-SERVER DOWNTIME ALERT-
Error message: Connection refused
Hostname: ********
IP: *.***.**.***.
Server Type: HTTP Port: 80
Current server date/time: 10/04/2004 07:40:28
Estimated downtime: 815

Webreseller.net upgraded our Ensim server and it has been down for over 13.5 hours (815minutes). They have a 1800 number which no-one answers, simply a mailbox service. If you have a dedicated server here, you better pray that they answer their tickets, because your server will be left in the dark. Numerous attempts of requesting updates of when our server will be completed results in irrelevant "We escalated your query regarding upgrade to the concerned staff. He will get in touch with you very soon.".

Their support is severly lacking, there is probably a hint that this company is probably facing financial issues OR severly lacking in employees. If you are okay with hours of downtime then Webreseller is okay. They seem to have gone from great -> very bad. My instinct tells me something fishy is going on here....

:angry: :angry: :angry:

Another question: Does it usually take 13+ hours to upgrade Ensim Pro?

LOL to this statement at: http://www.webreseller.net/support.htm

"We have continued to keep the principle that every time your server is down you could potentially be losing money. Our goal oriented support staff is here to help you any way we can and make your experience with WebReseller.Net a profitable and worry free one."

Well I would like to say to Mr. Paul Rice / Robert Greenawalt we've probably lost $1000+ from this downtime. Looks like you've kept true to your company principles... NOT :angry:

THEY also LOCKED us out of our very own server BECAUSE...

After hours of downtime, and numerous ticket sents, unsuccessful phones, we notice an admin working on the server and used the "WALL" command to ask for an upgrade ETA. To our dismay they LOCKED our own admins out of our PAID servers and then stated that we were annoying them when the simple truth is WE just tried to get an ETA update on how long the upgrade will take. 13.5+ HOURS LATER, WE STILL CANNOT LOGIN TO THE SERVER BECAUSE WEBRESELLER has changed the password to our server and we do not know what it is because their support is not replying.

Hah thats funny.. "annoying them", however loosing 1000 on one server makes me raise an eyebrow.

universal2001. good luck to you! I've left Webreseller over a year ago. Last time they worked on my server, they screwed up everything, even my backup drive. I hope you have a full remote backup. They're simply the worst provider I've ever dealt with.

we are also their customer and yes, we have the same experience also but not to that extent - 13 hours. i hope they can do something with your problem soon.

I hope Rob can give an official statement on what is happening in their network or to their support.

Originally posted by hunkman
we are also their customer and yes, we have the same experience also but not to that extent - 13 hours. i hope they can do something with your problem soon.

I hope Rob can give an official statement on what is happening in their network or to their support.

Can I just know 1 thing from you all? Why in the world are you still choosing WebReseller.net as your hosting/reseller partner? If you already know that they have bad service and you still choose them, then you're the ones who is to be blamed.

There are tons of other hosting partners out there and they will be more than willing to take you on without hassles and etc and yet WebReseller.net was ur choice.

So here's my opinion... if they have bad service and you're still choosing them as your reseller partner, then if they give you bad service, they are not to be blamed but yourself.

But anyhow, I hope that you will get your stuff resolved ASAP! If you're totally not happy with them, then MOVE. You have that right, you're the person paying. If you stick with them then you do not have a say on WHT.

Take Care... Be good!

The server is still down, this is getting ridiculous. Webreseller.net has confirmed and topped the award for the most pathetic dedicated server company. The co-owners have no idea what they are doing.

The other upgrades were fine, this upgrade messed up completely and they have been very unhelpful. Infact, they think its a good idea locking out a customer from accessing the server. I'll see what happens, it's been well over 24 hours of downtime. I have lost so a great deal of money on this company and the worst thing is they are NOT updating us on what is occuring on our server, they will not provide password to the server, the only update they provide us is the same templated email. "Your server is being updated".

Originally posted by aodat2
Can I just know 1 thing from you all? Why in the world are you still choosing WebReseller.net as your hosting/reseller partner? If you already know that they have bad service and you still choose them, then you're the ones who is to be blamed.

There are tons of other hosting partners out there and they will be more than willing to take you on without hassles and etc and yet WebReseller.net was ur choice.

So here's my opinion... if they have bad service and you're still choosing them as your reseller partner, then if they give you bad service, they are not to be blamed but yourself.

But anyhow, I hope that you will get your stuff resolved ASAP! If you're totally not happy with them, then MOVE. You have that right, you're the person paying. If you stick with them then you do not have a say on WHT.

Take Care... Be good!

You have your point and it is somehow correct. We are actively looking for an alternative host (look for thread - hunkman). But we are still considering the move if it will be risky of not. If you can move my whole account to your server and with the same offering with webreseller i will do it!

moving to a different provider is so easy to say but the act of doing it is very very hard.

PM me if you are interested.

universal2001 perhaps you should let everyone know the whole story surrounding the upgrade. You are getting an Ensim Pro 3.5 to 4.x upgrade. This is a complete overhaul of services and also an in box OS change (RH73 to Fedora). You also neglected to mention that you had been begging for this upgrade. The upgrade process was started at approx. 7:30pm EST on Sunday. Once in the server we notified you that the upgrade was going to begin using the wall command. We also asked that you disconnect from the server. This said, we began the upgrade as we have on many other machines. There were a few pre-upgrade issues that needed to be corrected, these were done promptly. From there we began the Ensim upgrade via Ensim's ServerXchange. The upgrade was abruptly interrupted as someone on your staff logged into the server and began restarting services. After this was done, the Ensim upgrade failed for the first time. We since changed the root password to prevent further issues. After the password was changed we began to correct the issues caused by the upgrade process being halted prematurely. This lead us to more issues however. During your time on the server you or your staff made permission changes to a number of RPMs, preventing the RPM service to process upgrades. It took some time to find and correct these issues, as we are still working on this. The problems were not easy to determine, and required us to consult with Ensim's engineering department. NOTE: This is not something that you would have to pay for, it's a cost that we have absorbed.

Also, during this apparent confusion with the server upgrade, one of your staff members later requested a server reboot. This once again set us back by some time. As with any provider or ASP, you should work from a single ticket for a single issue. Opening numerous tickets does nothing more than cause confusion and can lead to more problems, as this is the perfect example.

Paul, it would actually be good if you could send me all these event details. It's surprising how often providers explain the events so clearly to everyone on a forum, yet leave their own clients in the dark. I just hope the server is up soon because its been down for well over 24+ hours. Downtime will occur anywhere, but there is a difference between lack of communications and support.

You could of told me all of these issues clearly as you described them here, but you didn't. Your staff continually just gave us clueless templated replies similar to "We have forwarded your ticket to the appropriate dept, and your server is being upgraded". I don't think anyone will be happy knowing their server is still in "upgraded" status after 24+ hours of downtime. Anyhow, I just hope the server will be back soon...

I still have some faith in Webreseller.net. Hope they can turn around 360 degrees and improve.

BTW, if we could manage to contact someone at the NOC via phone, that would also be a huge relief.. But you can imagine how it would feel having a live production server with hundreds of clients being downed for over 24+ hours with no ability to contact the NOC.. And all ticket replies result in "your server is still being upgraded".. time after time.

We have explained the situation over a number of tickets, that was one of the points I was trying to make. That if you have multiple people asking questions using different tickets, than you need to make sure they everyone on your end keeps each other up to date. We can not continue to provide the same response to a number of your employees over and over. There should be a central point of contact, and that contact should keep the rest of your team updated.

This is soon reaching 2 days of downtime due to a upgrade gone wrong. Webreseller tops the worst downtime I've ever had. I don't know why it takes over 2 DAYS to simply install/upgrade a control panel... But then again, if you ever have clients or mission critical data, this is the *LAST* place I would advise using.

trust me, just leave these guys as soon as your server is up.

Update: The server is STILL DOWN. Do these guys care that hundreds of clients are left in the dark......

The server is still down after 48 hours......

For what it's worth - it's likely not thier fault to a degree.. If they've had to bring in Ensim to correct messed up issues then that's a problem unto it's self. Ensim has been known to take upwards of 4 days to look into an issue.

Further problem is that you can't install Ensim 3.5.x domains on a fresh 4.0.x server installation as the appliance is not backwards compatible thus your domains are likely stuck in a sort of limbo depending on where the upgrade failed and what maintenance state the failure ocurred in.

Until Ensim can assist your provider I expect thier hands are tied as they can't move partially upgraded domains to a new server with 3.5 or 4.0 as neither will accept partially upgraded domains.

Good luck with the resolution, I hope this partial explanation offers something...

Regards,

Ryan.

Well maybe your right, who knows. All I know is WEBRESELLER has managed to keep our server down for 4 DAYS. That's right over 96 HOURS OF DOWNTIME. I have never had a server down for this period of time.

This is a warning to anyone who is thinking of going webreseller. They are happy to take your money.. but just be reminded when your server faces issues, better say goodbye to every customer on that server because it'll be down for awhile..

This company tops the worst dedicated provider category by FAR. I am contacting my credit card company and also looking at BBB filings. This is ridiculous service.

Hoping you have offsite 3.5 backups - why not move them to another server with a fresh 3.5 install on it so at least your clients can be back online ?

Since this client has brought this issue out on a public forum I thought I would add some missing details to set the record straight, since I have worked directly on this server.

What they forgot to mention is that this problem was caused by something their server techs did to the server prior to the upgrade. All binaries on the system were set with the immutable flag, for those of you who are non-tech this means they are set read-only. This caused the major OS upgrade from Red Hat 7.3 to Fedora to fail. The system was left in a "half cooked" state with some files upgraded, and other not. Because of the strict way Ensim needs the system to be set up to run their control panel, we have had Ensim working on this from hour-one as soon as we realized there was a major issue here. Most services were up and running on the new OS after 1.5 days. The only remaining issue is with the Tomcat jsp service so it is not working on Tomcat enabled sites; we are working with Ensim to get this service back up.

Second issue is they are now threatening to do a chargeback on the last 6 months of service and contacting the BBB. Now, knowing the above information, does this seem fair to the Credit Card companies, or to us? We have provided them with excellent service for the past 6 months, expending valuable time and money. Doing a chargeback is a very serious thing and is meant to provide relief for customers who paid for a service they did not receive. I understand that they are upset about their services being down, but instead of taking the responsibility for not having backups or a backup server, or not handling this some other way, they blame it on us, saying we are "keeping their server down" which is absolutely not true. In no way would we try to "keep their server down", how would this benefit the customer or us? We always do our best to keep services up and running, and when problems do occur we work overtime to get them back up and running again.

So knowing the above information, I invite those to make their own conclusions about who is in the wrong here and where the blame lies, and whether this pending "chargeback" would be fair.

-Dave

As an additional update to this post:

This client has been email directly 4 times by me and I have received one response to date.

We have given the customer not one, but 2 months of credit for services even though this was not an error on our part.

We have additionally offered this customer a second free server for 2 months just to make sure that his customers can be online and we also said we would help move them

When performing an Ensim upgrade we take great precautions, things CAN and WILL go wrong from time to time. We do not design the scripts nor do we directly guarantee them. They are a product of Ensim and work 99.9% of the times. We will do everything at no cost to the customer to get a problem resolved when they do fail. We warn every customer of the potential issues that could take place and always ask if they have done anything custom to their server so we can prepare for it.

Again, we are very sorry for any problems this customer is having and will continue to devote all resources and techs needed to complete the upgrade at all costs.

Our monitoring system shows:

Failure: EDT:4d.3h.00m

That means 4 days, 3hrs to be exact.

Some system files are set to read-only to ensure we don't get hacked. This is something we do to ensure the servers are protected from hackers, etc.

I understand a chargeback is a serious issue and can dramatically hurt a company, this is path I do not want to proceed with, however you must understand from our viewpoint that having a server down for days results in massive lost of revenue for us. The months of chargeback would not even cover how much revenue we have lost in this downtime. Our reputation is on the line, not only that our clients businesses are heavy affected, many of these clients run businesses, downtime cost them money.

All we simply want is the sites to be up and working. Is that too much to ask??

Doing a 6 month chargeback would be considered farud in my book. Service was rendered during that time.

Originally posted by MjrGaelic
Ensim has been known to take upwards of 4 days to look into an issue.

Try upwards of two weeks.

-B

We have never had to wait that long with Ensim, however, I have heard of that taking place....

Originally posted by universal2001
THEY also LOCKED us out of our very own server BECAUSE...

After hours of downtime, and numerous ticket sents, unsuccessful phones, we notice an admin working on the server and used the "WALL" command to ask for an upgrade ETA. To our dismay they LOCKED our own admins out of our PAID servers and then stated that we were annoying them when the simple truth is WE just tried to get an ETA update on how long the upgrade will take. 13.5+ HOURS LATER, WE STILL CANNOT LOGIN TO THE SERVER BECAUSE WEBRESELLER has changed the password to our server and we do not know what it is because their support is not replying.

well, WERE you annoying them??

how many times did you ask them the same question over and over again, knowing that they probably were being asked the very same thing repeatedly by everyone else?

just curious.

i never did understand how people expect hosts to get any work done when they ask the same thing over and over and over and dont give them any time to work.

Originally posted by universal2001
Our monitoring system shows:

Failure: EDT:4d.3h.00m

That means 4 days, 3hrs to be exact.

however you must understand from our viewpoint that having a server down for days results in massive lost of revenue for us. Our reputation is on the line, not only that our clients businesses are heavy affected, many of these clients run businesses, downtime cost them money.

All we simply want is the sites to be up and working. Is that too much to ask??

if you are worried about your reputation, then why have you waited 4 days and kept your customers hanging like that?

it is up to YOU to pull your backups and move the hell out of there.

i see these same posts here every day.

whats next, are you going to say you dont have backups?

:eek:

I hardly call obtaining updates and getting replies every 5-6 hrs is overkill. If your server was down, do you expect waiting 5-6 hrs on average to get a reply on the status of an upgrade?

At the present moment, our services are still down and the hilarious thing is that we are still waiting for them to update us. These guys run their own data center, their website claims 24/7 support, yet we are still waiting for an "update" on a ticket that has had no response for the last 20 hours +.

If the NOC is responsive we would not have an issue. Lack of communications and support is the issue. Do a search on WHT, webreseller went from high to lows. I'm not the only one. I should of moved given the chance, but they say you learn best you've been hit.


Originally posted by LaurenStephens
well, WERE you annoying them??

how many times did you ask them the same question over and over again, knowing that they probably were being asked the very same thing repeatedly by everyone else?

just curious.

i never did understand how people expect hosts to get any work done when they ask the same thing over and over and over and dont give them any time to work.

Gee, and how do you propose we *move* out when they changed the root pass. Duh.

In the earlier thread you acknowledge we were locked out of the server so your response was "WERE you annoying them?" and in this thread you state we should of moved out if being down for extended hours, yet you already knew we didn't have access to our server since they changed the root password.

:stickout:

Originally posted by LaurenStephens
if you are worried about your reputation, then why have you waited 4 days and kept your customers hanging like that?

it is up to YOU to pull your backups and move the hell out of there.

i see these same posts here every day.

whats next, are you going to say you dont have backups?

:eek:

Not an error on our part? Well you upgraded the server and you broke it. That is your fault and your responsibility to get the server back up. It's been down, reaching 5 days of downtime. What use is giving credit when there will be no client left on the server to use it?

You offered me a second free server, I have agreed to this method and ask you how long it will take transferring clients to the second server. It has been 20+ hours and I am still waiting for an update. Nice one.

Your last statement is false. Right now, its been well over 20 hours with no response and no techs are working on this server. You state you are devoting all resources and techs need to complete the upgrade, yet the funny thing is we have had no response in the last 20 hours, there can only be 2 reasons.

1) You do not have enough staff
2) You are not allocating all resources required to get the erver back up and working. Thus your statement is simply a lie.

Look... All I want is a working server. These guys keep promising this and that, yet the truth is the server is still down, just get it up and everyone will have a great weekend....

Originally posted by webseller
We have given the customer not one, but 2 months of credit for services even though this was not an error on our part.

We have additionally offered this customer a second free server for 2 months just to make sure that his customers can be online and we also said we would help move them

Again, we are very sorry for any problems this customer is having and will continue to devote all resources and techs needed to complete the upgrade at all costs.

universal2001, don't you have remote off-site backup? If you have one, you should just ask them to restore it on a clean Ensim server.

Well it would be good if they can reply to my request to get a new ensim server to start the process.. Unfortunately lack of support/communications is also playing a major role here :(

Universal, im sorry to say but from reading the tech supports post, the reason they locked you out is because your techs screwed up the update process.

Overall if you are having them upgrade the boxes, I dont understand why your people were logged in, and then furthermore restarted the box during the upgrade. Thats like restarting your desktop in the middle of a windows update, just not the smartest thing to do.

If I was you I wouldnt point all the fingers at them for some of your mistakes.

Originally posted by universal2001
[B]Gee, and how do you propose we *move* out when they changed the root pass. Duh.


By getting your data from your backup. I suppose you have your own backup?

Originally posted by universal2001
[B]Gee, and how do you propose we *move* out when they changed the root pass. Duh.


Offsite backups.

Originally posted by MjrGaelic
Offsite backups. 10 to 1.....Anyone wanna take that bet?

Originally posted by auctionSuite
10 to 1.....Anyone wanna take that bet?

Nope.

-B

Doesn't need to be offsite backup. Just any backup in this situation will work, i.e. backup to second hard disk.

Originally posted by FHDave
Doesn't need to be offsite backup. Just any backup in this situation will work, i.e. backup to second hard disk.

Only if he can get into the box to retrieve it, which doesn't appear to be the case.

-B

Originally posted by FHDave
Doesn't need to be offsite backup. Just any backup in this situation will work, i.e. backup to second hard disk. True, though based on the responses from universal2001 there doesn't appear to have been any backups made.

Originally posted by universal2001
I hardly call obtaining updates and getting replies every 5-6 hrs is overkill. If your server was down, do you expect waiting 5-6 hrs on average to get a reply on the status of an upgrade?

At the present moment, our services are still down and the hilarious thing is that we are still waiting for them to update us. These guys run their own data center, their website claims 24/7 support, yet we are still waiting for an "update" on a ticket that has had no response for the last 20 hours +.

If the NOC is responsive we would not have an issue. Lack of communications and support is the issue. Do a search on WHT, webreseller went from high to lows. I'm not the only one. I should of moved given the chance, but they say you learn best you've been hit.

actually what is hilarious is that you are still their client. and spending more time here whining about the downtime than moving your clients to a more reliable place. in any event, i read their response about how you guys were messing arounbd during updates.... what did you expect really?

i dont mind being harsh, but only because i see this here TOO many times and it is hard to pity anyone who waits days upon days to do something.

Originally posted by universal2001
Gee, and how do you propose we *move* out when they changed the root pass. Duh.

In the earlier thread you acknowledge we were locked out of the server so your response was "WERE you annoying them?" and in this thread you state we should of moved out if being down for extended hours, yet you already knew we didn't have access to our server since they changed the root password.

:stickout:

why do you need a root password to get offsite backups and move?

please just answer this one question, do you have backups or not?

Originally posted by universal2001


I still have some faith in Webreseller.net. Hope they can turn around 360 degrees and improve.


Not to nitpick, but that would put them right back where they started before the turnaround. I think you meant 180 degrees.

Originally posted by universal2001
Update: The server is STILL DOWN. Do these guys care that hundreds of clients are left in the dark......

The server is still down after 48 hours......

IT seems the extended down time was because of:

From there we began the Ensim upgrade via Ensim's ServerXchange. The upgrade was abruptly interrupted as someone on your staff logged into the server and began restarting services. After this was done, the Ensim upgrade failed for the first time. We since changed the root password to prevent further issues.


Why would anyone from your company log into the server while they were doing the upgrade?

Originally posted by universal2001
Well maybe your right, who knows. All I know is WEBRESELLER has managed to keep our server down for 4 DAYS. That's right over 96 HOURS OF DOWNTIME. I have never had a server down for this period of time.

This is a warning to anyone who is thinking of going webreseller. They are happy to take your money.. but just be reminded when your server faces issues, better say goodbye to every customer on that server because it'll be down for awhile..

This company tops the worst dedicated provider category by FAR. I am contacting my credit card company and also looking at BBB filings. This is ridiculous service.

Why are you complaining when:

From there we began the Ensim upgrade via Ensim's ServerXchange. The upgrade was abruptly interrupted as someone on your staff logged into the server and began restarting services. After this was done, the Ensim upgrade failed for the first time. We since changed the root password to prevent further issues.


This was mostly your fault. Thier fault for not having a signoff sheet stating they are going to do the upgrade which then explains YOUR staff doesn't log onto the server. You screwed up the upgrade process buy trying to restart the services while the upgrade scripts were running..

And as i always state:

You do have backups so don't worry about it. Just restore them to a clean server. You could be up in a hour or so.

Originally posted by TMX
Only if he can get into the box to retrieve it, which doesn't appear to be the case.

-B

Then you really shouldn't consider it a backup.

There's always two sides to every story. Interesting read...:popcorn:

Sound like both partys, don't talk to their stuff as what to do or not do very much.

Why didn't they change over to a new server, before the upgrade was started. Then none of this would of happen, both partys should have learn they need a much better plan next time. And both partys should have done better then they did, and done this the right way to begin with.

It would of took one server to change over all the accounts, then after the upgrade was done moved them back. Now both partys has lost alot of money, and time needlessly. I hope you learn the get your sh** together next time, and have a game plan way ahead of time. This hole thing, was needless for both partys. Tim

Originally posted by tas38
Sound like both partys, don't talk to their stuff as what to do or not do very much.

Why didn't they change over to a new server, before the upgrade was started. Then none of this would of happen, both partys should have learn they need a much better plan next time. And both partys should have done better then they did, and done this the right way to begin with.

It would of took one server to change over all the accounts, then after the upgrade was done moved them back. Now both partys has lost alot of money, and time needlessly. I hope you learn the get your sh** together next time, and have a game plan way ahead of time. This hole thing, was needless for both partys. Tim I'd have to disagree with the majority of what's been said here.....

Granted, the provider could have been a bit more punctual with their communications and updates, but other than that I don't see that they did anything wrong. They may not even be guilty of that if they've been communicating with numerous members of the client's staff.

(The current status of the server is a bit of a question though.)

Why would the provider want to set up a new box just for an OS upgrade? That's ridiculous....Unless the client asked for and was willing to pay for it. The client needed to have had a backup of the server somewhere. That's their responsibility, not the provider's.

Well funny you said that, one of the reasons why we REQUESTED for an upgrade was the local FTP backups were not working, we were suggested it would be in the best interest to upgrade this server. Well that's gone down the crap hole. The thing I am most angry is the lack of updates. 6 days of downtime on the appliance and tomcat, yet we're waiting for an "update" on a ticket that has not been responded to in 30 hrs. They have told me numerous times they are dedicating all the resources and techs they can to this task, but every hour that goes by, I see no-one logged into the server, I see no updates to the ticket and wonder why they made such statements...

"...the local FTP backups were not working..."

You mean, the backups you had on your local machine weren't working (In what way?), and if they weren't why didn't you make new backups prior to initiating the OS upgrade?

I still can't believe it when I read this stuff. It's been over 2 years with Webreseller and I could not be happier. Their service completely rocks.

[Oppps Deleted]

Originally posted by tas38
Sound like both partys, don't talk to their stuff as what to do or not do very much.

Why didn't they change over to a new server, before the upgrade was started. Then none of this would of happen, both partys should have learn they need a much better plan next time. And both partys should have done better then they did, and done this the right way to begin with.

It would of took one server to change over all the accounts, then after the upgrade was done moved them back. Now both partys has lost alot of money, and time needlessly. I hope you learn the get your sh** together next time, and have a game plan way ahead of time. This hole thing, was needless for both partys. Tim

Not possible with the nature of Ensim upgrades.. Part of the upgrade is upgrading the filesystem of the hosted domains.. Thats where the problem with this entire post lies.

I am curious how this is going. Are you still down?

Just Tomcat is down now, everything else is working fine. I would like to thank webreseller.net for not putting us in the dark. Although the downtime was the longest we've ever had.. they still managed to fix our server and showed they still cared about their customers. This issue was a mix of many things that went wrong from many parties.... Lets hope it never ever happens again..

Great to hear your server is 99% back online. :agree: