I cannot tell you how pleased I was with Version12. The service, support, friendliness (imagine that with a hosting company) was all wonderful. Now, 5SC has taken over and let me tell you, it has been a roller coaster ride from hell.

I run a website which generates revenue every day from advertisements (I get 120,000 hits a day). During the transition everything seemed to go smoothly, but when I came back from my vacation to my surprise my server (VALinux) was/is not responding.

I hadn't even had access to the machine before it went down. So, I go home and check mail, they are asking me for my contact info, credit card # etc etc just like any other normal hosting company does. They didn't realize my server was DOWN! What type of company doesn't even monitor the servers???!!!

All this happened in the past 5 days (it has been down since Friday). Their webmaster tells me for him to fix it I have to pay $125/hour :angry: - I don't think so. As of tongiht, my server is still not back up.

I'm sorry if I seemed to rant and complain, but a business always relies on the type of service they provide you. If I were to describe the service I've had so far, pick your favorite 4 letter word.

If anyone has experienced similar problems let me know because this shouldn't be going on.

Regards,
Paul Roberts

wow
get your server outta there
and go with someone else asap

obviously your site is too precious to be down like that

This sounds like a lawsuit to me.

After the dust if finally settling, it appears that I have come out on top. Not because I've lost a huge advertising contract because of another company's incompetance, because I am letting everyone on WHT know of 5SC's poor business practices.

I'm venting because I've never had such a disgrace of service in my life. Here's what they told me

I must also inform you, that since this is a problem with your box and not the attached DNS or routing, a standard engineering rate of $125/hr will apply to any service that I perform on the server itself.

Ahem - bullsh*t!. So, today I actually made it to the datacenter. Very, very helpful people, but guess what, they don't even work for 5SC (there are no helpful people at 5SC). So I take a look around at the server, check the IPs, check the DNS...and the DNS was wrong. My site's IP address was incorrect along with the DNS they were providing.

It has also come to my attention that 5SC doesn't allow pornography on their network. Well, since I was a customer of V12 I knew some of the sites names such as "nvbrothels.net." I imagine that a list of the domain names were given to 5SC at the time of sale and they didn't say anything about "no porn allowed" because on another thread:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=16936

they found out the hard way.

In closing, my final thoughts about 5SC...the better business bureau will here from me about 5SC, and I hope that my fellow peers for webhosting stay as far away as possible from them.

Best Regards,
Paul Roberts

I could not agree more. Allan and version 12 used to respond to my emails immediately. I had a great deal of trouble contacting 5sc customer support. The phone number on the 5sc website doesn't work, and it took 16 hours before anyone responded to my emails.

My site has adult content, but I do not consider it pornographic. It is primarily a source of information. 5sc removed my site without any warning because of the content.

5sc has agreed to temporarily put my site online again, so I can download my files. This occurred more than eight hours ago and it is still not up.

<EDIT: It has been 24 hours and my site is still not up. I fear that I will never be able to download my files.>

My site gets hundreds of thousands of hits per day and I have been flooded with emails about the downtime. I liked version12, but I would not recommend 5sc.

I also hosted with Version12 and had a most enjoyable experience. 5SC are nothing but a bunch of monkeys who escaped from the local zoo. When they initially took over V12's customers, they transferred a bunch of servers to their preferred datacenter. At the same time, a fibre connection was severed in one of V12's other datacenters - the one we were in.

After many emails trying to point out that the server move has nothing to do with the fact our server had been down for 3 hours, we were eventually informed of the problem - a rain had been derailed and severed the fibre link.

The most concerning thing regarding the situation I was in was the fact the guy I was dealing with didn't seem to understand that we had a 45 day uptime - even though we had apparently been moved to a new datacenter 3 hours previously. I had no response until 12 hours after the scenario first arose, and the problem had been gone for a good 6 hours.

We are due to renew our contract at the end of August - whether we do or not is still undecided. I feel for all who have been bitten in the whole scenario - I also feel bad for Allan and Roseanne. I really doubt they had any idea of the implications when they decided to sell out.

Regarding this particular problem - you lease the server, and it's your own dedicated server. If I was running a business like 5SC, I'd let you host WTF you wanted on your own server! Who are they to lock you down? You're not sharing resources with anybody else other than network connectivity, which should be fairly easy to monitor.

You buy your own bandwidth each month - who are they to tell you you can't use it for porn? All that tells me is they are concerned their network can't handle the load you're placing on it.

NVB - depending on the size of your site, I'd be willing to let you zip it up and transfer it onto one of our servers for downloading in the future :).

Good luck :).

Rich

For one, I signed a contract with Version12 - not 5SC. And the other thing is, they haven't provided the service that was promissed in the contract I signed. So that means I can breach the contract whenever I want :).

Just thought I'd let you guys in on that little bit of info.

-Paul

Originally posted by PaulRoberts
For one, I signed a contract with Version12 - not 5SC. And the other thing is, they haven't provided the service that was promissed in the contract I signed. So that means I can breach the contract whenever I want :).

Just thought I'd let you guys in on that little bit of info.

-Paul

As far as who you signed your contract with that doesnt matter. But as long as they have breached the contract first you can leave them whenever you please.

Well, I am very upset with 5Star. Allan and Roseanne did a wonderful job. They never charged me for doing anything, except my regular quarterly payments.

However, a few things were never set up on my server. One was OpenSHH. Everytime the server was rebooted, it failed to load. Allan moved my server to a new subnet because the speed was lagging and Visual Route showed PRIZ*Net as the problem. After that, the server screamed. But, even if I tried to start OpenSSH manually, it failed.

It was immediately after this move that 5Star took over. When I mentioned the problem with OpenSSH, this is what I got back:

I'm taking a look into it now.. I'm having trouble with my admin interface for webmin currently, and Allan is in the loop on it... are you functioning smoothly otherwise?

Then I get:

If you require engineering consulting on that box with regards to OpenSSH, I must inform you that the standard engineering rate for linux consulting on a dedicated machine is $125/hr. with a minimum 1 hour commit. Please let me know if you would like me to resolve the problem on your machine. Thanks
again!

Well, I got the OpenSHH resolved on my own through the Webmin interface. It was a royal pain.

Right now my server is down. Easymonitor (www.easymonitor.com - an excellent tool!) is reporting it down for 1.5 hours now. I've tried calling, even the NOC and get no response. I ended up sending an email. I did get a fairly quick response:

We've talked to the MAE Dulles NOC; they are having routing problems; the 216.177.32.0/24 block is not being announced and is therefore not being routed. There is most likely not a problem with your system.

I'm not sure what the MAE Dulles NOC is. Is 5Star hosted by yet another company?

Anyway, I have one other problem. I recently had to cancel a debit card. I didn't close the account, just got a different number. This account is used only for my site. The only one who has ever the number is Version12. I am sure these records were transferred over to 5Star. The charge on my account (about $429) was used at a country club (Archery Shooters - well, the bank says it's a country club) in Florida. I live in Seattle. The charge came within a week of 5Star taking over. The bank says their investigation will close approximately in October.

Well, I thik it's time to look for another hosting company. My server is a hobby of mine, used to run online gaming leagues which is written in PHP. I currently run 6 leagues. I don't make any money off of it and run it as a service for the gaming community and as a learning experience for myself. About all I can afford is what I was paying Version12 ($140/month). If there are any takers out there, let me know.

Version12 had servers in a couple of datacenters, MAE Dullies was one of them. That's where mine is based.

5SC tech support stinks. They are so slow - not as slow as some I've seen, but I've waited 36 hours before now for a response(crap one at that!) to an urgent situation.

Rich

well, it was almost down for 8 hours (total) yesterday. Guess no one did anything until they came into work in the morning:

Date Time Description Duration

08.07.2001 21:01 HTTP Error 500 Can't connect to www.xendra.com:80 (Timeout) 5 hours, 39 mins
08.07.2001 03:19 HTTP Error 500 Can't connect to www.xendra.com:80 (Timeout) 1 hour, 5 mins
08.07.2001 02:05 HTTP Error 500 Can't connect to www.xendra.com:80 (Timeout) 56 mins

Hawkeye - Please email me ASAP at rich@inspa.net

Originally posted by Hawkeye
Anyway, I have one other problem. I recently had to cancel a debit card. I didn't close the account, just got a different number. This account is used only for my site. The only one who has ever the number is Version12. I am sure these records were transferred over to 5Star. The charge on my account (about $429) was used at a country club (Archery Shooters - well, the bank says it's a country club) in Florida. I live in Seattle. The charge came within a week of 5Star taking over. The bank says their investigation will close approximately in October.

I received some charges from an Archery Club on my credit card too. They are about what I would expect my monthly bill from 5star to be. I think that 5star charges their bills to an archery club for some reason.

Well, it appears this MAE Dulles issue is still on-going, as any connection to my server is near impossible at this time.

Customer support has not been all that bad really, from what I have seen, but it could be better. Even when companies claim to be "monitoring 24/7", they never seem to know when a site goes down before the actual owner for some reason :)

Also, when there ARE some serious network issues that affect many users, an email to all the customers alerting them to the problem, WOULD do wonders.

I certainly miss Allan and Roseanne :(

--Jim

MAE Dulles issues "appear" to have been cleared up. All connections and transfers seem to be at 100% again... for now.
Gaming Age (http://www.gaming-age.com) is back up once again

I still miss Allan and Roseanne though :)

--Jim