.5 days of downtime coming over the next year. Get your crash helmets on folks!

did everybody get their email restored from this debacle we just experienced?

I don’t think I got any email from the first 12 hours or so..

i (and my clients) lost about 24 hours worth...

a few odd ones here and there that were sent around 7am GMT on the 24th have somehow trickled through, but all others appear lost

anyone else up and down like a yoyo the last 20 minutes?

My site has been going up and down periodically all day!

Whats going on now??? Sites unavailable again.

at least email is still running... nothing's getting lost,

they're possibly tweaking - rebooting - tweaking - rebooting?

Reminds me of that scene in Marathon Man when Dustin Hoffman was sitting in that Nazi dentist chair, the dentist holding a drill in one hand a a bottle of painkiller in the other

"Pain, or pleasure... Pain or pleasure...."

Hmm, site is back up. I do notice that it is faster than I've ever seen it. I checked the server status in CPanel and now the CPU load status no longer blinks a red dot.

Whatever you guys did, DON'T MESS WITH IT!

haven't seen the movie, but i can relate to the comparison...

now i have an overwhelming desire to secure a supply of nitrous oxide

sites do seem faster now... not sure if they're faster than *ever* but they sure are zippy!

my imap does not work, does anyone elses? pop works fine

Sorry once again for the troubles caused with recent HDD crash.
We already restored all services and in order to compensate for the troubles we upgraded all accounts (both shared and reseller) one level up.

Now the answers to several issues addressed in this thread.

Long time for service restore.

Yes it took us a bit longer to restore service than normal average time we do this. Firs of all because we first tried to fix old HDD and take it up at the earliest time possible. That would allow us to copy all the data to the new harddrive and then just replace the one that has problems with a restored one. The problem was /usr file system was too corrupted to restore it.
For your information one scan for the corrupted chain block on that partition takes about 20 minutes. And we had to do several of them until we realized that following that way won’t allow us to restore everything fast and we’ll just switched the HDD and started to restore everything from the backups and partially from th parts of corrupted HDD in order to speed up recovery.
Just data copy took about 7 hours plus we had to spend some time making fresh cpanel install to work with restored configs, etc.


Upcoming Maintenances

Next week (Monday) we’ll be performing server maintenance for 64.74.112.74 in order to install non-vital software we delayed because of prioritizing on restoring service for the customers first.
Estimated downtime: 15 minutes.


Apache going up and down.

We were to recompile apache+php in order to have all the libraries our customers requested to be available in apache/php. Those times were not continuous because each time when compiled software failed we restored it with already compiled copy that worked fine. Each attempt to compile apache and hp takes about 40-70 minutes, but because we had a compiled version of apache/php with default functionality those downtimes did not took too long.

Other servers being down.
That issue was already addressed. We had another server that went down 3 times within 2 days and showed a trend to continue that way. We copied all user accounts on that server to a new dual xeon and gave them ability to check their files on a new server and switch their domains to a new server without downtime. It is the best route to solve the issue with as little hassle as possible. The only problem only a few users checked their files on a new server and confirmed domain move.

Ukraine based support.

Nobody and never hide that. You can search through the forums and you'll see that from the very beginning we told that our servers are based in Atlanta and support team is based in Ukraine. I and most of our customers don't see any problem with this.
We live in the age of globalization and if you ever make an effort to see where US flags is produced you'll be surprised to know that most of them produced in China.
Most of clothes sold in US only styled in US but produced outside of US.
I don't see the problem with this, because each country does what it can do better and at the lower price. Thus all consumers benefit getting best available quality at the lowest available price.
We just do what most businesses do. Purchase components of the service at affordable prices thus allowing you to get the most for your money.
All our employees have university degrees and are full time workers. I don’t see why it is worst than US teenagers working part-time from that some of our competitors hire in order to stay profitable playing at the affordable hosting market. Many of big hosting companies outsource support to the India, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, etc. The only difference we don’t hide this.

Once again sorry for the troubles caused with hdd failure issue.

Serge,

thanks for the help. No problem with the Ukrainian support (my wife is from Kiev)..

anwyay, I am missing a bunch of email. Should I consider it completely lost, or are you still trying to find it on the HDD?

thanks.

First, thank you guys for restoring the services. Based on my experience your support is still one of the best in this range of market. For those who are still unhappy and writing nasty emails, remember that Hostony is one of the most affordable hosting companies on the market. And most of all - America is a free country, you don't like the services of Hostony, then just change your hosting company .

The upgrade one level up it was a nice reimbursement for this down-time. Thanks.
One still nonfunctioning service is the IMAP server - I couldn't log in. Any help?

Greetings,
Wawosz

I'm not having any problems and am happy with the service.

Yeeah! Noticed the upgrade just now. Thanks guys!

SO YOU HAVE NO BACKUP SYSTEM???

HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF A SANS UNIT?

MY SITES ARE UP AND DOWN EVERY FEW HOURS NOW.

I got mine upgraded and have 5 addon domians...any know how to make it work? Cus right now im just redirecting my site to a index.html in a folder and masking it under a site name so it only appears *sitename.com, I tried adding on a .com but get DNS is not confgiured and needs to be deleted.... anyone can help me on this?

thank you from me too, for the upgrade *and* for your hard work restoring service...

a break on a month's fees would have been sufficient, this is a very generous gesture... thank you

Thank you all for your patience and understanding.

RHK Designs
Please contact our support with exact domains details about what domain you need to configure as addon and so on and they will help you & check whether there are some problems with your account in part of addon domains.

RHK Designs
You have your solution.

wawosz
Please contact our support if you're still having troubles.

Same problems here. I'm off soon.

Hostony was a great place to be for around 4 months, but it just suddenly plummeted.

Guest

SO YOU HAVE NO BACKUP SYSTEM???
We do have backup system. As of now you can see that server ius up and running.
We had only /usr partition corrupted.
We have distributed backup system and all backups are uploaded to other datacenter that located in Texas.

We copied user data because it is much faster just to copy files from the healthy /home partition to the new harddrive and restore from the backup only /usr partiton.

HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF A SANS UNIT?
We do heard about SANs. But I must admit that there is no solution from all the problems.
We do have the one that allows us to have data backed up offsite.

MY SITES ARE UP AND DOWN EVERY FEW HOURS NOW.
As I have expalined in the main post for this issue located at
http://forum.hostony.com/index.php?act=ST&...=1&t=461&st=105

We had to add libraries our users need to the php/perl/apache. Because of this we needed server to be rebooted.
Also there will be some more maintanance windows at the beginnign of the next week.

Guest_Fred
We don't suddenly plummeted. We have the same servers, same suport staff (we even doubled it over last 2 months). The only problem we had is HDD crash and did our best to restore service and compensate our customers for the downtime with upgrading their accounts one level up.

I cannot guarantee you that we won't have problems in future. It is true for any host in the market. There are so much factor you cannot 100% control like hardware failures, hackerts, other ISPs, etc. All we can do is to better organize for such problems and do our best once such problem occurs restire service at the earliest time possible.

Ok, now IMAP is working fine, thanks and good luck.

I was a web host for sixth months myself, so I know what i'm talking about.

A hdd crash does not result in on and off downtime, mysql problems and high server load for the past month.

I.E Like my site being down now

But, I will say support is good if I contact you.... but it shouldn't require me to.

Is anybody having more email problems today?

thanks

yes, smtp is non-functional and i've had three clients call and ask me if i've gone out of business this morning because email they tried to send me bounced back to them

hopefully this'll be *very* temporary

hang on to your hats everyone!

The symptoms are the same as the other day, with the exception of the site being up.

I wonder if I'm going to be loosing mail again..

Do you know if anyone is working the problem?

I opened a trouble ticket, but still waiting...

i do think they're working on it... i only say that because i seem to be able to log into POP3 intermittently.

unfortunately i'm coming up empty handed every time so I have so assume there's mail going astray again

anyone know if it's possible that they're able to capture any undelivered email up to this point so that it can be delivered when whatever they're fixing is fixed?

EDIT: on page 8 of this thread, Serge did give a heads up about maintenance to install non-vital software and estimated downtime at 15 minutes. Possible there's a connection here... once again, would be nice if this didn't happen in the middle of the US working day but I guess they have their reasons

seems to be working, but lost some mail AGAIN!!!

me too... but everything *does* seem to be working now, including smtp

back to the phones!

The maintanance and possible downtime was announced. Please be patient we are working on the server.

thank you for the update Serge,

it's just very worrying to know that during peak business hours over here we're losing email...

trying to be patient

Please make the downtime be in the middle of the night
US time, since most of your customers are located in
the US.

Please do NOT plan ANY down time durring the business
day.

There are NO isp's that I am aware of that ever have
planned downtime during business hours in the country
where their servers are located.

Working on anything is a risk; downtime always can
bring up other problems that can take longer than
expected to fix. If you have another mid-business day
outage, it will be very, very bad. Realize that there
are already numerous negative postings about your
service on ISP review sites, and that nearly 2000
people have viewed the forum regarding your last
outage.

Again, please do not have ANY down time during US
business hours.

Thank you.

- Steve Saroff http://www.saroff.com/steve
- steve@saroff.com (406) 728-2967
- Web mining, Software Development, Marketing.
- Author of 'Ask and Receive,' Creator of FreeMail
- TOP of Google for these search phrases:
- * php consultant * 1st out of 642,000 sites
- * mysql consultant * 7th out of 76,000 sites
- * marketing expert * 17th out of 1.8 million sites.
- * missoula marketing consultant * 1st out of 7,000
- What would you like to promote today?

I thought i was going crazy ....
SMTP was working for some of my clients, but not others ...
from some PC's, but not others
with some ISP's but not others

Now I think I see the common thread!

SMTP at Hostony is woking SOME times but not OTHER times.

Am I right?

Personally, I have NOT been able to send any email since last week from my laptop.

This isn't funny anymore, the serverload is skyhigh again and it's near impossible to get the page to load.

Everything is down again, my new customers are leaving, this has to stop!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My email, everything!
I will be moving my best customers to another server, if the problems persist, I will leave completely!!!!!!!!
Please fix this now, after Friday, I have very little patience!

(my 2 cents)
If you where my client and I told you the server was down for scheduled maintenance at 1:00 p.m. CST would you laugh?

.. me neither.

me too, all my sites are dead again...

We are talking down time that blows away what all other ISPs promise; negative that is....

The problem is that the support people are on one contienent, and the hardware is on another, and there is NO redunduncy; they are trying to trouble shoot from affar....

This kind of thing is as risky as satalites to mars.


Total failure looms.