I've been with HostRocket for nearly two years, and in the past six months I've noticed a marked deterioration in service.

On innumerable occasions, both my email and my website have gone down and have been inaccessible.

On Friday, my website disappeared completely replaced by HR's spam policy page. Repeated inquiries went unanswered all day Friday and most of Saturday.

When there finally was a response it was:

Hello,

There was a problem with our DNS servers and they were pointing your site to an incorrect IP address. I have corrected this but it might take sometime for your ISPs DNS to reflect the change. In the meantime you can view your site at this URL:
--

--
Please let us know if there is anything else we can help you with.

Joe R.

EXCUSE ME?? Could HR please AT LEAST tell folks when there is a problem to begin with? There was nothing to indicate thgis on the server status page (and still isn't). DNS errors are pretty serious things and it seems the LEAST they could do.

I told the guy this and here's what he said:

We are really sorry for the trouble. Now we hope you don\'t have any problems. If you have any problems please feel free to contact us.

Am I talking to an auto-responder or what??

HostRocket has become a joke. It's always sad to see a company become the victime of their own success. I'm off to find a better hosting solution.

IF I am not mistaquen, HR just moved some accounts from VDI to their NOC .. if your account was one of them, it is possible the new IP was not properly updated in the DNS servers, an unfortunate error, but it can happen...

you should see how cahotic the Jumpline move was ;)

I just find it funny, if people dont' get a reply from HR, they bitch .. if people get a reply from HR .. they bitch about the reply ..

Unlike what most people thing, it is IMPOSSIBLE to keep an eye on tousands of websites, and make sure each and every one is up, and if there is a DNS problem with one .. I am sorry, but the only way the host will know .. is when the client tells him.

I was with HR for 2 years as well and totally agree with you about their support. I had two accounts with them and over the last 6 months experienced numerous problems that were inevitably an error on their part. I was also charged on my cc a few times for things I didn't request, like a domain name registration renewal and extra bandwidth. Fortunately those charges were reimbursed. Their responses to trouble tickets, if I was lucky enough to even get a response, were generic and totally non-helpful.

As my year contract was almost up, I found a new host and left. I learned a few lesson though, including not giving my hosting company my credit card, and not to sign up for too long a period. I now pay for hosting with checks and sign up for only 3 or 6 month periods at a time.


Good luck with your search for a new host. I'm now using Alwayswebhosting and Site5, and so far so good!

ditto...I'm with HR for almost a year and I loved them, really, recommended them to everyone who wanted a host, and now their support.....

like the two others above, their answers to my questions have been very ambigous and generic.

Am on my way out there....

Carlos,

People do have the right to bitch, because after days of waiting for a reply, and then a message arrives with a basic answer, then I don't see how this shows any good support.

And this is not the first time HR customers come here and complain. I think that shows that HR is doing something wrong.

Personally, I have to side with the position that a much more prompt reply should have been made. Personal customer support is the benchmark of a company with which it is pleasurable to do business. A well-attended helpdesk is one aspect of this. Phone support is another. Ultimately, each client should have the personal contact info of at least one person inside whatever company he or she is doing business with.

When responses take so long to come and contain no information, I think it is time to hit the road in search of a new host. Best of luck!

There always having some sort of problems,i recall when i use to host with them they had the same dns problems and my site was down for the weekend,i emailed them Sunday and didnt get a response till around tuesday and then one of there support people has the guts to say that my site was up all weekend,when i was saying how can that be i had tons of emails from visitors saying it was down.Then after asking for a credit on a month of hosting they didnt even answer it.

Originally posted by CRego3D

Unlike what most people thing, it is IMPOSSIBLE to keep an eye on tousands of websites, and make sure each and every one is up, and if there is a DNS problem with one .. I am sorry, but the only way the host will know .. is when the client tells him.

This is so untrue, there are many FREE software packages that monitor servers uptime, and not just for web, but for DNS, POP3, SMTP, etc.

IMO - No matter how big a host is, I firmly believe that when you call your host and tell them that your site is down, they should reply "Yup, we know we are taking a look right now", or "Oh really, It is showing up on our side let me investigate." Thats just me. I think every host should be monitoring every site.

If you are co-located or using a dedicated server then I think you should monitor your own server.

Originally posted by DaddyPops


This is so untrue, there are many FREE software packages that monitor servers uptime, and not just for web, but for DNS, POP3, SMTP, etc.

Was I speakign French ? .. of course there are a ton of services that will check for those, but the problem is checking every SINGLE site to make sure it's up, becuase DNS is running fine in one server, doesnt' mean all sites are.

And yes, a host can do it .. and lots of other things, .. but it wont' cost you 10.00 a month ;)

No your not speaking french... And what is this 10 dollars a month crap? You buy software to do it, there is no monthly fee. One that runs under Windows is IPSentry for about $99, for linux I could right a script in about 2 hours that would monitor sites.

Use the Windows one from your home computer and the linux one from a server in preferably in another data center, but in the same datacenter if you had to. There is absolutely no excuse for not monitoring your customers sites. I can't believe you are trying to act like it is because of monthly fees, sounds more like laziness to me.

Anyways thats just my opinion.

I think that HR host 2000+ sites.
Do you think that its possible to monitor 2000+ sites??
I don't mean servers, I mean domains.
Sometimes the server its up, majority of the sites are up too, but 1 no.

I used to work for i-structure a level3 company and they used "Whats up Gold" at I think around $799 if memory serves. With this program I logged into a web page and on that page was every router and server for the company. And at a quick glance if anything was red it was down. If something went down a person was paged and a ticket was automatically logged into a help desk system. Now $799 doesn't sound like much for a company with 2000 domains being hosted. With IP Sentry that I mentioned earlier I am honestly not sure if it could handle that load but here is how it works. Since the earlier poster was mentioning how it becuase DNS is running fine in one server.

You set it so that everything is dependant on something, if your main router is down it does not bother checking the individual sites, you can tell it that if your DNS Server is down don't check the individual sites. Now lets say that you set it up to check a certain domain. You can tell it what text to look for on the main page. By default I think it looks for "HTTP/1." and if it finds that it marks the site as up, you can change this text to whatever you want. So you could make it where if a site didn't display a certain title tag then the site would be marked as down, that way if it was an error message, it would still mark it as down, and someone would get paged to investigate.

Writing a program yourself for this would not be that difficult. Now for 2000 servers on the other hand it would be best to use threading, but still not too difficult. I still think that there is really no excuse to not monitor sites.

(I apologize for rambling)

Mike

I use whatup gold for DataColo .. when the number of servers starts to esacalate drastically, the program becomes slower, I could onyl imaginge if it had to be used to monitors 5 or 10K sites, it would hang

The thing is, you don't generally monitor everything about each site. You monitor the services for each site (like the FTP server, the DNS server, Apache on the server, etc.). The DNS server could be up and functioning, but have the incorrect entries, and it wouldn't tell you that a site was down.

In other words, just because the FTP server is up, it doesn't mean I emailed you the correct password and you can FTP in. Server is up, you can't get in. Apache is the same way, httpd could be up and running fine on the server, but there could be a problem with the site itself.

If you have a small number of sites, you can monitor the services for each individual site. Make sure httpd is up for domain.com, domain2.com, domain3.com, etc. But at a certain point, you (the host) have to monitor the services on each server. You need to be alerted if FTP, or DNS, or Email, or Apache, etc., takes a digger.

This is all I expect (personally) from a host, (I'm not telling anyone else what they should expect).

Originally posted by Jedito
I think that HR host 2000+ sites.
Do you think that its possible to monitor 2000+ sites??
I don't mean servers, I mean domains.
Sometimes the server its up, majority of the sites are up too, but 1 no.


I'm sure that number can't be correct. We host 5000+ and I would still consider us a relatively small hosting company. Its a *very* comfortable number of customers to manage.

--Tina

A while ago Brendan told me they push about 50Mbit of transfer for their shared customers - thats a lot more than 2000 customer accounts :)

A lot of domains to host is a lame excuse.
If you make profit on each domain, the more domains you get, the more profit.
Some companies use the extra profit to hire extra staff and extra monitoring servers, while other companies preffer to increase the profit without spending extra to keep the same relativity of costumer per support staff.

Iceblaze, I think that you didn't get the point.
You can monitor all your servers, but not every site on each server.

I'm talking about the support attitude of 'Wer'e sorry and lets finish that here'

Even if the servers where monitored, and the services where monitored its imposible to track 1000+ sites. Its all about CUSTOMER SERVICE that is number 1 priority for any sucessfull hosting company. The bigger the company the more knowlegeable and informative support staff they should have. Yes a hosting company with 1000+ domains won't be able to find out right away that there is a problem with one of their domains its imposible but if there is enough support personnel the client will send a ticket > support will get it > and fix the problem right away. Everybody will be happy :eek: .

I will say this I have had one domain hosted at MaximumASP for almost a year and a half, they are very expensive in my opinion, but they earn it. Everytime my site has gone down, when I call their support, as soon as I tell them my domain name they are like "Yup our server monitor caught that and we are working on it right now." My site with them has NEVER been down for more than 10 minutes. Most of the time they have it back up before I can call.

Just thought I would add that still in my opinion the only excuse not to monitor all of the sites would be if they were all name based and did not have a dedicated IP address, but even then it is shaky.

Many server monitoring programs do an http request and can be configured to find common problems.

From the sounds of most of the replies this is not the status quo, and maybe it should be.

Originally posted by DaddyPops
Just thought I would add that still in my opinion the only excuse not to monitor all of the sites would be if they were all name based and did not have a dedicated IP address, but even then it is shaky.

Many server monitoring programs do an http request and can be configured to find common problems.

From the sounds of most of the replies this is not the status quo, and maybe it should be.

So you want alarms going off when you decide to remove your index.html or delete your home directory? How are hosts supposed to know when you are working on your web site? Also, they would need to configure your logging not to have the entries from the monitor, and if you have any type of CGI on your page (to set cookies, or count visitors), it's going to be called everytime your site is "visited" by the site monitor.

Do you have any answers for these problems?

If you want this service, you should set it up and have it email you, then you notify the web host. I would be more than happy to set up a free monitoring service like enotify for any of our customers that requested it, but it's going to go to their email or pager, and not ours. :)

I also have been a HostRocket customer for over a year. They were doing a pretty good job until January 2002 when my mail and web site would go down on a weekly basis. Troubletickets would get a response but would simply say "its up now". What made me leave was that I had a mailing list going on my site. For two days I didn't receive any mail! I submitted a trouble ticket and you know what they said? "We no longer support the current mailing list ... Feel free to install one yourself" I couldn't beleive it! That is just poor business with a poor attitude. It sounds like they have so many customers that they just don't care. Any size company that stops caring about their customers is headed for trouble. I no longer recommend hosting with HostRocket.

-- Akamai

Originally posted by Jedito
I think that HR host 2000+ sites.
Do you think that its possible to monitor 2000+ sites??
I don't mean servers, I mean domains.
Sometimes the server its up, majority of the sites are up too, but 1 no.

I don't see the point in monitoring every site on a given server. Monitor the server enough to guarantee that the apropriate services are functioning properly and you've done your job. Customer sites will work. If a customer screwed up permissions on something or deleted their index.html or whatever, I don't see how it's the host's responsibility to hold the customer's hand. If there's a problem at that point, then it's most likely isolated and the customer can submit a trouble ticket or whatever the procedure is with your hosting provider.

Originally posted by bitserve


So you want alarms going off when you decide to remove your index.html or delete your home directory?

No you would configure it to look for error messages or read the headers not the site content. Also if they are inexperienced enough to delete their home directory what is the harm in a heads up since they will most likely be calling you to get it back anyways. You could also set it up so it only goes off when there is no response from port 80.

How are hosts supposed to know when you are working on your web site?

Once again you could set the monitor to specifically look for error messages, or look in the headers. It would ignore a 404 since this would be a end-user problem not a server one.

Also, they would need to configure your logging not to have the entries from the monitor, and if you have any type of CGI on your page (to set cookies, or count visitors), it's going to be called everytime your site is "visited" by the site monitor.

You mean like a spider from a search engine? You are correct, but that is why every monitoring software has IP Exclusions so that requests from certain IP's are ignored. (This is why that feature was added.) As far as cookies this is a non-issue, as cookies only get returned to web browsers.

Do you have any answers for these problems?

I guess I do. ;)

I will however update my statement and say that monitoring the services is fine, but monitoring the individual sites is going the extra mile and being proactive.

and tell me again what your paying with Hostrocket? $9.95??

you want the world given to you on a silver platter to i betcha......

So for $9.95 he should expect his site to be down all the time?

What exactly is the limit Wolf? At what price should he expect his server to stay up and for support to respond quickly?

looks like every company on this board including hostrocket monitors services on their networks just fine, as another said perfectly, the host isnt responsible for if a customer screws up their website or data resulting in their site being down.

A host will monitor the services in general, with us, its every 5 minutes, in 10 minutes if its not responding, we get called. Now if we were to monitor 2,000 websites which MAY or MAYNOT even be on our system, thats quite a bit to deal with and its impossible to do so.

If you want to have your site monitored individually, expect to pay a U(#$(# more of money or go spend another $15 a month and use a external monitoring service

The whole point is that a LOT of users pay 10 dollars a month, and that brings profit. HostRocket do not depend on one single user paying $10 a month, or 50, or 100 or even 1000. I expect that if they sell hosting for profit for over 2000 users like mentioned they should have the same ratio of profit per costumer as if they would sell 5 $10 accounts and only need to monitor 5 sites, if you know what I mean.
It's like saying you should not expect service at all from your cellular phone company because of their low rates, but thats bull****, because they get a lot of costumers and their financial turnover should be realtively just the same.

The point is, the costumer pays them for uptime, support and reliability. He shuoldnt really care if they need to bust their asses off to provide that, but as long as he pays for that he should get it.
There is no more you pay what you get for excuse here. HostRocket is a big company, and they should know better, and you should know better, than using that excuse. If HostRocket prices are too low for them to be able to provide the service they are supposed to it should be their problem and not the costumers problem. The costumer paid, period.

HostRocket doesnt say anything like: "You only pay 10 dollars so dont expect a good service", or "Well, because our prices are low you will suffer downtime" or anything like that.
If the company should go through losses of money to provide what they should, then so be it. They have the responsobility to provide what they need to provide based on the prices they wanted to charge to attract more costumers.

you want personal guaranteed 100% uptime on your sole website out of thousands of others, expect to pay more............alot more..........

this thread is really trying to beat blood out of a turnip...really useless in itself

Originally posted by AlaskanWolf
you want personal guaranteed 100% uptime on your sole website out of thousands of others, expect to pay more............alot more..........

this thread is really trying to beat blood out of a turnip...really useless in itself

Amen to that, unfortunately, some people just don't get it.

I only expect what they said they have for the monthly payment THEY CHOSE TO REQUIRE.

That is:
99.5% uptime
24/7 assistance and friendly support

Sheesh! is that too much to ask?
Even 'Yes', the sattelite TV company I'm with, have better service than what all those clients described, and they have MUCH MUCH MORE CLIENTS.

I'm sure if you are such a big company and you earn so much money, 15-30 minutes of support time response MAX, friendly and assistant support, is not THAT hard to achieve.

They said they have it, they want those $10 for it.

Its like saying that if I ask a shipment from UPS for $7 and it gets 2 days later than it was supposed to, they can say 'Oh well you only payed $7, what did you expect?'.

HostRocket is a professional company, and they should deliver what they offer, it doesnt matter how much they require for it, as long as you pay what they want for it. period. and some people here JUST CANT GET IT.

Originally posted by IceBlaZe
I only expect ...
99.5% uptime
24/7 assistance and friendly support

Sheesh! is that too much to ask?
...15-30 minutes of support time response MAX, friendly and assistant support, is not THAT hard to achieve.
Just a note that uptime guarantees are not actual guarantees of uptime, rather it means that you will receive credit for downtime (see TOS for the exact offer and calculations of this).

24/7 assistance and friendly support doesn't necessarily mean 15-30 minute response time (which I'll add is often impossible as it could take a couple of hours to trouble shoot a problem). If this is something you are looking for, then you should ask a prospective host if they can and will offer it.

Usually when there is an uptime gurantee it means the company will do their best to keep it that way.

And 24/7 support means you should get a quick reply wether someone is on the problem or not, and maybe some explanations, and not a regular almost auto-responder like, or just a general reply.

Originally posted by DaddyPops
No you would configure it to look for error messages or read the headers not the site content. Also if they are inexperienced enough to delete their home directory what is the harm in a heads up since they will most likely be calling you to get it back anyways. You could also set it up so it only goes off when there is no response from port 80.

Once again you could set the monitor to specifically look for error messages, or look in the headers. It would ignore a 404 since this would be a end-user problem not a server one.

You mean like a spider from a search engine? You are correct, but that is why every monitoring software has IP Exclusions so that requests from certain IP's are ignored. (This is why that feature was added.) As far as cookies this is a non-issue, as cookies only get returned to web browsers.

I guess I do. ;)

I will however update my statement and say that monitoring the services is fine, but monitoring the individual sites is going the extra mile and being proactive.

It sounds like you really only have a basic understanding of web servers. None of your proposals would correctly address the issues that I raised. But thanks for trying to be helpful with your suggestions.

Surely you are not going to attack my knowledge of web servers without an explanation? I would be willing to bet I know more about them then you. Could you please explain to me what is flawed in my thinking, or is your attack just a ploy to not look bad as I answered all of your questions.

i think its time for the mods to close this thread, soon it will be a "i know more then you do" which looks like DaddyPop is trying to ignite

I agree.. It's gone way off topic. HR is no longer being discussed.