Anyone else... VPS Outage Problems?

[egodshall]

Hello,

Is anyone else who has a VPS account that was affected by the outage/IP address change having MAJOR performance problems? I have an ecommerce site and it is basically unusable because the performance is so bad (sometimes times out). Note: before the outage/IP address change, the site was very fast.

I've been talking to support over the last 2 days but I'm not getting anywhere...

Thanks
Eric

[SouthernCharm]

I'm having the same issues. For starters, it took them forever to update my DNS records on their servers even though I contacted them about it well in advance of the switch-over. Then my sites still didn't work because they failed to mention that you had to manually update some conf files for Apache; changing my IP in Plesk didn't do the trick. Now I've noticed that the sites are running much slower and timing out on a frequent basis, and I've never had those issues prior to the IP changes.

Needless to say, support has been practically useless. >:\ My service comes up for renewal in a few months. As much as I hate to do it, I'll probably try to find a different VPS host because this isn't looking too good. I initially thought the Hostway acquisition would be a good thing, but now I'm not so sure.

[bkcash]

Yeah, my server is down too. It has been since Friday morning. I sent in a support ticket and they told me they were going to do a reboot (took 'em like 12 hours to answer the support request), however, I never received an email that the boot had been accomplished. That was Friday night. As of today (Sunday) it's still down and I will be cancelling my account. I would like to backup my databases first, though. Who knows...

[egodshall]

Well.. I'm sorry you are all having these problems.. but I'm glad I'm not alone. I have called into dedicated support about 8 times and I'm not getting any further.. I can honestly estimate that I have lost $4,000 to $5,500 worth of sales since this "outage" on Friday. I have tried everything.. asked to speak to the admins.. asked to have the ticket escalated as high as possible... asked to have them call me at home at any hour to help figure out the issue. NOTHING... NOTHING... "The ticket is still open"

I have tried accessing my site from Maine (on vacation this weekend [right... trying to fix this]), New Hampshire where I live and New York (had my daughter try to get to the website).. NOTHING... timing out. But when I talk to support... they have no problems accessing the site ... I keep telling them.. I don't know what is wrong but something IS wrong.

I'm at my whits end... but... I wish you all the best... If you hear anything or find a fix, please let us know!

[KB71]

Here are my 2cents.

I got the IP's changed and was working fine until this afternoon, I came in and all sites was down and no connection to the server at all. Called tech help and they told me they couldn't get in either and that it needed a reboot. Asked them how long time that will take. No more than 30 minutes was the answer. They would also send me an email notification that the ticket went through. Its now 6 hours since that phone call. No server and no email notification.

Im off to bed, hopefully they have fixed it by tomorrow morning or they will have another one leaving them....

[beeplogic]

My VPS is down and out too it seems :\ Was working fine this morning.

[taliver]

My VPS went down at 2:11:45 PDT On Sunday July 8. I called within an hour, and was given the same information "Up in 30 minutes", "Up within the hour", and then "Sometime tonight."

I just called, and got the answer, "Well, lots of customers are angry, and I don't know when it will be up, and I don't know why it's down -- the techs are working on it."

Not a good sign.

[taliver]

Apparently, as of 6:30am PDT (9:30 EDT), the single admin who is able to do anything has not come in, nor do they know when he is coming in.

For the record, I am in the process of switching providers.

[SouthernCharm]

That's just swell. Some of their customers (such as myself) are angry enough to get our attorneys involved for breach of contract. Personally, I can't have my VPS down because I have paying customers with e-commerce sites who have now been down for FOUR DAYS. When they did the cut-over on Thursday, my site didn't come back online until Saturday morning. It ONLY came back online Sunday morning because I manually edited a conf file on my server and restarted it. It was up for about a day, and then it went out again on Sunday and hasn't been back. I can't ping the IP. I can't access Plesk. I can't do anything to troubleshoot the issues myself. But since I'm not the only one with this problem, I'm guessing it's a networking issue and NOT our individual servers.

At any rate, I have customers calling me wanting to know when their sites will be back, and I have to say, "I don't know. My web host did some major upgrades and seems to have screwed the pooch. Sorry. My bad for buying a server at a retarded web host."

I cannot seem to pick web hosting companies. The last three or four I've used have been incompetent boobs even though they were supposedly recommended by a hosting review site. :-/

[SouthernCharm]

Taliver, to whom are you switching? I'm ready to switch myself.

[egodshall]

I'm looking into ********... Dedicated server... much more expensive but still way cheaper than all the lost sales already.




Edit - If you wish to discuss other hosting providers you can do so via a PM but any other Posts with other providers info will get your account banned.

[egodshall]

Fair enough... my bad.

[KB71]

Looks like mine finally got back online after 18hrs down. Lets see if it stays up or not.

[SouthernCharm]

Mine is also back online, and we'll see for how long. I've been told I have to "play nice" and not refer to anyone as being anything less than supremely competent on the board. ::rolls eyes::

The really sad thing is that my service with Gate has been stellar until the Hostway acquisition. Truly, I think I emailed them for support twice, and I got a reply within hours that was helpful and correct. It wasn't even because something was wrong with my server; it was a general question about the server configuration. These boards have never proved to be very useful other than for those of us to with problems to complain. ;-) They just don't get that much traffic.

Again, I truly hope this isn't indicative of what we can expect from Hostway. :-/ If it is, I *will* switch providers and bemoan the fact that Hostway bought Affinity/Gate.

[bkcash]

Well it's good to hear that some of you are back up and running. Unfortunately, my server is still down and I still have not received any replies to emails. I haven't wasted my time calling. I figure if they aren't answering emails why bother. Fortunately, I'm not losing any money at the moment since I was just getting things set up.

Good luck to everybody.

[bkcash]

I'm looking into ********... Dedicated server... much more expensive but still way cheaper than all the lost sales already.

Edit - If you wish to discuss other hosting providers you can do so via a PM but any other Posts with other providers info will get your account banned.

You mean to tell me that someone took the time to jump in here and edit this post, but you can't get our servers up? Wow.

[egodshall]

Still down... Still Losing Sales... Still No Response

[Ray]

You mean to tell me that someone took the time to jump in here and edit this post, but you can't get our servers up? Wow.


I am not an admin so there is nothing I can do to get the servers back up.


I haven't wasted my time calling. I figure if they aren't answering emails why bother.

If you sent an e-mail, instead of filling out the support request form (https://www.gate.com/support/contact-dedicated.htm), the it normally takes a few days for tech support to actually get your e-mail. The form sends it directly to us but an e-mail goes into a different department which then has to be forwarded to us. Unfortunately that forwarding process takes time so its not that we are ignoring your e-mail, its just that tech doesn't see it yet to answer it.

[egodshall]

Well I'm outta here! Switch to new hosting service is done... It's crazy... I'm getting sales online again and I'm not getting complaints... I guess there really WAS a problem. Cancellation coming shortly...

Best of luck to the rest of you!

[synergetics]

Why can't you guys get this fixed?, didnt you pretest the ip switch-over on a test server before subjecting your customers to your experiment? I've been down all weekend. Yesterday the server was so slow it took a minute to call each page. Today I am receiving my script error page like my script cannot access the database.

How do you expect anyone to carry on a business when their websites are down all week...this is crazy...

[SouthernCharm]

I am not an admin so there is nothing I can do to get the servers back up.




If you sent an e-mail, instead of filling out the support request form (https://www.gate.com/support/contact-dedicated.htm), the it normally takes a few days for tech support to actually get your e-mail. The form sends it directly to us but an e-mail goes into a different department which then has to be forwarded to us. Unfortunately that forwarding process takes time so its not that we are ignoring your e-mail, its just that tech doesn't see it yet to answer it.


I don't know if this is true or not, but I've always sent my support requests directly from the Contact Us form in my account management tool at https://secure.gate.com/cgi-bin/VW0099.exe

If they send a reply to my email, I reply directly to their email reply, though, and I just assumed it would be handled correctly since it has a case ID number attached to it.

So far, so good. My server is still online and has been since Monday afternoon. My guess - whatever changes were made weren't correctly propagated in the corporate routers and firewalls. I got back responses from support which said THEY could see my servers and ping them, but I couldn't ping them. Thus, it had to be some sort of router issue, probably due to integrating the Gate/Affinity networks into the Hostway network.

Honestly, I expect *some* glitches when such a major change is made, but it seems like someone just didn't really think about all the little things involved in the integration...

[SouthernCharm]

Also, for those of you still offline, do you mean that you can't even ping your servers? Initially, I had a bizarre issue where my server was online, but all of my other vhosts weren't appearing; it was just loading the primary domain on my server. It didn't make sense, especially when I looked at the httpd.include file for each domain. Everything *seemed* correct.

So, I started picking through the conf files on my server, and this file

/etc/httpd/conf.d/zz010_psa_httpd.conf

still had my OLD IP as the NameVirtualHost.

I fixed that myself and restarted Apache. Then everything magically worked. So, just making all the changes in Plesk as instructed by the support department prior to the upgrade was insufficient to make the IP changes work with everything, especially if you have multiple domains hosted on your VPS.

[Ray]

I don't know if this is true or not, but I've always sent my support requests directly from the Contact Us form in my account management tool at https://secure.gate.com/cgi-bin/VW0099.exe

Yes, if you send it via that, then it comes strait to us. Some customers will send directly to the e-mail address they see in those replies instead of filling out the form or the e-mail address used to send out the mass e-mails to all our customers. In those instances the e-mail does not come strait to us and usually takes about 2 days to get to our box for us to answer.