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The CIHost Saga Continues
kiltboy writes "CIhosting had a major failure effectively eliminating 48,000 e-commerce sites. They claim it was a DNS failure but customers are complaining of old data being restored and some pages just being gone. MSNBC has picked up the story here along with some human interest stories. " I've talked personally with several people who've been dealing with this, and as people know, we've had hosting issues before. It's one of the most frustrating aspects of working on the Internet, but can anything be done about it? What do you think?
CIhost has an office just down the street from my house, and when I applied there, i noticed a lot of lax behavior. from everyone in the building. Their equipment was not kept clean or orderly, and according to one tech I spoke with, they only run backups every week or so, sometimes as long as 3 weeks! This is NOT flamebait or BS, I got this info from people in the company.
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There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Not to mention that they tend to tell you they'll call you right back, and then don't; they'll tell you something has been fixed, but they haven't tested it (and of course it's not fixed); and so forth. I would avoid Digex at all costs if I were you.
--- Dirtside | "Spirituality" is the irrational belief in the supernatural
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
According to the story, the recorded message on C|Host's customer service line said something about entering domain names and IP addresses into the DNS server by hand.
I'm guessing that these are customer IP addresses, but even that smacks of technical incompetence. Pretty scary. Hint: if you're not going to make recoverable backups, at least spend an hour or two learning rudimentary shell scripting, if not Perl.
--
how to invest, a novice's guide
I feel that a company is supposed to provide a service that is stable, secure, and efficient. Any time those goals are violated in any way the person has a legitimate legal complaint. Would you be pleased or very impressed at all if for example you had your automobile serviced and then as you were driving out of the service center the engine just dropped out of the vehicle? Hardly.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
A co-worker has been experiencing the bad side of C-host, for the past few days, he's been calling their tech support to YELL at them. So I wondering now, what are the alternative providers?
I am thinking more along lines of someone local so you can stop by their office if something goes wrong.
-- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
It's about money. If you want something done right, or at least done so that you do not complain, then you'd better be prepared to do it yourself. Otherwise, you get what you pay for.
Web hosting is big business, and to make the price competitive, corners get cut. The problem is when failures occur, you see the underbelly of your cost savings. It costs money to hire good staff. It costs money to make (frequent) backups. It costs money to provide redundant equipment.
Now, an out of the box solution may run great for a while, giving all involved a sense of security. A smoothly running computer needs little more than a baby-sitter in terms of administration and tech support. It's when all hell breaks loose that you find out where your money has been going. A trained staff costs more, but will get you back up and will keep you there. The cheap and untrained baby-sitter will, at best, be on-hold with someone elses tech support.
The mettle of your staff and contracted hosting company is tested and proven during a crisis. How they handle that crisis is what you pay for. Their response to this matter tells much of their commitment to their customers.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I have been useing AIT for almost 2 years now without a single problem. There connections are wicked fast and dirt cheap. They offer virtual both NT and unix virtual servers and colocation of anything you want.
http://www.aitcom.net
This may be off-topic, but....
Which virtual hosting services have people had success with? Which ones should be avoided like the plague? I'm sure there's enough experience here to answer this question.
Personally, I just signed up with a new, inexpensive service, and have gotten the impression that they are completely incompetant, and I may be looking to switch. Any advice?
to prarphrase an old lawyer joke... What do you have when you've got 18,000 e-commerce sites wiped with no backup? An idea whose time has come.
Sure. People can stop buying stuff just becasue it's cheaper than the alternatives. Of course, if people in general started behaving so differently, the world as we know it wouldn't be here. I like to imagine that the fulminating ninnies of slashdot would be one of the things that would be absent in that much improved new world.
[nah, I thought he was blathering too, but "fulminating" was a perfect word for much of what happens here. A silver lining, like.]
i just got myself a T1, sure its expensive but the only downtime is self-incurred.
As far as the people who, at least the article seems to indicate, lost their entire site and fear that there is no backup, I have a piece of advice:
"Never trust a backup that isn't in your hands."
What, do these people just schlop their pages on the server and not keep a frequently-updated copy of everything on their own media? That's just stupid, plain and simple.
The trouble began a week ago, according to a company press release, when it began a $2 million system upgrade. The company claims data on its "nameserver" became corrupted, Hello ? Ever heard of the word backup ?? And nameserver not nameservers ? So redundency isn't in your vocabulary I see.
Ok, wonder why sites like UserFriendly and such make fun of idio... er customers calling in? Read the above! Your cow-orker calls tech support to yell at them. In long entire chain of command how much power do you think the lowly techie he is yelling at has? Tech support gets dumped on because they are a convient target. If you want something changed go higher up the food chain and give the techies a break.
So from reading the article it seems that we've lost a site that sells tennis balls that go on your car antenna, and a meeting place for celtic musicians.
I don't know about you, but that sounds like acceptable losses to me. You know the old saying, if you're gonna make an omlette, you've gotta break a couple tennis balls.
Hotnutz.com
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
You're right, HE.net is good (of course, you never know what will happen if something goes wrong). My site's also hosted there...
I would ask all of these companies, (all the people who signed contracts with the web hosting services) "Have you ever used a computer?" Any professional in the IT industry should know that computers are not 100% reliable, and anyone who has ever used a PC will have seen a few GPFs, or BSODs. When you contract with someone to provide computer services, you don't ask them "Do your systems crash?" You ask them "What do you do when the system crashes?"
Unfortunately, most people want to be lied to. Despite the fact that it's an OBVIOUS lie, that anyone with an ounce of common sense would disbeliev, they want to hear "Our systems never crash." If they don't hear that, they keep on looking until they find someone who will promise that. Of course, there's never anything like that actually in the contract...
Not everyone can have a T3 coming into their office, plus the boxes and someone to maintain them in their office, so hosting services will probably always be needed.
Hopefully these sites are able to be restored, but it seems unlikely. Too bad.
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
However they aren't fundamental in running a business.
;)
Businesses will always try to cut corners, unfortunately backups and high availability, which should be the cornerstone of this kind of "operation" are often overlooked.
Just today in fact I came into work and had a disk crashed on a Jamaica JBOD attached to a Hewlett-Packard K370. True, since it's not an array it took a while to recover everything, but being as it was a development database, I managed to restore it back to the state it was at 2am last night.
Without those backups I'm be typing my resume now instead of posting to Slashdot
But there's no excuse for a company like this to backup their customers' data, the technology is out there--StorageTek, ATL, they all have scalable solutions to back up terrabytes worth of data, but that costs money and apparently they didn't think providing a decent service to their paying customers was worth it.
If I had an account there, I'd most likely find another provider that knew about system backups and high availability, it is *your* business.
I think, like many geeks maybe, that the only way to do things right is doing them myself OR contract somebody like me to do it.
Some day, a wire to get my linux and bsd boxes connected to the internet would be cheap, and my ecommerce site will be up as long as I pay a sub 30$ bill to a fair company that will give me a quality service.
Until that, I fell that we well see MANY more hosting providers messing our lives.
There's a still a long way to go, I know...
Incidents like this are likely going to increase in frequency over time, what with the ongoing proliferation and consolidation of providers. And under current law, ISP reliability is more or less limited to what's in the contract the end-user or business has with said ISP.
Does anyone think we're going to get dial-tone-level reliability without imposing something like common-carrier status on ISPs and hosting providers? Of course, this particular path opens up Costco-size cans of worms in other arenas; spam leaps to mind as one, and the sheer cost of maintaining 99%+ uptime is another. But I have a sneaking feeling that sooner or later, we're heading down that road...
I know that keeping web servers up isn't the easiest thing in the world, from my past experience. It's not rocket science, but sometimes hardware failures happen. Sometimes you lost power, and not everbody can afford a backup generator to run their web server on.
However, I've never dealt with a hosting company with as many problems as CIHost.In the past two months or so, our web site has been offline at least 8 times for no apparent reason. For about two weeks, their bandwidth was almost completely saturated. And now, we've got this issue.
When we first heard about CIHost, we checked into them, and they were rated highly on at least two sites we checked. With this kind of service they sure won't keep a rating like that for long.
A web-hosting service can cut corners on software, by using Open Source products such as Apache (optionally with IBM's GUI, SGI's patches, and/or one of the acceperators such as Squid), OpenSSL, Perl, [PHP | Zope], Minivend, [Sendmail | Postfix | Qmail | Cyrus IMAP], Cyrus LDAP, [SSH | OpenSSH], [Linux | FreeBSD | OpenBSD | NetBSD], Heartbeat (for High Availability), etc.
They can also cut corners -to some degree- on hardware. eg: You don't -need- to buy hardware RAID solutions, as you can do that in software. You don't -need- to buy watchdog cards, as you can do that in software, too. If you use ReiserFS, you can use the increase in performance to go for disks that aren't necessarily as fast.
How often you make backups depends on the volatility of your data, NOT on how much you want to spend. If your data can be expected to change daily, then backup daily. If it's likely to be stable for a few weeks, backup weekly. If it's continuously on the move, then backup hourly.
How to make backups - buy tapes. They're cheap, they're reliable, and they store a lot. Tape drives are also a lot cheaper than R/W CD-ROM drives. If you've got the cash, get twice the number of tape drives you normally would, then Cron the jobs to run in the background. Stripe your data across half your tape drives. Use the remaining drives for the next backup cycle. That way, you give yourself more time to swap in fresh tapes, and if you forget before the next backup, you're OK.
How long to keep tape backups: Forever, if you can afford it. As long as your budget can possibly allow, otherwise. It's vitally important to be able to backtrack as far as possible.
All in all, there's never any excuse for mishandling data, on account of expense. You CAN make things as cheap as you like, WITHOUT compromising the integrity of the system or your ability to recover from a catastrophic failure.
As for DNS', routers, etc: ALWAYS have TWO of everything. That doesn't mean you have to splash out on a vast number of machines. You can always use your fileserver as your secondary DNS, and a software router can always sit on a web server (though that's not really good practice, for security reasons). And ALWAYS have High Availability wherever applicable. DNS doesn't really need this, as most OS' can search multiple DNS servers.
Again, there's no excuse for not having backup systems. Once you've got the basic machines, you can have them multitask as much as you like, so they can always act as backups for something else.
It's negligence that leads to disasters like this. And I include the times that my own failure to backup has led to significant loss of data. It's a lesson I learned well. If others haven't, well, don't hire them to host your web services until they have.
I think the worst example of negligence like this that I've personally seen was at NASA Langley. The admins backed up -officially- daily. In practice, it was whenever they felt like it. One visitor to the center picked up a hard disk (in use at the time), shook it, and asked what it was. The disk, needless to say, crashed. It turned out that there was a vast amount of critical research data on it and the admins hadn't backed it up in 3 months.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well, rule #1 should be to make your own backups and don't trust anybody.
Ideally, you should do your development on your own machine and only upload 'production' code to the machine that hosts your domain and has all the bandwidth and then run a cron job each day or so to dump your database, tar and gzip it all, and ftp it someplace else.
Also, a cron job that runs a little script to inform you of the state of things and emails it to you every few hours is a good idea if your site is not a full time gig.
Of course, since you're paying somebody to do all this for you you really shouldn't have to worry about it but that's life.
As a fellow conservative, I agree on most of your points but on the issue of backups you are DEAD WRONG. It is very much the responsibility of the web server company to keep backups. One of the very reasons people pay to have their sites hosted is cause they don't have the cash or bandwidth themselves to host their own site. Not ever dealing with a e-commerece site I can't say for sure but I would assume that databases on these pages with customer data, order info, products, etc could easily be several hundred megs or more kinda making it difficult unless you have a dsl, cable or t1 at your business itself to backup the web page.
I also have to disagree with you on the government's role when dealing with fraud. If this turns out to be a issue of fraud or incompetence then it is up to the legal system to stomp on these morons, which is why I don't totally disagree with the lawsuit against microsoft. I do disagree with the government on the issues of microsoft controlling most of the market or them bundled msie with win95/win98, those I don't think they have any business getting involved with but I certaintely think the way microsoft has threaten oem's with lawsuits or loss of discounts if they don't only ship 100% microsoft pc's is criminal and needs to be looked into.
later
jason.salopek@usa.net
I consider myself an expert on this subject, meaning the "How much does Digex suck" subject, and I can back this up 100%. They are in my opinion the most completely clueless operation in the business. I'm tired of re-re-documenting all the crap I've been through with them, contact me by email if you're interested.
Mind you, I only use server space there -- I haven't tried to colocate whole machines -- but they recently moved their entire NOC and they did a pretty damn fine job of it.
As a result, I trust them even more.
I have no
Data is fundamental to running a business. If a business loses data, it loses money. Since it is a given that systems will fail, backups are a requirement for businesses. Any business that cuts costs here will eventually learn why it's bad. If they're lucky, it will be a painful lesson; often the lesson is a fatal one.
The reason why backups are fundamental to sys administration is because the sysadmin is responsible for the data - like you said, lose the data, lose your job.
as a very unsatisfied, and even baffled, customer i have to say that these guys are right on the money!!! and msnbc picking up on the story too. haha.. i hope these guys realize what theyve gotten themselves into. jay
I think one of the largest culprits in bad events like this is lack of documentation/planning.
It's not that the hosting company is negligent, but that the users assume certain things about the hosting company without getting it in writing.
ie: Did the hosting company specify that they had daily backups? Weekly? Did they state that they had a disaster recovery plan? Did you ask? Did you state *your* needs as the customer, or did you just assume, as many people do, 'They are a web hosting company, so they'll have daily backups, a super-fast disaster recovery plan, fault tolerant systems, and enough staff/resources to deal with problems efficiently.).
This is not the case in a great many companies.
As for backups, you should have your own off-site backups, and if it's e-commerce related, you should damn well have your OWN disaster recovery plan. Your own backups. Your own copy of the records, either that, or contractual obligations that your provider will supply those services.
Oh, and Frontier Globalcenter, or whatever they're called this week, had a (get this) power failure in their NYC facility last week. They had to replace a circuit breaker, they called us at 2pm saying they were shutting power to our racks down at 1am. Now they're running around issuing SLA-induced refunds. A guy that works for me once asked why we don't put UPS in our racks, and I laughed and showed him the room full of batteries down the hall. Never occured to me that the circuit breaker would be a single point of failure. Dolp!
I am one of those who has a couple domains hosted with CI Host. I also understand that crashes happen. If things had crashed, they'd admitted that things crashed, and then fixed it, I'd be satisfied. But their system crashed, they were totally unreachable, and it took them over a week to have my sites' DNS working correctly. A week of downtime is what is unacceptable.
Even before they crashed I was getting pissed at CiHost. PHP / MySQL web pages that should have worked fine, and did work fine at home, simply hung on their machines. They talked about all these wonderful things they could do (e-commerce etc) but never gave the details. Now this.
So, where do I go? Any recommendations for a *good* provider with decent backups, uptime, big pipes, available tech support, reasonable prices and (most importantly) MySQL and PHP support?
www.cihostsucks.org and also msnbc... hahha.. this is great
there is something you can do about it. Don't go with a suck web hosting company. Colo is a good way to go so that you can do it yourself. However make sure the company has zero downtime for an extended period. Approximately 2 years without downtime is a good start. Our company das done it so why can't others?
I think everyone is missing two important points: first is that CIHost, despite being down for several days, isn't guilty for being down so long, per se. It's dumb, but not un-survivable; alternative service could be found, and if they were a great service, they'd have little to worry about. But their attitude is not an apologetic and a forthright one, but one of arrogance and obfuscation - arrogance, because they see the problem as being a minor glitch, and obfuscation, because they can't seem to get even simple information, like the status of their site and my site, up. I have not recieved one e-mail, one call, one notice, or even a web page informing me of their status. I note, though, that their own CIHost main page was up before mine. When I look at that, when I can't reach their customer service site, when I can't get my own mail because of this - I'm mad. Down, I can understand. Down & no info why or when it'll be fixed, I don't.
The second point, one that I think everyone is saying but skirting around, is that there's no good, reliable information on web hosts. Lists make money off of a) advertising from the very people they're rating, or, sometimes b) money to rate other people higher. No one has an objective list which rates the customer service, the time up and down, the overall service, that I know of - and it's almost impossible to make one, because the good ones can so rapidly become bad ones. Information about these things is so subjective as well - several people have already complained of having "bad service" while not detailing what happened.
The first problem is CIHost's fault. They can (but most likely won't) change. The second problem, maybe we can work on - compiling a list of decent web hosts, and keeping track of problems and sucesses. Any thoughts?
Whatever you do... don't read this.
If it seems too good to be true, generaly it's not true.
I wouldn't trust a web provider who had that kind of promotion of being very reliable or competent. Maybe I'm just cynical like that. Of course, my current provider is cut-rate, but doesn't offer huge promos either. They have basic service for basic prices and I've been happy thus far.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
and they wont answer the phone.. funny for a company that states that customer service is a "cornerstone of their business".. www.cihostsucks.org www.msnbc/news/353491.asp?cp1=1
It is very much the responsibility of the web server company to keep backups.
An absurd contention. It's not their data. Why should they care?
One of the very reasons people pay to have their sites hosted is cause they don't have the cash or bandwidth themselves to host their own site.
So what? I don't have the cash to fund a flight to Mars. Is my ISP therefore obligated to send me there? Don't be absurd.
If this turns out to be a issue of fraud or incompetence then it is up to the legal system to stomp on these morons
You're insane. If they have committed fraud (they haven't, obviously, but I'm speaking hypothetically) the market will take care of it. They will get a bad name and they will lose customers. This is not an issue in which the government has any need to get involved. In fact, it is CIHosting's customers who are almost certainly guilty of fraud. They are now suffering the consequences of their stupidity.
Barring government intervention, bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people. If something bad happens to you, and the government didn't cause it, you brought it on yourself and all the "victim" rhetoric and whining in the world won't change that. If you fail, you are a failure. Period. Don't whimper at me about the details, because I don't care.
I certaintely think the way microsoft has threaten oem's with lawsuits or loss of discounts if they don't only ship 100% microsoft pc's is criminal and needs to be looked into.
I get the impression that you also support coerced abortions in China. Microsoft has a perfect right to protect their investment in their innovative technology. If these OEM's don't want to sell Microsoft products, they don't have to. If they do want to take advantage of all the great features of Windows, they can damn well play ball with Microsoft.
If Microsoft has the capability to control the entire industry, then by definition they have earned it and should be left in peace to do with the industry as they see fit.
Many of the sites that the uninitiated user would go to for comparisons of hosting companies receive money from the hosting companies for positive reviews.
It's pretty tough to get an objective appraisal of where to spend your hosting cash. Especially if you aren't technical enough to tell when people are bullshitting you...
I've worked with 6 different web hosting companies in the last 3 years as a developer and reseller, and I've never come across one that is "Perfect". I've never used CI Host but I cannot say I'm surprised, all these companies seem like they put up a good front and you don't really know what you are getting into. But this looked like a good moment to put my 2 cents in... Hiway.com, apparently the largest web hosting company, their service is pretty good, but they are located in Florida. A couple years ago during a Huricane they turned off my site for 6 hours, they gave me some story about how they wanted to move the server to the basement were it would be safe. Otherwise they generally seem professional, but they have a real "Get in the back of the line" attitude about tech support. Simplenet.com, this company was all the rage a few years ago, they were aquired by Yahoo and you almost never hear about them anymore. Generally reliable, but very limited range of services. Their tech support was bad about 2 years ago, haven't used them recently. Superb.net, They have had their share of problems, I think they actually maybe trying to offer too much for too little money. They also host porn sites under another name, don't get me wrong, I'm not morally opposed to porn, I am bothered that my web site performance might be degraded by a bunch of one-handed-typers. Also there were some pictures of their "Network Operations Center" floating around the internet about a year ago which look more like a shoe lace factory exploded than what they have on their web site. Tierra.net, their service is pretty good, they have the best tech support I have ever encountered but they only have phone staff 9-5 mon-fri, not as helpful during non-business hours. Web2010.com, "over 300 T-3's", my ass, liars, every last one of them (nuff said). Webhosting.com, their service is actually pretty good but they have no billing dept. They will never issue you a refund, and they will continue to charge you after you close your account, and they will never answer you, or return calls reguarding billing issues. They are probably alright as long as you never have a billing dispute and never want to cancel :)
A lot of companies would be better off using Small ISP's. Smaller ISP's are almost always willing to give you more bang for your buck. They don't charge enourmous amounts of money and you have a better chance of getting a human on the other end rather then an automated attendent. When you call, ask them how long they have been around... the average lifespan of bankrupt/closed down companies in this world is about 3 years. If they live past then, they are pretty well as solid as the next guy.
If you are a small company chances are your webpage is not going to garner gobs of bandwidth at one time... even the little ISP with a 128K ISDN connection can easily serve up your pages to people in a reasonable amount of time. Ie. At home I have a 56K modem... at work I have a T1. Slashdot loads at the same speed for both. I get 6k per second on my home machine... and I get 80-100 on my work machine at peak so its not my server because they are both using the same pipe.
People need to get out of this frame of mind that bigger is better. It isn't... with bigger you have red tape. You have cutbacks where they have 3 guys tech supporting 10,000 users. Sure with the smaller ISP you may not get 24/7 tech service.. or you may even pay a little bit more for one specific thing but in a lot of cases cheaper isn't better. If your business hosting needs are dependent on 24/7 support then you need a Network Service Provider. If your business was so dependent on uptime that it would kill your profit margin by being down for 8 hours because your ISP staff is asleep then you need the bigger guy... even then you can find medium sized companies that have higher levels of tech support options available. I would be willing to bet that some of the best webhosting companies out there are small timers who will stay small because they won't sacrifice quantity for quality.
Just my 2 cents... keep them in mind when you need a business (or even personal) internet solution.
- Xabbu
- Jimbob
I just looked at www.cihost.com, it seems to be up, all the pages came up. But they are still talking about their award-winning service, blah blah blah. No word as to what happened and no acknowledgement that it even happened at all.
-- Error: Cannot find file REALITY.SYS - Universe halted, please reboot!
Last year about this time, my host, 9NetAve had an 'incident',which was described as a hard drive crash during the backup procedure. My site was lost completely. Apparently they only ever had one set of tapes, and it was lost. Just because your host is a large one, doesnt mean they know what the fsck they are doing.
-=Bob
Oh No, No, No, No!
1/2 Price Hosting SUCKS. My site has gone down several times (conventiently on the weekend) and cannot be brought back up until the following Monday. (You'd think they have people to monitor that sort of thing).
Now, they are the host of mariahcarey.org, which should be a BIG selling point to anyone (I say in jest).
There mail server is slow (try connecting to their mail server #247 -- impossible MOST of the time).
My personal site is still there, no reason to move, no visits anyway There connection is slow and packet loss is HIGH. As soon as I feel like working on my personal site, it's moving.
If their support amounted to a small mound of crap, their prices may make up for there downtime, but as it is -- THERE IS NO REASON TO STAY THERE!
We recently moved our BUSINESS e-commerce site to Interland.com. 24/7 support (and knowledgable support at that) and awesome connection speeds.
There online admin pages rock too. They're slighlty more than Half price Hosting, but any legit business ite is better suited to paying for quaility. Unfortunately (or fortunately I suppose), the old saying, "You get what you pay for," is true.
You geeks need to work in the real world -- see your backup "ideals" squashed by the realities of lack of money. Watch someone tell you to run a 40,000 website with not enough people, not enough equipment. Watch shit crash and burn and customers screaming in your face cause your incompentent. It all comes back to money. Give engineers enough money and this stuff doesnt happen. Think about the mars probes "faster, cheaper" --- yeah right.
The sites were down for a day, and the first "responce" I recieved concerning it was not from ciHost, but from another hosting company. They evidently sent email to everyone who used ciHost's nameserver. Perhaps not the most ethical course of action, but certainly a timely one.
It was a full day before I heard anything official fro ciHost, and --although one of my sites was (and has remains to this time) down-- Their rosey press-release email told the story of the problem you're now familiar with and that they said was solved.
Prompt, honest answers would have kept me as client.
Lloyd Sommerer
I see they finally changed their little y2k problem... but if someone didn't get to see it, you can check the screenshot on my site at:
http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~ejs211
BTW- I also have a description of my nightmare with cihost on the rantings section... Well I guess we'll have to sit here and wait till these jerks put the phone back on the hook so I can tell them to kill my account. Oh yeah... and yesterday (get this) they -=BILLED=- my account for another 27 bucks... I called American Express and told them the story, forwarded them the article on cnet, and pointed them to slashdot to verify the problem. Even American Express told me that they'd kill the bill since even -=THEY=- could not contact Cihost.
As I've stated in my other posts, if someone files a class action suit, please email me. If the suit has a lot of power, I may contribute one or two thousand dollars to help legal fees.
I'm just fuming at these jerks, and they deserve what's coming to them.
-Eddie
...an attempt to serious work on a Microsoft OS is precisely that.
However, this morning I checked my credit card balance only to discover that CI Host today charged me for another 3 months ofservice, even though I was paid through (around) January 15th. I would know the exact date if I could actually view my invoice online, but as with cisupport.com, this part of CI Host is still not operational. However, I signed up on October 15th and paid for three months in advance.
Needless to say, I was pissed and immediately called my credit card company to dispute the charge. I am also attempting to call CI Host, but I'm only getting busy signals when I dial their 1-888-868-9931 number. I highly suggest that anyone who cancelled accounts with CI Host to make sure they didn't charge you for another billing period.
Speaking of coerced abortions... (you lame shill)
...an attempt to serious work on a Microsoft OS is precisely that.
Microsoft, and Microsoft alone, created the computer industry and the Internet industry. Microsoft, and Microsoft alone, created the boom economy of the 1990's. Now radical left-wing ideologues like you want to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, but a million retarded pygmies cannot kill one giant of genius.
You will lose.
Also remember to test that you can restore from backup. I worked at a company with an elaborate backup plan incorporating daily, weekly, monthly and annual backups with some onsite and offsite storage of backups. But they had never tested recovery. When it came time to restore some files, they discovered that the backups were unreadable. That is not the time to learn this.
From the O'Reilly book Practical Unix Security:
When was the last time you backed up your computer?
a. today
b. this week
c. this month
d. this year
e. never
f. My computer is already against the wall and can not be backed up any further.
If your answer is a or b, good for you. If your answer is c, d or e, put the book down and back up your computer. If your answer is f, keep reading; everything is just fine.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
HOW ABOUT FREAKING POST OFFICES YOU IDIOT, you expect them to deliver your package and if they don't then they have to pay for it. By your stupid logic I guess the customer should be responsible for flying the postage plane and making sure it don't crash and lose your package.
The US Postal Service is a massive welfare program, a socialist Big Government scam. I do no business with them. Only a hard-core liberal like you would fail to grasp the difference between a communist welfare scam and a legitimate business.
As for the rest of your so-called "argument" here, it's not even worthy of my attention. Contracts should be enforced by the market itself. If I have a written contract with FedEx to deliver a package, they are free to do as they see fit with it, and if I don't like the results, I am free to complain to others. Ultimately, if they provide poor service, they will go out of business.
The inexorable laws of the market ensure that conditions are always optimal. If you can't understand that simple axiom, you are a more degraded left-wing ideologue than I had thought.
A week of downtime is what is unacceptable.
Is that specified in your contract? If it's not in your contract, you essentially told them that it is acceptable. If you don't require them to do it, why should they spend extra money to do it?. If it is in your contract, then they took your money and lied about what you'd get - time to sue sue sue.
Check out Kimmel and Silverman, the Computer Lemon Law Attorneys.. They advertise: Simply call Kimmel & Silverman, The Lemon Law Attorneys at 1-800-LEMON-LAW (800-536-6652). You can also fill out our form and submit by e-mail. We'll do the rest, quickly and efficiently to get you a NEW COMPUTER or FULL REFUND at absolutely no charge to you. That's right, Kimmel & Silverman's service is FREE, win or lose!!
I have no connection with them, but I called them, and they say they handle this sort of thing.
CI Host has a blurb on their home page making note that they've made one of the top 3 out of 15000+ hosting companines. Wonder if that award can be taken away. ;)
Here's the blurb for the motivationally-challenged:
Award Winning Service
C I Host leads the web hosting industry by providing and upholding true commitment to customer care. The belief that customer satisfaction and trust are the key factors to our success makes C I Host the premier choice for consumers and businesses in over 128 countries worldwide. C I Host is also consistently rated in the Top 3 of 15,000+ hosting companies by HostIndex and The Ultimate Web Host List. Speed, reliability, affordable pricing and superior customer service are the hallmark of success at C I Host
--
I've been co-locating my web server at Global Online Electronic Services. My server is more of an educational toy for my friends and I than anything. So we suffer no great loss if something goes wrong. However, if I ever need to host anything serious, I'll probably still stick with GOES.
:) I became aquainted with the owner, Norm, at a fair at the local college. The cool thing about it is that Norm is an ISP because that's what he loves to do. He loves having his own T3, servers, and racks of modems.
:)
GOES is a local ISP in Hackettstown, NJ (where M&M's come from
Norm's a BSD guy, but he's got at least one member of his tech support staff that's a Linux nut. They're very knowledgable, know me by name, and eager to help. In fact, they seem genuinely interested in what we're doing.
Point: I understand that a small ISP may not suit everyone, and not all local ISP's are alike. However, it's certainly worth considering because there are benefits to dealing with someone who will actually know who you are once you start with them. And, if they're local, you can always harass them in person if something goes wrong
Anyway, I moved ~1000 miles south as the car [sic] flies since the time I started doing business there. I'm using Linux so it's not as if I ever need to visit the box anyway.
Oh, another bit...I did have a problem with the server not rebooting once. It refused to detect the SCSI adapter all of a sudden and I figured the adapter was dead. Norm called the owner of the computer store located in the same building. He came up and fixed it--then wouldn't even let me pay him for his time because all he had to do was re-seat the SCSI card. You don't get that kind of support when you're dealing with a big companies...
numb
In the world of full out ecommerce sites, this just isn't reasonable. These sites take in so much info, it isn't just slapping some HTML on your local machine. We are talking about hundreds of transactions a minute. Think about it. How would SlashDot keep a local copy? This isn't the world of homepages with pictures of your cat anymore. Ebay goes down for eight hours and their stock drops thirty points. That is the real world now-a-days.
I think people should stop dealing with cihost all together. a whois on cihostsucks.com shows they actually realize they aren't to favorable in the market's eye. I've been *extreamly* pleased with my webhost WebServe Pro...
I just called CI Host to have them cancel one of my accounts, took 4 tries to get through but the lady was polite. She informed me their accounts database is down and that to cancel my account, I needed to fax them and they will do it once their system is back up.
The problems never end...
Anyone who really knows me knows I am a card carying member of the relgious right so I don't need to prove it to a meathead like you.
Hey, don't fly off the handle here! As long as we agree about killing all the foreigners (and a few others who it's not polite to mention -- I think you know what I mean
If you still want to host within Texas, drop by www.cscweb.net. Service is great, machines are fast.
We have 5 sites with Mindspring, and are going to move them all. I'm actively looking for a new host. Our main site, which gets about 15,000 hits a day goes down about 1-3 hours every 2 weeks or so on average. I call up mindspring every time, and they just say "yeah, we're having some problems with that server now, just check back in a few hours." meanwhile we're losing business and viewers. I've talked to the highest people I can & havn't seen any change. This has been going on for at least 4 mos. Any suggestions for hosts?
My letter of recommendation for Cihost back in April '99 and their response. Thought I would post it. Hi, I am considering using CIHOST to host a couple of web sites and I understand you are a customer. I was wondering if you could provide me with your impressions about their service, how long you have been using them and whether you'd recommend them. Positives and negatives. Any info would be most appreciated. Sincerely, Dan XXX Webmaster ***************************** Dear Dan, We used Cihost for a little over a year. We started tinkering around with a meta search engine script and threw it online not knowing how fast it would take off. Anyway, to make a long story short, Cihost shut us down without any notice. It's not like we has a huge spike of hits, it was a steady increase month to month. It would have been nice to have them send us a letter saying byteSearch was nearing the limit of system rescources. We went ahead and got a dedicated server with them. Cihost told me we would me up and running within a week. Took three weeks to get byteSearch up and running again after about three dozen calls and e-mails. A lot of time wasted. More than one of the techs I talked to on the phone promised to have it up and running and then get in touch with me to let me know the job was done. Never heard back from them. Finally after 2 weeks of going back and forth a customer service person replyed to one of my e-mails after I wanted my money back. She might of done something. I do not know. She never followed up with me. I then got a hostle e-mail from a tech who said that since his sysop makes 100,000 a year then it must be OUR problem. For the postives? They are cheap. I guess we will have to take our lumps. It will not be long:) In closing, bad business and bad customer service. You get what you pay for. Hope this helps. Best Regards, Ty Smith byteSearch Inc. ty@bytesearch.com http://www.byteSearch.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Ty Smith To: Sent: Sunday, April 25, 1999 9:30 PM Subject: FW: Request for reference for CIHost Dear Erin, We do get these requests for recommendations about Cihost quite frequently. Here's how I have been responding as of late. Best Regards, Ty Smith byteSearch Inc. ty@bytesearch.com Please take care of this today. Remedy byteSearch's problems. Hello I am writing to hopefully change the response you give to people when they ask who you use for hosting. I understand that I would be upset if it took a long time to get something I wanted and payed for. I can only say we got the server up and going as fast as the pieces came and could be put together, yes we are a lower cost but to discuss our customer service level based on this one thing is unfair. If someone calls to ask you about a hosting service why are you telling them about a dedicated server problem, thats not what they are asking you. I realize that you give us a good grade at first untill you became so popular that you had to get a dedicated server? We have done nothing but try to help, we don't set up dedicated servers in the call center we just request them. If you are so disastisfied with our service why do your investors approve? Please stop sending this letter out to people. And finally since your investors make you host with us, where do go for your own hosting? Why don't you state this in your letter? Best regards Jason McCarthy Support Manager ----- Original Message ----- From: Erin Bullock - VP - Customer Relations To: Sent: Monday, April 26, 1999 9:07 AM Subject: Fw: Request for reference for CIHost
My letter of recommendation for Cihost back in April '99 and their response. Thought I would post it.
Hi,
I am considering using CIHOST to host a couple of web sites and I understand you are a customer. I was wondering if you could provide me with your
impressions about their service, how long you have been using them and whether you'd recommend them. Positives and negatives.
Any info would be most appreciated.
Sincerely,
Dan XXX
Webmaster
*****************************
Dear Dan,
We used Cihost for a little over a year. We started tinkering around with a meta search engine script and threw it online not knowing how fast it would take off. Anyway, to make a long story short, Cihost shut us down without any notice. It's not like we has a huge spike of hits, it was a steady increase month to month. It would have been nice to have them send
us a letter saying byteSearch was nearing the limit of system rescources.
We went ahead and got a dedicated server with them. Cihost told me we would me up and running within a week. Took three weeks to get byteSearch
up and running again after about three dozen calls and e-mails. A lot of time wasted.
More than one of the techs I talked to on the phone promised to have it up and running and then get in touch with me to let me know the job was done. Never heard back from them.
Finally after 2 weeks of going back and forth a customer service person replyed to one of my e-mails after I wanted my money back. She might of
done something. I do not know. She never followed up with me. I then got a hostle e-mail from a tech who said that since his sysop makes 100,000 a
year then it must be OUR problem.
For the postives? They are cheap. I guess we will have to take our lumps. It will not be long:)
In closing, bad business and bad customer service. You get what you pay for. Hope this helps.
Best Regards,
Ty Smith
byteSearch Inc.
ty@bytesearch.com
http://www.byteSearch.com
----- Original Message -----
From: Ty Smith
To:
Sent: Sunday, April 25, 1999 9:30 PM
Subject: FW: Request for reference for CIHost
Dear Erin,
We do get these requests for recommendations about Cihost quite frequently. Here's how I have been responding as of late.
Best Regards,
Ty Smith
byteSearch Inc.
ty@bytesearch.com
Please take care of this today. Remedy byteSearch's problems.
Hello
I am writing to hopefully change the response you give to people when they
ask who you use for hosting. I understand that I would be upset if it took
a long time to get something I wanted and payed for. I can only say we got
the server up and going as fast as the pieces came and could be put
together, yes we are a lower cost but to discuss our customer service level
based on this one thing is unfair. If someone calls to ask you about a
hosting service why are you telling them about a dedicated server problem,
thats not what they are asking you. I realize that you give us a good grade
at first untill you became so popular that you had to get a dedicated
server? We have done nothing but try to help, we don't set up dedicated
servers in the call center we just request them. If you are so disastisfied
with our service why do your investors approve? Please stop sending this
letter out to people. And finally since your investors make you host with
us, where do go for your own hosting? Why don't you state this in your
letter?
Best regards
Jason McCarthy
Support Manager
----- Original Message -----
From: Erin Bullock - VP - Customer Relations
To:
Sent: Monday, April 26, 1999 9:07 AM
Subject: Fw: Request for reference for CIHost
'Cause this guy is so pathetic I am laughing! *chuckle*
www.strade.com
Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand (bash.org)
Okay, I feel sorry for all the businesses out there that got hosed for thousands of dollars in this.
But seriously, who would stake thousands of dollars in inventory, advertising, time, labor, etc., on a damn cut-rate host company?
If your business is worth anything to you, you should have at least one dedicated server for it, with someone who knows how to administer it available to fix it. Rent for storefronts costs thousands of dollars a month, $500 for a high-quality basic Linux server is a bargain by comparison.
Setting up a real business with one of these places is the Internet's equivalent of setting a store up in a ghetto. So these people didn't know that? Then they have no business in e-commerce. They bet their future on something they don't really comprehend, and that's just plain foolish.
-cwk.
Am I the only that thinks they were hacked and had all their customers files deleted and had to restore them? Think about it, they were completely offline for two days, you couldn't even route to there IPs. If my network had tons of machines hacked into, I probably turn off my network until I figured out what was going on. Now they're back up and files appear to have been restored copies.
Just my impression.
hostindex.com is one of the places where you can vote for (or against) hosting services.
I've been entering a "poor" vote for C I Host daily for the past week or so.
They went from #3 in December to #6 in January. So, VOTE!
Your first mistake was to sign up with an "inexpensive service".
Fast servers, decent bandwidth, competent staff, and timely backups all cost money. If you are looking for a place to host your mom's recipe book this may not be an issue, but if you are going to depend on your web site you'd better be prepared to pay for your hosting. If I remember correctly, one of the people quoted in the MSNBC article said the service outage had cost their company $10-15K. If your web site means this much to your business DO NOT have it hosted at a $29.95/month hosting company. This is the wrong place to try and save a buck!!
Bigger is not necessarily better, unless you are going to someone like UUNet, IBM, or the like. Otherwise you are likely to get much better service (and perhaps even an indication that your business is important to them) if you go to a smaller hosting provider. Local isn't a bad idea either. Who knows, maybe you might want to have a look at those "Dual PIII 400" servers sometime, just to make sure they actually exist.
Give some serious thought to providing your own hosting, especially if you have the technical ability. You'll spend less time on hold, sleep better (unless you use NT), and have complete control over your site.
I had the same dilema that you had. I went with www.voxel.net They have an excellent connection to the net and their customer service is great. I e-mailed them Saturday night with some question about their service and they got back to me Sunday morning; they even left their cell phone number!! They are a bit pricer than most people out there but the level of service is great. I also looked at pair.net and he.net . He.net took three days to get back to me and pair.net never did. Good luck.
>It's not CIHosting's problem. You should maintain your own backups.
>They are not responsible for your incompetence and laziness. Any idiot
>knows that disks sometimes crash, so the problem is with the idiots
>who don't get it. If you lost your shirt in this mess, fuck you. You
>deserve it. Period. End of story.
Thank you for posting. You and your fellow *SNAKE-OIL SALESMEN* just keep on shooting your mouths off and we'll have all the regulations we want and more on the sites created by people like yourself without having to lift a finger to do anything.
I have been trying to get through with no luck. There's no way in hell I will fax in that form to them, in which I authorize them to take their final charges from my credit card. They make very prominent "guarantees", but the legal fine print absolves them of just about everything. Legal precedent shows that you simply can't wash your hands of everything with a disclaimer, even when the customer signed something. This is ridiculous. I hope they get what they deserve.
Well, I finally got through, only to be put on some sort of surreal "hold" cycle. I pressed the button for cust. service, but got a message telling me to hold for Unix support. This was followed by a very odd series of beeps, sort of like a call waiting signal, but more frequent. This was punctuated by the occasional blaring sales pitch, crowing about their 29,000 clients and Top 4 rating. (The stories I read said they had 48,000 domains... hmm.) I still sit here on hold, becoming increasingly nauseated by the marketing-speak periodically injected into my ear. What a nightmare!!!
Well my gaming site is one of the many sites to bite it on cihost. A year ago this would have been a big deal, but I've kind of let it go since I started working for an internet startup too. I do actually have a backup from 5 months ago at home. :) Paul
I have went through the worse week of my life with this server outage at CI HOST. I signed up for my trial 30 days of service just before the CI HOST crash. Everything was going fine for the first week or so of my service then on the 29th my site www.mouthtalk.com (a site for audio/video user contributed commentary daily events) would not load up. I started getting emails from friends and users about the site being down. I checked into it, and sure enough the site was done. So I contacted CI HOST. Customer Service told me that this would only affect me for an hour tops. Two hours later I call back, and they tell me three more hours at the most. I called 24 hours later, and got a canned message saying that it would only be three more hours. The message explained that they had some problems with a DNS upgrade and they were finishing up the upgrade. On the 31st I tried to get through, with no luck, the phones stayed busy all day. I sent countless emails, but they never were replied to. The companies support (www.cisupport.com) was also down, though their main site (www.cihost.com) was up as nothing was wrong. Finally I got through after hundreds of attempts on New Years Day. I asked to have my account canceled and I was told that I would have to call back and talk to Customer Service Monday morning (3rd) after 9am. All through New Years weekend, my service was still down. Finally after 4 hours of constant busy signals I got through to Customer Service on Monday. I was told that I could only cancel my account by going to (www.cancel.cihost.com) I tried to do so while I was on the phone with 'Steve', but that site was down as well. I asked to speak to a supervisor, but was told there was not anyone around. I asked 'Steve' how I was to cancel my account, since their site was down, he said, that was the only way. I asked him repeatably while he could not do so, but he would not answer that question. Finally he transferred me to Accounting. Accounting told me to mail them a letter and they would process it when they could. I explained that I was still on my trial period and did not want to be charged anything because of my 30 day money back plan. I tried for the next two days to get through to the (www.cancel.cihost.com) site but it stayed down as did my site. Finally on Wednesday the 6th (a week after my troubles started) I managed to get through to the cancel site. Once I cancelled my account online, I was prompted to print out a document and fax it to them. The document stated that I would have to waive any "chargeback" attempts. It also stated that if I did not send in this form with my VISA account information that they would not cancel my account, and would continue to charge me. I finally signed the account, to hopefully but a end to my week of horrors. Down the drain: a $70 domain name, which they will most likely take forever to release for me to transfer it to another service, and my $50 setup fee which is not refundable. All of this for a 1/2 month of nothing. As well I have lost many users to my site and revenue generated by Banner Ads.
I find it very hard to to deal with this on many levels. First I joined CIHost because they ran on Linux, and offered a great amount of perks. My domains did have some trouble from the 29th 'till the 4th. Mostly it's very sluggish and I can't make changes sometimes. I have one domain that was pending going on-line, but it seams to be lost. That doesn't bother me. I hope this smooths out in a day or two. I'm not jumping ship. If you'd like to see my CIHosted site then check it out: www.GaragEquipment.com Slashdot me. :)
Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most.
If you need carrier-class reliablity, you should Level 3.
Their core business is voice-over-IP for carriers like ATT, MCI and PacBell. They also provide colocation services, barebones, with guarenteed power and connectivity. You provide the rest.
I have been to many, many hosting facilities and have build a number of really high profile sites, and Level 3 is definetly the best so far.
Chris.
-- I don't have a cool sig.
Has anyone heard of this service? You pay 200 bucks for 200 mbs for life. No real restrictions. I have contemplated using it, however, I am afraid, they will take my money and then close down after 3 months. Or maybe I am just being paranoid, but personally I think that 200 mbs for the rest of your life is a pretty good deal or am I wrong? www.nomonthlyfees.com
Ben
Is that specified in your contract? If it's not in your contract, you essentially told them that it is acceptable. If you don't require them to do it, why should they spend extra money to do it?
OK, its not in his contract, so he has no legal recourse. Who cares? Smart business isn't about doing exactly what you stated to your customer and fuck all else, its about making your customers happy, even when the proverbial shit hits the fan. In this case, CI seems to have dropped the ball. Did they violate the contracts that they held with their customers? Probably not. Is that little fact going to keep a truckload of their customers from finding another hosting service? Likely not! Anyone who runs a business with the attitude of, "Well, were doing just what we stated we would and no more" is looking to go out of business in a very big hurry.
Your question was, "If you don't require them to do it, why should they spend extra money to do it?" The simple answer is: Because that's how smart business is done. CI probably won't get sued over this little fiasco, but I'd hate to be in their office when next months financials come out.
Deosyne
-Eddie
-------- Email from Siobhan G. O'Brien:
I have sent an email to everyone who has
contacted me in regards to joining together to
form a class action lawsuit against CI Host.
If I have missed anyone who is interested in
joining, please let me know and I will add you
to the list. Please email me directly at
me@evolvedsites.com so that I will
know you are interested.
I am hoping to have some further details to
report on their liability tomorrow.
Siobhan G. O'Brien
President
Siobhan Envisions Evolved Websites
For Today .... and Tomorrow
http://www.evolvedsites.com
http://www.siobhanenvisions.com
(312) 642-0351 Fax: (312) 896-1473
Email: mailto:me@evolvedsites.com
------------
I also suggest that we follow "gbnewby"'s remark and go to:
http://www.hostindex.com
and vote cihost "poor" - render their bribery useless!!!
-Eddie
I bet that posting was from the president of cihost himself! I heard he put out cease-and-desist orders on serveral sites in the past for talking about cihost's poor service. Since he can't do that here, he'll post crap like this...
I am with them now for about 2 months, and they seem OK (not exceptionaly great, but good value for money).
They use Red Hat Linux on Intel servers from a larger (and more expensive) hosting company called Alabanza.com
They have a lot of nice features, including free parking of extra domains (I host Baheyeldin.com, as well as 2BITS and Muslim Investor all out of one account on NoMonthlyFees.com. Also, a few subdomains as well, including Saudi Arabia Internet Service Providers and Middle East Internet Statistics, and my own personal site khalid.baheyeldin.com.
They offer you stuff that others charge for, like mailing lists, lots of POP accounts, MySQL, PHP, ...etc. They charge extra for SSH access (there is no Telnet due to security reasons).
I think about it this way: at 180$ for lifetime hosting, this comes up to 15$ a month for a year, which is about what you pay for others or even less. Anything after that is a free bonus for me...
Downsides:
- The Apache log sometimes doesn't get written to at all for a whole day. It has been a few weeks since I reported the problem and they haven't solved it (well it was the holiday season in the USA,
...etc., so may be that is it...) - They have a few minutes of downtime every few days for some reason, but I can live with that...
E-Mail me if you have specific questions...2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Check it out at: http://www.cihost.com/cihoststatement.html dated January 5, 1999 Makes you wonder if they're paying attention to the details, eh?
After all the problems I had with CIHost during december and into january I wrote to Christopher Faulkner the CEO and stated that I believed CIHost should compensate me.
I indicated that I would accept as compensation an upgrade from the 'special' package I originaly signed for in february of last year to their 'special' as now advertised at the same price. The current special includes more than double the disk space and ten times as many emails as my original package.
I also indicated that if he did this I would regard it as adequate compensation for the inconvenience caused and would be happy to post to the news group and to slashdot to that effect.
In his reply he says.
This has been done and will be done for EVERY C I Host client beginning tonight. So you can post that if you dont mind in the flame group where you are posting other things. I would GREATLY appreciate that. Again, every C I Host client will be given a no cost upgrade to our current special listed at www.cihost.com/specials.html
This is not very friendly but **is** a clear statement that cihost will upgrade not just me but **all** clients to the current special at no cost. He further indicated that James Miller james@cihost.com was handling this.
As mentioned above I regard this as reasonable compensation for the downtime I have suffered and I intend to accept the offer.
Alan Cowderoy.
I also use HE and am a reseller. If you want to sign up and would like programming or development support, drop me a line (pdohara@techneex.com). I have had no problems with HE nor have my customers.