I am searching for a reseller account for my sites. I had around four or five until now. All of them with big disk and bandwidth space just for not too much. Sure that I never used that big space. Actually, all the time i was under 500 MB disk space and 1000 Mb bandwidth in a month and sometimes I had more than 10Gb disk space.

Every time the support was good. Sometimes I received a respond in less those five minutes. To setup an account never was more that 24 hours sometimes it was instantly.
I uploaded my pages and I was just happy. Every time when I visited my sites, I was happy because I saw that my sites downloaded in my opinion quickly. So I was a happy customer.

You had a site. Sure that you want to have visitors maybe you event are dreaming to make some money with it.
If you are lucky you will have some visitors. We know very well that are many sites with very low traffic.

So at the moment I observed, that I had some visitors. I was happy. So I am started to spend a lot of time. I was many hours online at my site just to see when I receive a visit.
I can say that sometimes I made myself a check in every minute……AAAAAAAAND

I just started to observe that I had an account with huge disk and bandwidth with high performance servers and………and they aren’t able to handle a for example seven visitors in the same time. So I started to change the resellers hosting providers. And I will do this until I will find one who will be suitable for my needs. Sure that if would pay 1000$ I would find one, but even I would do this I can’t because I haven’t so much money in my pocket for this.

In the present I start to have more then 150 visitors in a day and I hope these will be more.

So I am started to search.

My last choose was ---- site5.com.

So here is my first impression:
- I must to spend a little more that I was planed ---- this was bad
- I chatted with someone and I received some responses before to place an order – good point
- I had support in the chat while I placed the order – good point
- I must wait a little too much in my opinion until my account will be activated --- Baaad point.

I will continue with the account activation.

Ps. Maybe my English is a little bad.

You're understandable. Who was your previous host, who couldn't handle 7 simultaneous visitors?

Originally posted by jsw
You're understandable. Who was your previous host, who couldn't handle 7 simultaneous visitors?

Not sure that they are, :) Since this is a review of Site5 and only them.

From what I can gather, they were on a previous host who they were having problems with, and have just made a switch to Site5...

I think the posts subject is a give away!

Hello tiltil

I chatted with you earlier this morning about this issue, and let you know that I would be looking into this.

After looking into your account, you signed up on Tuesday evening, and we actually have setup your account already. The setup was done yesterday (Wednesday) evening. You may not have received our welcome email, or it may be there and you just accidentally passed it by. I have sent you an email to your personal address on this issue, and let you know that I can resend the welcome email if you wish.

We are working on our setup times, and are going to be coming out with programs in place to ensure much faster setup times within the next couple of days max. We are looking to even bring out guaranteed setup times. :)

Again, please reply back to the email I sent you with any questions you have and if you need that welcome email resent.

Thanks again for your patience and understanding. I apologize for the delay in your setup.

So only two bad things to say about site5? Both those things are not really site5's fault either, so you may be on to a winner!

1. Spending more than you planned - not site5's fault... if you cant afford em, dont use em!

2. Taking time to setup your account - often this is all to do with fraud checking on payments, we sometimes take several hours to screen an order... its just protection for you as a genuine credit card holder - not a bad thing.

:)

Originally posted by UH-Matt

2. Taking time to setup your account - often this is all to do with fraud checking on payments, we sometimes take several hours to screen an order... its just protection for you as a genuine credit card holder - not a bad thing.

:)

Thanks for the comments Matt. :)

We also manually verify and setup each account, so that does count for a large part of our setup times (more delayed than some offering instant of course).

I'm not trying to discredit this situation, we strive to setup accounts much faster than 24 hours, however at times it isn't always possible. As already stated, we will be working very hard on improving this issue.

Again, please feel free to let me know if you have any questions! Thanks ;)

We also manually verify and setup each account

Right on. I think more people should appreciate this way of doing business. Anyone who owns a credit card should respect the fact that its for their own protection.

Instant setup accounts just makes fraud worsen.

Originally posted by UH-Matt
Right on. I think more people should appreciate this way of doing business. Anyone who owns a credit card should respect the fact that its for their own protection.

Instant setup accounts just makes fraud worsen.

I agree!

We screen/research everything from the name, address, and domain name of every order. I would be more worried by a host that provided instant activation then someone that took steps at proper screening to find out who it is that they are letting on thier servers.

Taylor,

Good to see your side of this!

FYI, when an order is placed we do all screening within a four hour time frame. We can usually complete all screening during this time but there are times when you need more info from new user. We just completed an order today that came in on the 2nd, The address did not match the billing address and we requested a utility bill as well as copy of t he users state id faxed to us for verification purposes!

Originally posted by UH-Matt
Right on. I think more people should appreciate this way of doing business. Anyone who owns a credit card should respect the fact that its for their own protection.

Instant setup accounts just makes fraud worsen. We've seen instant setup accounts cause major spam, fraud, and phishing problems for our dedicated server clients, and highly recommend against it. We also manually check all orders (even down to manually calling the billing phone number for confirmation) to protect ourselves and our potential customers.\

Site5.com seems to be very respected in the industry - Wait for everything to be setup, and I'm sure you'll be happy with them :).

I placed the order. I thought that I will have difficulties with the payment. You know maybe not enough money, maybe because I am from where I am. But my order was accepted. So I waited for the account activation and to receive that welcome mail with my account information.……….. and I waited……and I waited until today.


For--- Taylor
I understand very well the situation with the credit card fraud.


For ----- UH-Matt
Spending more that I planed --- sure that isn’t the site5’s fault. It was just a bad point in my impression. But I decided to spend more because I hope that I will obtaining more for that.

I sent some mails to the support, to some addresses what I found it on the site5. I received just one response.

After I saw this, I decided to make a post here and to see how in which direction we will go.

I made the post and after that I visited again the site5.com. I saw that someone is online there. So I started to chat with that someone.
Here it is that chat:

please wait for a site operator to respond.
You are now chatting with 'Site5'
Site5: Hello, Welcome to Site5.Com. How can I help you?
you: well...well
you: hello site5
Site5: :) hi
you: I just made some post on webhosting talk. Mabe is good maybe is bad
Site5: I just saw that
you: :-)
Site5: I have just sent in a note to the CEO and COO to get this addressed RIGHT away for you. I apologize that we have been a bit delayed on replies lately
Site5: We are working to address this issue, and even implement guaranteed setup times within the next couple of days. I apologize that yours has taken some time, I will work very hard at getting your issue addressed for you by management
you: what is CEO and COO
Site5: Management, the bosses :)
Site5: What is your domain name?
you: Hmmmmmm.........do you know that you made me to lose 2 days and some money, because I expactedthat my account will be setup after 24 hours?
Site5: I understand your concern, I really do. I am terribly sorry that this has taken this long, I will be having someone look into this right away and find out what the issue was
you: here is the domain name -- ******cum.com
you: and it was for a reseller account
Site5: Did you receive our order confirmation email?
you: actually I sent some mails too the suppots, too
you: yes, I did.
Site5: Ok great
Site5: Well I am going to work really hard on getting someone on your issue right away for you
you: :-)))))))))))))))
Site5: Thank you for your patience and understanding, do you have an email address I can have them contact you at?
you: *****@*****k.*o* :-)))))))))))))
Site5: Great thank you, again I apologize, we will work on getting this issue resolved right away


*****************************

Now, after the posting, after the chat……Taylor Hawes resolved my problem.
The problem was that
I didn’t received the account activation information. If me like a customer can be sawn like someone who want to made a fraud……then..in the same way I can have my suspicions if my credit card was billed and I didn’t received the information what I need to use my account after 24 hours, what was a promise. These suspicions can grow if you didn’t receive any information after 45 minutes what is the average time response at that site when you sent some mails.


Conclusions for me:

- my problem was resolved trough Taylor Hawes
- I didn’t received any help in useful time from other staf where I wrote
- I signed up with site5, because I didn’t find many bad reviews
- Probable it was just a mistake somewhere, which it is happening time to time. Nobody is perfect.

So who was the host that could only handle 7 visitors at once?

I too had a time problem when signing up with site5, but really it worth, server are till now very stable and I'm 100% satisfied with them.

for -- CodePHP

actually doesn't matter the name. i received what i paid.

what is matter, now -- how is site5.com.



So I am not the only who had some problems with site5.com.



The only thing what for what i am still with site5. is that I hope that their machines (servers) will have other setup which will give me more satisfaction.


We know very well that a server can be overloaded easy just because the owner want to have profit in short time.

So the same server can be excellent to at host and very bad to other host.

Again, I apologize to those who have experienced long account setup times. As I mentioned, we're actively addressing this problem and I expect to have it fully resolved within the next couple of days (as we're currently implementing a new protocol).

Glad to hear everything past that is satisfactory though. ;)

Matt

Anyone can handle 7 simultaneous visitors!

For what its worth, I've been a pleased shared-server and co-located server client of Site5 for more than three years. I've always found them to be prompt and attentive to my needs.

Frankly I don't care if initial setup takes a day or two or three or five for that matter - who moves a "business" on the spur of the moment from one hosting service to another without having satisfactory arrangements in place before hand?

Originally posted by mwatkins
For what its worth, I've been a pleased shared-server and co-located server client of Site5 for more than three years. I've always found them to be prompt and attentive to my needs.

Frankly I don't care if initial setup takes a day or two or three or five for that matter - who moves a "business" on the spur of the moment from one hosting service to another without having satisfactory arrangements in place before hand?

Thank you very much for the kind words.

I can assure you that our setup times have already drastically improved, and we are working hard to even speed things up further for you! :)

Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or suggestions. Thanks again!

It seems like there's an infinite supply of new members coming here to blast their new host !!!

Since we're talking about site5, I can say that the company I work for has been hosted by site5 since summer 2003 and we're totally satisfied by their services. We use their RS-50 plan to host our site + a couple of our suppliers and we've always experienced fast and knowledgeable support along with a near-perfect uptime. Our servers seems to be on NAC's network in Parsipanny, NJ which is a good thing for us since our internet provider peers with NAC in Toronto.

Well, you all seem so happy with Site5, but let me tip the scales a little and tell you that I am not happy with Site5, and also recommend that you frequently check your site's popularity and stats reports. If your site get's more than a couple thousand pageviews they will kick you out!

It has happened to me twice with two different sites in the last week. The first one I could understand, it was growing too fast, and the dedicated server I ordered from a company advertising here took longer to be delivered. Then after getting personal assurances from the staff my attempts to copy the site to the new server were interrupted twice by their support staff.

This second incident which occured today has me thoroughly disguested. My second site got booted today, and it took them over 6 hours to respond to my e-mail, only to receive a half-baked, moronic answer stating that I would have to move the site. Ok, how exactly do these brain surgeons expect me to do that when it's suspended?

And secondly, and I have yet to have an answer to this question, how does a small vB forum that has used less than 2GB of bandwidth for February use excessive resources on a 100GB reseller account? Easy, they oversell!

Hello Steve,

I've been unavailable for the majority of the day (although our support team has been working 24/7). Upon return this issue has taken precedence. I have an email from you in my inbox from 1 PM this afternoon, but apparently the story made it to the press before I could appropriately respond there. :)

You and I have corresponded quite a bit regarding the issue from last week, and I was under the impression that we had a good working relationship--certainly one that warranted me being granted the chance to respond before the issue was made public.

However now that you have expressed your opinion here in such a way that makes us look irresponsible and unhelpful (which may very well be how you feel at this point), I feel obligated to at least give our take on the events to which you have referred.

Your site had a mySQL database with 30,000 tables (not a typo), hosting over 1400 separate installations of phpBB (from that single database) by our count. A mysqldump of the database, even at the highest CPU scheduling, took several hours, if that gives you an idea of the magnitude. In addition, there was a script in one of your other accounts that was running checks of all of the tables in that database, which was, in itself, putting quite a strain on the server, as most might imagine.

And indeed the transfer of this site to your dedicated server was interrupted by our systems administrators, however you must understand that we were catching flack from all sides on the issue. Several of our other resellers on that server were writing in complaining of server speed problems, which we quickly investigated and isolated to your account(s).

After accidentally interrupting your transfer (in an altruistic attempt to bring down the load on the server), one of our administrators--Tim Greer--went out of his way to assist you with the move so as to minimize your site's downtime. And consider that this whole time we were simultaneously trying to placate customers who were wondering why their sites were running so slowly.

Today, again, another of your sites was using an unacceptable amount system resources and was suspended to prevent further service impairment. How do we define what's acceptable and what isn't? One pretty solid indication is when we receive complaints from other customers about their site's performance being degraded (which we did in both cases).

What would you have us do in these situations in light of this elucidation? Is your assertion that your sites actually require "reasonable" levels of system resources and that our servers are simply not equipped to handle it? If a server was chronically overloaded with no obvious cause, we would quickly take action by adding new machines to our network and distributing the load between them. In fact in many cases we do this proactively--before performance gets to be an issue for our customers.

However in both instances mentioned above, your accounts have been the sole source of the problem. The administrators receive notice that load on one of our servers is out of our predetermined reasonable boundaries, they investigate, and then they take action to correct the issue. And in the past week, three times has one or more of your accounts been the cause of the issue. In every case, when the offending account was suspended the server's performance returned to normal. Does this suggest to you a chronically overtaxed server, or a user whose requirements are perhaps too much for a standard "shared" server environment?

You could claim that we're trigger happy with the "suspend" button, but I can guarantee you that if you wrote in complaining about service degradation caused by another user's account, you'd appreciate us taking immediate action.

You might also claim that our expectations of resource usage are far too low. This is your own opinion and I'm not here to argue our policies. We host many hundreds of resellers (who in turn host many thousands of their own customers) and many thousands of direct shared hosting accounts, so we have a fairly good idea of what "reasonable usage" looks like. And contrary to your argument that it's impossible to make use of all the resources we offer, we have many users who are either at the resource limits of their account or exceeding them. If we were at any time deluded in our ideas of what was "reasonable," you'd think that in analyzing a sample of thousands of live websites, we would have quickly been able to determine what the norm was and adapt our expectations accordingly. Either that or we'd be pretty regularly asking a large percentage of our client base to find other hosting arrangements (which, to my knowledge, isn't the case ;) ).

As for a detailed explanation of exactly why your sites manage to voraciously munch CPU cycles, we don't have one. In cases like this, we can only act on the symptoms, not the causes. We will work with you to help investigate the issue if you ask for our assistance (which we have offered to do in the emails where we've notified you that we had to suspend your account), but rather than taking a collaborative approach to solving the problem, your reaction has been mainly to take an caustic and derogatory tone with our staff (see the above post for an example--referring to us sarcastically as "brain surgeons"). This has been your response even after I have had several personal correspondences with you and have demonstrated that we are both receptive to your requests and willing to go out of our way to help. Don't get me wrong, I understand that this can be a very frustrating situation, but emails and posts with the tone of the one above are not a good way to initiate a mutual problem-solving effort. Nevertheless, we have responded professionally and courteously.

In fact, if you were to write to our support team now (or if you had at any point throughout the process) and ask for one of our administrators to help investigate the issue in an effort to solve the problem, we would be (and would have been) happy to do so. Granted there is only so much we can do, as it's not really our job to troubleshoot and optimize your website, however we will make an effort that is more than reasonable to assist you in resolving the issue.

In spite of all this, I would love to continue our business relationship, as I believe Site5 can work with you to meet your needs. There isn't a single customer that I'm willing to lose--the minute one makes that concession, all customers become unimportant. If you can conceive of some way for us to continue working together, I'm more than willing to talk (and I would have spent the past hour addressing your email, rather than this forum post, had you given me so much as half a day to respond). However when you come to WHT and make the problem public domain so quickly, it suggests to me that you're unwilling to even entertain the possibility of working things out. I sincerely hope that isn't the case here, as I like to believe that all problems have an amicable solution if you look hard enough.

If you're interested in exploring possible resolutions to this issue, I'm happy to work with you through email. However if you've resigned yourself to the fact that we're a contemptible organization, and your goal is to make that public knowledge, it would seem that this discussion forum should be your communications medium of choice.

I appreciate your candor, and sincerely hope that my words are perceived in the same optimistic spirit in which they were written.

Regards,
Matt Lightner

Matt, your reply gets my vote for ROTM (Reply Of The Month). :D

Originally posted by tiltil
So I started to chat with that someone.
Here it is that chat:

please wait for a site operator to respond.
You are now chatting with 'Site5'
Site5: Hello, Welcome to Site5.Com. How can I help you?
you: well...well
you: hello site5
Site5: :) hi
you: I just made some post on webhosting talk. Mabe is good maybe is bad
Site5: I just saw that
you: :-)
Site5: I have just sent in a note to the CEO and COO to get this addressed RIGHT away for you. I apologize that we have been a bit delayed on replies lately
Site5: We are working to address this issue, and even implement guaranteed setup times within the next couple of days. I apologize that yours has taken some time, I will work very hard at getting your issue addressed for you by management
you: what is CEO and COO
Site5: Management, the bosses :)
Site5: What is your domain name?
you: Hmmmmmm.........do you know that you made me to lose 2 days and some money, because I expactedthat my account will be setup after 24 hours?
Site5: I understand your concern, I really do. I am terribly sorry that this has taken this long, I will be having someone look into this right away and find out what the issue was
you: here is the domain name -- ******cum.com
you: and it was for a reseller account
Site5: Did you receive our order confirmation email?
you: actually I sent some mails too the suppots, too
you: yes, I did.
Site5: Ok great
Site5: Well I am going to work really hard on getting someone on your issue right away for you
you: :-)))))))))))))))
Site5: Thank you for your patience and understanding, do you have an email address I can have them contact you at?
you: *****@*****k.*o* :-)))))))))))))
Site5: Great thank you, again I apologize, we will work on getting this issue resolved right away


*****************************

Now, after the posting, after the chat……Taylor Hawes resolved my problem.


I didn't know sit5 has a live chat available. Where did you access that?

Yes, those MySQL dumps can put a lot of strain on the server. How many databases were running the 30k tables??

Originally posted by MaxHosting
Yes, those MySQL dumps can put a lot of strain on the server. How many databases were running the 30k tables?? They were all in a single mySQL database, if that's what you're asknig. On further examination, the total number of tables was actually well over what I mentioned in my previous post, and the number of different forums (as in different instances of forum software and associated tables, not different forums within a single board) is also higher than the figure listen above.

Incidentally, there appears to be some evidence that setting up this kind of single-database model can lead to decreased performance depending on usage patterns:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/creating-many-tables.html
http://forums.devshed.com/archive/t-33073

Additionally, when you consider the obvious implications of running so many forums on a server that's already being shared with hundreds of other accounts (many of which are also running their own forums), you can see very clearly how performance could be affected, regardless of the hardware specifications of the system.

I believe Steven recognized the need for a more robust environment, which is likely why he chose to move to a dedicated server instead (not with Site5 however, as we haven't released our dedicated server line yet). This is the move he was referring to from last week which was inadvertantly interrupted by our systems administrators trying to deal with high load issues.

Originally posted by rois
I didn't know sit5 has a live chat available. Where did you access that?We currently provide live chat for sales inquiries. We will be running a pilot live support program with Cerberus' LiveHelp shortly. Customers will receive notification of this in an upcoming newsletter.

Originally posted by Aussie Bob
Matt, your reply gets my vote for ROTM (Reply Of The Month). Thanks Bob--glad to hear it was time well spent. :)

Matt

Matt, your reply gets my vote for ROTM (Reply Of The Month).Well, he used to be Wordsmith Extraordinaire. He's now Billing Mastermind, but I suspect it's a disguise. :D

Indeed it was a very nice post! :agree:

LOL I agree you should expect a call from the BUSH administration. They are going to need a deliverance of this magnitude real soon. I will also state that in the SPF (http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=236816) thread by shackrat I was given the impression that the dedicated server he ordered was from Site5. However here he states it was thru another provider. I would also agree that 24 hours is not too much to ask before taking this matter public.

Originally posted by Aussie Bob
Matt, your reply gets my vote for ROTM (Reply Of The Month). :D

I've gotta say, im really quite impressed how polite Site5 has been through this entire LITTLE issue....so often you see tech support acting in an unprofessional manner but this is clearly not the case here.

Originally posted by Site5-Matt
Hello Steve,

I've been unavailable for the majority of the day (although our support team has been working 24/7). Upon return this issue has taken precedence. I have an email from you in my inbox from 1 PM this afternoon, but apparently the story made it to the press before I could appropriately respond there. :)


I am not exactly sure as to what time I wrote, but 1pm sounds about right. It was not a matter of "bringing to press" as you state, but rather an act of desperation. I had been locked out of my reseller account with the site down for nearly twelve hours, and the only response I got from Site5 was the half-baked e-mail from tech support stating that I would either have to move the site, or fix the resource issue. But doing either is a little hard when you are locked out, wouldn't you agree? And wouldn't you agree that 12 hours is a bit too long of a wait too?

You and I have corresponded quite a bit regarding the issue from last week, and I was under the impression that we had a good working relationship--certainly one that warranted me being granted the chance to respond before the issue was made public.

I was also under the impression that we had a good working relationship, however after waiting nearly 12 hours to gain access to my sites (and giving up to go to bed), and explicitly asking you personally for help and not receiving a response, I began to wonder.

However now that you have expressed your opinion here in such a way that makes us look irresponsible and unhelpful (which may very well be how you feel at this point), I feel obligated to at least give our take on the events to which you have referred.

You are most welcome to present your point of view, that's what this is all about. I never meant to make Site5 look to be irresponsible. Unhelpful, well yes, I would say that would be a fair assessment as to how this current situation has been handled. Sending an email telling a customer to move or fix their site, at the same time denying them access is certainly being unhelpful.

Your site had a mySQL database with 30,000 tables (not a typo), hosting over 1400 separate installations of phpBB (from that single database) by our count. A mysqldump of the database, even at the highest CPU scheduling, took several hours, if that gives you an idea of the magnitude. In addition, there was a script in one of your other accounts that was running checks of all of the tables in that database, which was, in itself, putting quite a strain on the server, as most might imagine.

Technically, it was over 40,000 tables in all fairness. And as I have said, I was planning to move the site a lot sooner, but it nearly doubled in size over the week I was waiting for the new dedicated server. I never faulted Site5 for reacting to how much resources that site used, I knew it, and was just crossing my fingers that I would have enough time to move.

And indeed the transfer of this site to your dedicated server was interrupted by our systems administrators, however you must understand that we were catching flack from all sides on the issue. Several of our other resellers on that server were writing in complaining of server speed problems, which we quickly investigated and isolated to your account(s).

Yes, that occurred despite the fact that all parties were supposedly notified about the fact that the transfer was taking place. I will give credit where it's due. You guys recovered from that very admirably, and managed to get the database dumped in record time.

After accidentally interrupting your transfer (in an altruistic attempt to bring down the load on the server), one of our administrators--Tim Greer--went out of his way to assist you with the move so as to minimize your site's downtime. And consider that this whole time we were simultaneously trying to placate customers who were wondering why their sites were running so slowly.

Yes he did, and Tim did a fantastic job. He also helped me with an answer to a question that had me baffled much of the following day.
He received my sincere thanks when it was all done.

Today, again, another of your sites was using an unacceptable amount system resources and was suspended to prevent further service impairment. How do we define what's acceptable and what isn't? One pretty solid indication is when we receive complaints from other customers about their site's performance being degraded (which we did in both cases).

This is the one that baffles me to no end. The site is a simple vBulletin forum, has used less than 2GB of bandwidth, and at most get a couple thousand pageviews per day. I was very curious how that could be considered excessive, and furthermore, I was also very curious as to why that was happeneing, and was very anxious to take a look. But the problem was again, twelve hours had passed and still no access or communication from Site5.

What would you have us do in these situations in light of this elucidation? Is your assertion that your sites actually require "reasonable" levels of system resources and that our servers are simply not equipped to handle it? If a server was chronically overloaded with no obvious cause, we would quickly take action by adding new machines to our network and distributing the load between them. In fact in many cases we do this proactively--before performance gets to be an issue for our customers.

Yes, in fact my assertion was that I do feel your servers are on the hairy edge of being overloaded, especially if a site of such size as this last one causes resource issues. I also have a long string of emails from many dates where I was the one complaining about high CPU useage over a period of several weeks. This was before I even launched the huge site I moved last week.

However in both instances mentioned above, your accounts have been the sole source of the problem. The administrators receive notice that load on one of our servers is out of our predetermined reasonable boundaries, they investigate, and then they take action to correct the issue. And in the past week, three times has one or more of your accounts been the cause of the issue. In every case, when the offending account was suspended the server's performance returned to normal. Does this suggest to you a chronically overtaxed server, or a user whose requirements are perhaps too much for a standard "shared" server environment?[quote]

I think that suggests a litle both, wouldn't you? I never once tried to hide the fact that one of my sites did not belong on the server, it was definately large, and needed a new home. Like you I was trying to be proactive about it. But this last case is a mystery to me. If a customer cannot run a vBulletin forum with only a thousand or two pageviews a day, then yes, I submit to you that your servers are overtaxed.

[quote]You could claim that we're trigger happy with the "suspend" button, but I can guarantee you that if you wrote in complaining about service degradation caused by another user's account, you'd appreciate us taking immediate action.

Fair enough. I won't disagree with you there, but again, it appears to go back to server capacity.

You might also claim that our expectations of resource usage are far too low. This is your own opinion and I'm not here to argue our policies. We host many hundreds of resellers (who in turn host many thousands of their own customers) and many thousands of direct shared hosting accounts, so we have a fairly good idea of what "reasonable usage" looks like. And contrary to your argument that it's impossible to make use of all the resources we offer, we have many users who are either at the resource limits of their account or exceeding them. If we were at any time deluded in our ideas of what was "reasonable," you'd think that in analyzing a sample of thousands of live websites, we would have quickly been able to determine what the norm was and adapt our expectations accordingly. Either that or we'd be pretty regularly asking a large percentage of our client base to find other hosting arrangements (which, to my knowledge, isn't the case ;) ).[quote[

I honestly can't speculate as to the inner workings of your company. I can only say what it is based on my experience, and those have been clearly stated.

[quote]As for a detailed explanation of exactly why your sites manage to voraciously munch CPU cycles, we don't have one. In cases like this, we can only act on the symptoms, not the causes. We will work with you to help investigate the issue if you ask for our assistance (which we have offered to do in the emails where we've notified you that we had to suspend your account), but rather than taking a collaborative approach to solving the problem, your reaction has been mainly to take an caustic and derogatory tone with our staff (see the above post for an example--referring to us sarcastically as "brain surgeons"). This has been your response even after I have had several personal correspondences with you and have demonstrated that we are both receptive to your requests and willing to go out of our way to help. Don't get me wrong, I understand that this can be a very frustrating situation, but emails and posts with the tone of the one above are not a good way to initiate a mutual problem-solving effort. Nevertheless, we have responded professionally and courteously.

I'm glad to hear from your that you're willing to work with me on this, because that is not what your support technician said. The suspension e-mail asked to provide info as to what scripts I was running and a rough traffic estimate which I did. The response I received made no mention as to the scripts I was using, or any potential issues they were causing, in fact this is the gist of it:


I'm sorry that multiple accounts administered by yourself have been
suspended. However, the suspensions were required in order to maintain
an overall Quality of Service.

If you plan to move this account to your dedicated box, once moved,
please email billing@site5.com with a termination notice & I will ensure
we credit you for unused pre-paid hosting.


So exactly how is that a helpful response? That is the only response I received, about 6 hours after the suspension.

In fact, if you were to write to our support team now (or if you had at any point throughout the process) and ask for one of our administrators to help investigate the issue in an effort to solve the problem, we would be (and would have been) happy to do so. Granted there is only so much we can do, as it's not really our job to troubleshoot and optimize your website, however we will make an effort that is more than reasonable to assist you in resolving the issue.

See above. I did exactly what I was asked, I provided as much information as I could without accessing the site. Support was not interested in helping. I would be more than happy to forward the entire e-mail I received.

In spite of all this, I would love to continue our business relationship, as I believe Site5 can work with you to meet your needs. There isn't a single customer that I'm willing to lose--the minute one makes that concession, all customers become unimportant. If you can conceive of some way for us to continue working together, I'm more than willing to talk (and I would have spent the past hour addressing your email, rather than this forum post, had you given me so much as half a day to respond). However when you come to WHT and make the problem public domain so quickly, it suggests to me that you're unwilling to even entertain the possibility of working things out. I sincerely hope that isn't the case here, as I like to believe that all problems have an amicable solution if you look hard enough.

We at least have one common goal... I have no desire to move the remainder of my sites, however, they're all small, yet still causing problems. I don't know if I can be comfortable hosting my sites there. The fact that I went public was purely out of desperation based on the fact that 12 hours passed with no resolution.

If you're interested in exploring possible resolutions to this issue, I'm happy to work with you through email. However if you've resigned yourself to the fact that we're a contemptible organization, and your goal is to make that public knowledge, it would seem that this discussion forum should be your communications medium of choice.

I appreciate your candor, and sincerely hope that my words are perceived in the same optimistic spirit in which they were written.

Regards,
Matt Lightner

I finally received an e-mail from you Matt, about 24 hours after the suspension. I will be responding to it shortly.

Originally posted by kneadingu
LOL I agree you should expect a call from the BUSH administration. They are going to need a deliverance of this magnitude real soon. I will also state that in the SPF (http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=236816) thread by shackrat I was given the impression that the dedicated server he ordered was from Site5. However here he states it was thru another provider. I would also agree that 24 hours is not too much to ask before taking this matter public.

Sorry, I didn't mislead anyone into thinking the dedi was ordered from Site5. I certainly would have considered one with them since their network latency and throughput are excellent from where I'm located.

But I do disagree, 12 hours was what I call borderline reasonable. 24 hours is way too excessive.

I simply want to clarify that I considered the response here on the forum a response in lieu of responding to your email. As I mentioned, I would have spent the time responding directly instead of here, however this post required attention.

I had been waiting for you to follow up with me and inform me of your decision (based on my forum response), which is why I didn't respond to your email directly last night. This morning, after I hadn't heard back from you, I realized that you might be waiting on a direct reply to my email as well, at which point I provided one.

Keep in mind that I am not our 24/7 support--I'm not even around during all business hours (although I certainly seem to get well over 70 hours a week in somehow). A 12 hour response from me (not support), I feel is more than acceptable for a customer service issue, as I'm not the guy who deals with urgent matters (although I generally respond much faster than that when I'm around).

I am going to be having a meeting with our COO shortly to discuss revising our policies and procedures regarding excessive resource usage and account suspensions. Our goal is to come up with a solution that will both allow us to act in the best interests of the customer with the offending account and the other customers affected by resource abuse. I'm sure there's a good solution out there, and this thread seems to highlight that there is some room for improvement--if nothing else in the way we correspond with customers regarding the issue. (hey, it's possible that we don't have everything exactly right just yet, but we're certainly working toward it).

I will follow up with the results of that meeting if there is interest in the outcome.

Matt

I've also sent you an e-mail, and I will await your reply. I was not complaining about your lack of response time by the way, it was directed at your support staff in general.

FYI.. My site is still down, I'm still locked out, and cannot even get access to my reseller account.

It has now been 32 hours since suspension. I've compiled with two requests for information, yet I am still locked out patiently waiting for Site5 to follow through on their promises to work with me to resolve this issue.

Shackrat, your account was just suspended for 2 minutes and this is what happened to the load:
root@server [/home/shackrat/www]# uptime
20:00:54 up 1 day, 18:03, 1 user, load average: 19.65, 5.06, 2.60You can't honestly expect us to allow this kind of performance hit to go on. We're on the phone discussing the issue now. I will keep you informed, via this thread, as you seem to prefer.

Matt

Single client vs Whole server's clients* :)

I think Matt's doing the right thing.

You have to blame the CPU usage :smash:

I think you guys have another issue other than my site. The site has an alexa rank of 965557, it's not exactly busy. Can we check for a DOS attack or something because it's certainly not related to any increase of traffic there.

Actually Matt, I e-mailed you several hours ago since you asked to discuss this matter there and have not yet received a response.

Originally posted by PTH
Single client vs Whole server's clients* :)

I think Matt's doing the right thing.

You have to blame the CPU usage :smash:

In principle I agree with you.. However I highly doubt the site itself is to blame. I'd love to show an awstats report to prove it, but I still can't access the site.

Damn CPU usage! ;)

Shackrat,

I just got off the phone with our COO. We discussed our account suspension and resource usage policies in depth (using your individual case as an example) and have come up with a completely revised method of handling situations like this in the future. The new method will give customers more power to investigate and solve the issue on their own, as well as provide them with the same information that our staff members see when analyzing an account's resource usage. The goals of the new procedures are to aide in finding quick and painless solutions to this kind of problem, and also prevent customers from feeling like they're being kept "in the dark.�

The procedural changes of this resolution will be implemented immediately, and the technical changes (new scripts to gather more detailed information to provide to customers) will be written and distributed to all servers within a few days.

We're also going to be differentiating between the method of suspension used in cases of nonpayment, TOS/AUP violation and excessive resource usage. The method used in resource usage cases will involve disabling as little account functionality as possible (as opposed to a "full" suspension, which disables all access) while still putting a stop to the problem affecting the server's performance. We will also be providing users with the ability to unsuspend their own account when they feel they have resolved the issue (so there will be no need to wait on our staff to respond). This will avoid giving customers the feeling that their hands are tied and that they are at the complete mercy of our (I like to believe benevolent ;) ) support team.

I also discussed with our COO why it took six hours for you to receive a response to the inquiry regarding why your site was suspended (which was sent to both directly to me and to our reseller support department).

Your response to our suspension notification email was addressed to Todd (our COO) and me personally (the greeting was "Dear Matt and Todd"). Additionally within that email you explicitly asked for a personal response from me. The tone of the email was such that it most certainly required a manager to properly address and respond to the issues and criticism that you raised. In doing this, you made this ticket a managerial issue, not a technical one. When one of our systems administrators sees an email of that tone which is addressed specifically to the management, and especially when the email asks for a direct response from the CEO, they're likely not going to touch it with a 10-foot pole for fear that they might botch something and be held responsible. This is a reasonable response for a technician (or anybody for that matter) to have--nobody wants to risk messing up something that was directly addressed to their boss.

So the problem lies in the fact that your response turned this into both a technical and managerial matter. As is stated on our site, we provide 24/7 technical assistance with very fast responses. However, as you might imagine, managerial issues take longer to resolve. If you write in to any company and demand a personal response from the CEO, you can rest assured you're going to have to wait much longer (if not forever) than if you simply call their tech support department. In this case, our technicians put off handling the technical side of the problem because you had so clearly spelled out in your response that it was a managerial issue. The two had become so intertwined that it was difficult to address one without addressing the other. You can see why a technician might be apprehensive about getting involved with such a sticky and volatile situation.

As part of our new policy, our systems administrators are being instructed to "strip out" the technical details of the problem and respond only to those aspects, while leaving the managerial side for a manager to handle at a later time. Our reasoning for this policy change is that the technical side of the problem (I.E. your site is currently suspended and you want help solving the problem) is almost always more time-sensitive than the managerial side (I.E. you don't like the general manner in which we've dealt with the problem).

Todd will be contacting you shortly to implement our new policies in your case. Your site will be our test run of this new resolution, so I'm anxious to see how you feel about it.

I appreciate your willingness to work with us, and hope that I've helped to clear the air on matters described in this thread.

Matt

Good move Matt especially the part about disabling the offensive script/resource hog versus the entire site. Okay you two should be able to resolve the residuals amicably and perhaps in private?

Originally posted by Site5-Matt
[B]Shackrat,

I just got off the phone with our COO. We discussed our account suspension and resource usage policies in depth (using your individual case as an example) and have come up with a completely revised method of handling situations like this in the future. The new method will give customers more power to investigate and solve the issue on their own, as well as provide them with the same information that our staff members see when analyzing an account's resource usage. The goals of the new procedures are to aide in finding quick and painless solutions to this kind of problem, and also prevent customers from feeling like they're being kept "in the dark.

Well I would certainly have to say that I agree with that. It will eliminate someone else from being put in my situation where the site has been taken down, but the user cannot have access to determine the problem. I certainly commend you guys for that.

The procedural changes of this resolution will be implemented immediately, and the technical changes (new scripts to gather more detailed information to provide to customers) will be written and distributed to all servers within a few days.

Another 3 cheers for Site5, again, I'm glad to see this being done.

We're also going to be differentiating between the method of suspension used in cases of nonpayment, TOS/AUP violation and excessive resource usage. The method used in resource usage cases will involve disabling as little account functionality as possible (as opposed to a "full" suspension, which disables all access) while still putting a stop to the problem affecting the server's performance. We will also be providing users with the ability to unsuspend their own account when they feel they have resolved the issue (so there will be no need to wait on our staff to respond). This will avoid giving customers the feeling that their hands are tied and that they are at the complete mercy of our (I like to believe benevolent ;) ) support team.

They should also have different suspension notices too. The other aspect of this is the fact that I've received a few e-mails wondering about whether I'm paying my hosting bills. That was quite embarassing, but not the most important thing on my mind. I think you guys are really on the right track.

I also discussed with our COO why it took six hours for you to receive a response to the inquiry regarding why your site was suspended (which was sent to both directly to me and to our reseller support department).

Your response to our suspension notification email was addressed to Todd (our COO) and me personally (the greeting was "Dear Matt and Todd"). Additionally within that email you explicitly asked for a personal response from me. The tone of the email was such that it most certainly required a manager to properly address and respond to the issues and criticism that you raised. In doing this, you made this ticket a managerial issue, not a technical one. When one of our systems administrators sees an email of that tone which is addressed specifically to the management, and especially when the email asks for a direct response from the CEO, they're likely not going to touch it with a 10-foot pole for fear that they might botch something and be held responsible. This is a reasonable response for a technician (or anybody for that matter) to have--nobody wants to risk messing up something that was directly addressed to their boss.

I can certainly understand that, however, I feel that when someone's site is offline, and the manager cannot be reached, it then turns into the tech responsibility to help, whether they want to or not. Since Todd was the one who did respond to the message, isn't he manager enough to handle the problem in addition to yourself?

I think from this point onward the technical matters should be taken care of offline. I am grateful that Site5 has chosen to change their policies to be more fair to their customers in response to this issue. I will happily report back to this thread once things are resolved.

Originally posted by shackrat
In principle I agree with you.. However I highly doubt the site itself is to blame. I'd love to show an awstats report to prove it, but I still can't access the site.

Damn CPU usage! ;) You have to realize that CPU usage and website traffic are not always directly correlated. Just because you don't think your site gets much traffic doesn't mean it's not using a ton of CPU resources. The empirical evidence is overwhelmingly pointing to your site being a huge resource hog (see my post above about the server load).

It's not really our job to debug your site (although we will certainly try to help you identify the cause if you want to work with us). The fact of the matter remains that your site, when unsuspended, basically crashes the system. This is a dual (hyperthreaded) Xeon 2.8 GHz system with plenty of RAM. Wen your site is suspended it runs with a load well below 1 (the server is not at all overloaded), and when your site is unsuspended... well... see my post above.

Despite your incredulity, those are the facts. You say your site doesn't get many hits. Believe it or not, we handle a lot of sites that DO get many hits, and they all run without issue. You seem to be very quick to point to our servers as the cause of the problem, however aside from your site everything about this particular server runs great. Barring some kind of surreptitious voodoo, our investigations have all implicated your site as the cause of the problem.

You can look at uncorrelated indicators (visitors per day, bandwidth usage, disk space usage) all you like, but at the end of the day, in the case of excessive resource usage, we simply look at which user on the system is running the processes that are consuming all the resources. In this case, it's clearly you.

Script inefficiency, oversized/inefficient databases, bloated/hacked programs, malicious activity--all are possible reasons that your site (and not the thousands of others that we host) is having a resource usage problem. I'm virtually certain that if you took this site elsewhere the problem would not evaporate. Either your estimates of your site's popularity are way off, or there is something else in your account that's putting a large strain on the system. The server load on systems this powerful doesn't just magically jump to 20+ for no good reason--it takes a lot to get the kind of response we're seeing when we unsuspend your site.

If our servers were chronically overtaxed as you claim, the load shouldn't drop below 1 when your account is unsuspended. Server overloading, as you speak of it, is the aggregate result of too many reasonably-sized accounts packed onto a server, so suspending any one of them should not solve the issue. Here, upon suspending your account, the server runs flawlessly.

I'm hopeful that an investigation into the matter will yield results that you find to be satisfactory. If it does turn out that your site is simply getting a ton of usage, you could certainly have worse problems on your hands (no visitors at all is definitely a much trickier problem to solve ;) ).

I look forward to continue looking into the issue with you and allowing you to continue your own investigation into the matter.

Matt

Site5 seems very professional and customer friendly, the people critisizing them all seemed that they were abusing their accounts in which case Site5 should act upon it to keep their other rule-abiding clients happy. I just wanted to comment that although I'm not a customer of Site5, they seem like a very customer friendly and fair company.

BillNathan, you do not have the facts, so I would appreciate it if you would refrain from making such accusations.

Well Matt...

I do not know what to tell you.. I have not done anything with the site in months, traffic has dropped right off, I've made no changes to any of the scripts or code in weeks, and suddenly it's a resource hog? Sorry folks, don't blame the scripts, it just doesn't add up.

Could it be a DOS attack or something similar? Sure, I would love to know if that is it. But since I cannot access the site, how am I supposed to make any determination?

My hands are still tied, I cannot access the server, nor my accounts, so I can't check logs, scripts, or anyting. I can just sit here and be called an account abuser. Nice.

When an issue gets to the point where forum users are being criticized for contributing their thoughts on the matter, it no longer belongs in a public forum. This is no longer a discussion, it is a two-way conversation.

I will be requesting that the moderators close this thread. Any further correspondence should be directed to our reseller support email address and will be passed along to me if it requires my attention.

Matt

Originally posted by Site5-Matt
When an issue gets to the point where forum users are being criticized for contributing their thoughts on the matter, it no longer belongs in a public forum. This is no longer a discussion, it is a two-way conversation.

I will be requesting that the moderators close this thread. Any further correspondence should be directed to our reseller support email address and will be passed along to me if it requires my attention.

Matt

Matt, I get the feeling that remark was directed towards me. I am not criticising the members of this forum, I politely asked a certain member to refrain from making accusations without all of the facts.

Secondly, I just discovered I had access to my account again. Within 5 minutes I was able to determine that something was going on with phpAdsNew and disabled it immediately. I still need to determine why it happened, but at least I was able to kill it until I can look into it further.

This is something that could have, and should have been resolved very quickly yesterday. I agree, this thread needs to be closed.

I have read this whole thread and am on Site5's side, they are providing quality support and 2 abusive customers are just trying to damage their rep.

It simply seems that the issue has exhausted the usefulness of the forums and would be better addressed through direct communications. If no satisfactory solution is reached, then I would expect the forums may be appropriate again, however as we are obviously in contact, they seem to be an unnecessary formality. I think we're both in agreement on this point.

I'm glad to hear that you were able to identify the cause of the problem--score one for the new system. I apologize for the delay in getting it implemented, we were going over a couple details to make sure everything was kosher. As I said, feel free to let us know if you need further assistance.

Matt

Originally posted by BillNathan
I have read this whole thread and am on Site5's side, they are providing quality support and 2 abusive customers are just trying to damage their rep.

Matt has been providing good service and has been going out of his way, for that I commend him.

On their side?? I'm abusive?? Oh brother.. You're entitled to your opinion... Oh I see you also have a hosting company.. Hmmmm...

Anyhow. Matt, thank you for your help, I think we both have learned something and hopefully will get something out of it in the long-run. I'll contact you or support offline should I need further assistance. And yes, score one for the new system. It worked very well on it's first trial this evening! :)