Recently, in the past 2 months, we've been the victim of at least 3 separate RS Blunder incidents.

In Mid-December 2001 we had an incident where the power plug for one of our servers was "tripped" and it stayed offline for 8+ hours until they figured that out.

Just this past week, this same thing happened again. The power plug was "tripped" and openly admitted to as such in our trouble ticket by the technicians.

Also, just 2 days ago, two of our servers that have very similar IP's - XXX.XXX.XXX.9 and XXX.XXX.XXX.4 apparently had some "labels" on them switched in the data center - by accident? How could labels "just get switched"? More so, the IP's configured into the boxes themselves were switched - the .9 box was booting up as .4 and the .4 box was booting up as .9 - so everything was fubbed up - and openly admitted by a System Admin that it was RS's fault somehow.

Problem is.... the FIRST solution offered before any investigation was done was a full restore. I understand that a system restore may fix SOME issues and be a VALID solution in SOME cases, but to have it be the FIRST suggested action before further investigation is not alright. After demanding further investigation on all three of these incidents, all three turned out to be the fault of RS. Two tripped power plug incidents and one incident where labels & IP config on two boxes somehow got mysteriously swapped.

Restores should not be the first solution offered - if I had gone with the first solution offered in these incidents I would have lost 2 Cobalts and a PLESK server to full system restores within 6 weeks of each other. And they wouldn't even have been necessary. What's the lesson here? Demand further investigation. Demand to have a systems admin look at your system in DETAIL and check every cable, every possibility...... I will never again accept "Restore recommended" as a "first solution" knowing full well that in MOST situations the problem can be fixed WITHOUT a restore.

These three incidents combined resulted in over 36 hours of downtime - and wasn't our fault. The first comment we always get is "httpd.conf was edited, unsupported." (OK, who DOES NOT edit their httpd.conf file for SOMETHING simple?) The second comment we get is "restore recommended" - and after MUCH investigation, tripped power cords and mislabeled boxes (this still baffles me) were the reasons.

I won't mention names here, but I'd like to THANK the systems administrators at RackShack who have HELPED us fully investigate these incidents and PREVENT the restores that were initially recommended and thank them for their further investigations. I understand that restores are a valid option for some people, but I would have lost 200-300 sites PER box and have had MANY more hours of downtime - and not to mention would have lost MANY customers in the process.

RS.... Please, just investigate a situation thoroughly before recommending a restore. Editing your httpd.conf does not always mean doom and gloom for your server - however, tripped power cords and mislabeling does. Why should *I* have to put in a week or two of rebuild time for YOUR errors?

I've already written to HeadSurfer of RS & VP of Support of RS about these issues - with no response. Not expecting one, but I wanted to make the blunders public as an "educational" piece and recommend that everyone request further investigation BEFORE accepting a "restore" solution.

Ouch!

There's been a quite a bit of bad traffic lately about RS, mostly written off by 'company growth' problems.

Can it be all that bad, or is it just crappy part time tech's employed by RS having a bad day.

I've read that if you need minimal support, then go RS - is it actually true?


Lats...

Originally posted by Lats
I've read that if you need minimal support, then go RS - is it actually true?


Lats...

Well I wouldn't expect the world on a plate for $99 :)

Indeed it is. If you run your own DNS everything is great.

I don't expect the world on a plate. I *do* expect servers to be POWERED UP and ACCURATELY LABELED. That's it.

Originally posted by Haze


Well I wouldn't expect the world on a plate for $99 :)

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Haze
[B]

Not a personal attack on you sir...
Honestly, these types of comments gets me grinding my teeth! If you offer a service at a price, please give your customers what you OFFERED! Dont give crappy service and say its because the customer only paid $99. It IS what you offered. If you offer me a dedicated server for $1 a month, and you throw in incentives to make me sign up for that $1. You bet , I WILL expect you to perform to the fullest extent of your promise for that $1.00. What do I expect for $1.00? :) Exactly what you promised me on that website when you advertised!

I have seen a few posts here saying ...check you inventory, calculate your costs and come up with the price that you can reasonably afford to offer and make a slight profit and remain competitive. This is excellent advice! There is little excuse for rotten tech support.
:D

Honestly, these types of comments gets me grinding my teeth! If you offer a service at a price, please give your customers what you OFFERED! Dont give crappy service and say its because the customer only paid $99. It IS what you offered. If you offer me a dedicated server for $1 a month, and you throw in incentives to make me sign up for that $1. You bet , I WILL expect you to perform to the fullest extent of your promise for that $1.00. What do I expect for $1.00? Exactly what you promised me on that website when you advertised!

However, common sense will dictate that cheap offerings will eventually show there true *value* at some point.

I will sell you a wooden tennis racket. I promise you can hit balls with it, I promis it will be light, I promise it is regulation.

Common sense tells me I won't beat Pete or Andre with it. Common sense tells me it has a higher chance of breaking. Common sense tells me when I need repairs or support for it, I won't get the same as my brother with a $400 racket.

My personal opinion is that while you have the right to complain, you have no grounds for the complaining - unless of course it is something like Cyberwings pointed out. But if you come here and say RS sucks becasue your $99 server with 300 domains crapped out, you are to blaime, not RS.

Just my 2.

Well RS are not a managed hosting company, they are a self-managed dedicated hosting company, who provide the services to get online at low costs. If you know what you are doing (and that is why if you're new, then you shouldn't go with RS), you won't have any problems, your server shoudl run smoothly, THEY will manage the network connections and generally keep the servers online and also the hardware side of things.

I haven't had one problem with the software of the server yet, as I know what I'm doing. Their network part is okay, I wouldn't say is great because they have not had full uptime at the moment, due to DoS attacks, which could be due to them not keeping the servers secure. But that is actually our responsibility to keep the servers secure, quite confusing don't you think? We have to keep the servers secure, but if we don't, they have to spend the extra time to get rid of the DoS attacks.

Overall, for the price, it is well worth it. For people who have had a large budget for web hosting for their websites, moving to RS will reduce their bills substantially each month, which means bigger profits. Even though it is larger profits, the down time could cause you to lose revenue, which equals out. So it's a personal choice to go with RS or not, to save on web hosting and also get less revenue, or pay more on web hosting and earn it back in revenue, evens out at the end.

Just my thoughts anyway.

Alan

In my correspondence to RS on this issue I clearly said the following:

"I do not "want" any credit for this downtime, I just want to bring it to your attention so that you can look into it if you wish and help make improvements in your system - or confirm that these were "indeed" just flukes. This is the 2nd time in 2 months we've had a server power plug "tripped" causing the server to go down."

That's it. I am not asking for a refund. I'm not asking for a credit. I'm just asking for maybe some rubber strips be put over the power cords or just a little more caution. That's it.

You're totally right - RackShack is NOT terrible, horrible, etc. Uptime has been overall very good over the past 6 months, I just wanted to bring this to their attention and maybe give them a few more reasons why "RESTORE" should not always be the first recommended solution.

I'm all for calling RackShack on their issues, but I'm also one for giving credit where credit is due, and the support people I deal with here on a regular basis are really good and always do whatever they can to assist.

I'm fair in my opinions - I just wish that damn power plug would have a big red flashing light on it so someone wouldn't trip over and then recommend a restore! (The restore part being the whole point about this post.....).

Shawn

<rolls eyes>

As a FORMER rackshack customer, I understand your pain, can only recommend you RUN to a more reliable provider. RS can't be beat when it comes to price, that's for sure, but price isn't everything.

They've got to be careful - I'm sure their strategy is a 'landgrab' at this point, but it could backfire.

Originally posted by Lats
There's been a quite a bit of bad traffic lately about RS, mostly written off by 'company growth' problems.

Can it be all that bad, or is it just crappy part time tech's employed by RS having a bad day.

I've read that if you need minimal support, then go RS - is it actually true?<soapbox>I posted a similar message on RackShack's message board in response to a duplicate message that started this thread here..

What is happening at RackShack is that there are 2800 servers there, of which, if 99.9 percent of those 2800 hosted servers were humming along perfectly well without one smidge of problem, there are still going to be 2.8 of them that are not..

Which just about equates to the amount of desparate pleas of "this place sucks" that I see here there and everwhere..

Now, to me, 99.9 percent of a system running seems about on par with this industry for "what is expected" with hardware failures, software failures.. human error, etc.

If you add to that 2.8 factor, a few folks who don't have a server at RackShack, have NEVER had a server ANYWHERE, but who, for whatever reason, wail on about how bad the services are at RackShack, both here and at RackShack's forum.. The numbers begin to add up to about what we see here..

Is RackShack Perfect? Nope. Is any host going to have 100% of their customer base totally completely absoutely happy 100% of the time? Ridiculous to even think of that in a business relaiant on an electronic device operated by software and with 2800 possible chances of... operator error, hardware failure, software failure.. network hickup... etc..

So bash away all you will those 2.8 of you who are unhappy weekly, bash away those of you with statements like... "land grab" the other 2797.2 of us are happy as clams, shelling out well under 200 bucks a month for a huge bandwidth allotment and a network, at least, as stable as any other out there... for three times the price.

Hell, go to Verio and spend 3-4 hundred bucks a month and see how much more stable their network is, or how much support you'll get for anything less than $200. per hour..

I really do tire of this constant HOST BASHING I don't care who the host is.. Get two or three unhappy people in a room and my god.. the entire place is a wreck before they are done with their rant..

Get a clue guys! RackShack provides very reasonably priced machines on a very fast network.

They are not perfect, and no host ever will be. Live with it.</soapbox>

Shortbox

No, I'm not trying to run up my number of posts...

Amen.. well said.

We have servers at RS with 0.00 problems. Great service. Unbelievable. Comforting. And we compete head on with them most of the time. :-)

Drew

Originally posted by drewnick
No, I'm not trying to run up my number of posts...

Amen.. well said.

We have servers at RS with 0.00 problems. Great service. Unbelievable. Comforting. And we compete head on with them most of the time. :-)

Drew LOL.. and I'm not trying to run mine up either, in fact, I'm on the 12 step program as we speak :eek:

I only felt the need to add to my above message something that came to light at RS and here over the last few days.

And that is the underhanded acts by some of RackShack's competitors who have been "posing" here and at RS's board and whipping up a frenzy about this issue or that.. in particular, over the last few days, Spamming and Texas Taxes..

The person/persons who were responsible KNOW who I am talking about and I hope they are so red in the face reading this that they are breaking a sweat.

I'm going to be nice and stop mentioning who exactly they are, but you can investigate the posts for yourself on these subjects and track the very carelessly shown web addresses for yourself to see where it came from.

Point of all this is. Rackshack provides good service for a good price. They are so good, they are cutting deeply into the profit margins of some other hosting companies. At least one of those companies have shown their hand in that they will stoop as low as they feel necessary to try to drive some business their way...

Tisk Tisk... it would be a shame if someone read any of that and changed their mind based on those slanderous rumors that have been being piled on us.

If I ever have a deep problem at RackShack and can't get it resolved, I may change my mind. So far, it's been smooth sailing and I can allow certain clients to go way over what they ever expected on bandwidth if they should need it temporarily and not have to charge them for it, or get charged for it myself..

That, my friends, is very nice indeed!

Shortz

shortfork I know you said you were on a Raq - I believe. Do you also have either a plesk or ensim whitebox server? I'm just wondering if the problems are mostly due to their newness with these servers, so you who are on a server which RackShack has specialized in for a long time would have a better experience than others might be having...

Originally posted by panopticon
shortfork I know you said you were on a Raq - I believe. Do you also have either a plesk or ensim whitebox server? I'm just wondering if the problems are mostly due to their newness with these servers, so you who are on a server which RackShack has specialized in for a long time would have a better experience than others might be having... Yes, I'm on a RaQ4i there and I don't have one of the "white boxes" but from reading all the posts, I think the *major* portion of the problems is caused by the pilot of the box. Some have been HD failures, some memory stick problems (one or two each) *Most* at least my take on it is, the Ensim and Plesk CP's and directory structure and the way they add virts is TOTALLY different than the way the RaQ does it. I know it would throw me for a loop and I've had my server for growing on two years (a RaQ3 for about 18 mos before the 4i at RS now)

If I were to dig into the new boxes, just starting out, without a manual (I had one for my original 3) especially if I were trying to run my own dns, which a lot of the guys seem to want to do, I'd be in huge trouble.

My guess is, if you were to do a survey of all the dedicated boxes out there, the Cobalts have a huge installed base over the Plesk/Ensim lineup. The OS was specifically developed for the machine, there are a lot of pretty smart folks out there who have a lot of the answers already in place in archives on the cobalt list and other places. That's my take on it. I don't believe there is anything really "wrong" with the white boxes, they are just "different" other than maybe using RedHat... from what I've heard.. and I'm pretty lame about this stuff, RedHat has some glaring problems..

Tha'ss my take on it..

Shortz

Seriously though...this is something that you're going to have to live with - for the price, RackShack give a darn good deal on those servers/traffic. Their support team are pretty useless (I've experienced a few boo boos myself). As RackShack is an unmanaged service, this is expected.

If you're running a mission-critical operation, try a managed host like RackSpace. They might be expensive, but our boxes at RackSpace have never gone down.

Best regards,

Leo.