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  1. #1

    one more BAD hostgator story

    Hi everyone on this great forum! I joined here because I found a lot of discussions about Hostgator and I have my own Hostgator story that developed today. I was a pretty happy Hostgator customer until today with two shared accounts, even promoting them as an affiliate. This morning exactly the same thing happened to me as to the guy in another thread here lately: Account suspended due to "high server load" without any prior warning, all domains on that account are down, no further details given, account moved to a new dedicated ip with the option to upgrade to dedicated, but the login does NOT work on that ip. Livesupport confirms that my account has actually not been moved to that ip.

    For a full seven hours no one could give me any further information, livesupport admitted that no manager and no one from the abuse department, who are in charge of this, was on duty for this entire period.

    Finally the abuse department gets back to me, apologizes for the error when moving my account (but does not correct it) and cites this as the reason for the suspension:

    "You were using 40% of the memory, of which there is 4 gigs of RAM total. That was affecting the server immensely. As for what needs to be done, it looks like you had numerous zombie processes (processes that were terminated before they should have been, usually a scripting issue). Those are shown in brackets ( [] )."

    According to the path they gave it seemed that a Links Organizer script I use on one subdomain had caused these "zombie processes". I know for a fact that this script is running without any memory or other server issues on extremely large website networks with hundreds of thousands of daily uniques. So I contacted the programmer of the script, who replied immediately:

    "yeah, thats pretty bad action your hosting company took. The script just makes 2 pretty simple mysql queries and nothing else that should cause such server overload. Can you ask your host support to look for more details, like since when it started loading the server like that and etc. I have really no idea what could cause such thing. A script to have unterminated zombies processes can be caused by 2 things generally:
    1) script is poorly written and takes really much time to complete and it can't complete properly and stays as zombie.
    2) a server problem appeared, causing even properly coded scripts not complete for exact amount of time..
    I think it is the 2nd case here, since the track.php has simple pretty simple things - connect to mysql, make 2 pretty fast queries and ends. There is no way for it to take more than less than a second to execute and finish if all is fine on the server..It has no long processing queries or code that could make script to get stuck for more time.."

    Of course I kept emailing the Hostgator abuse department and a support manager, asking to reactivate my account (I'd even remove the script if needed) or at least finally move the account properly to a new IP so I can login. I also sent them this statement from the programmer, asking for more detail on these "zombie processes" (logs). No reaction from them at all for several hours again now.

    In total it is now 11 and a half hours that my account is suspended and I still don't even know where it's been moved to, I have not been given a new IP, I cannot access it at all! I still don't have enough detailed information about the problem that caused them to shut my account down without warning. I don't know if this memory issue was actually due to another server problem that caused these processes to not terminate properly, as the programmer suggested. Is this a way to treat a paying customer?! Please don't tell me I should have signed up with a better quality host, I have figured that much already...

  2. #2
    So far, I'm a satisfied customer with HostGator. I log into their support forum almost daily. This kind of horror story occurs from time to time, usually to long term customers. It make me nervous every time it happens. When is it going to happen to me????

    I can understand HG's position. They have a server with many customers and quickly shut down an offending customer and all of his sites rather than have the whole system go belly up disenfranchising everyone on the server.

    It does seem that they use a sledgehammer approach when a pair of needle nose pliers would be better. Their maintenance people have more tools available than the customer. The customer is usually limited to cpanel/whm. Maybe they should investigate the problem in more detail and shut down only the offending script or domain?

    The best option is a dedicated server. Not all of us can afford that solution.

    Jeff

  3. #3
    3 hours later I have at least access to the cpanel on the new server they put it on. But they screwed up this account moving, none of my bogs can make the database connecions anymore. I cannot even access it via FTP, it seems FTP is not set up on that server as Livesupport cannot access it either. Their support takes hours to reply to simple questions. This is all in sharp contrast to my previous experiences with them. I was a happy customer too until this sledgehammer hit me. As you say if they had informed me I could have stopped that script immediately. I still didn't get any logs from them so I suspect it was actually a server issue and it just affected the processes of this script. They are clearly understaffed with qualified personnel and they don't even have an escalation path for issues like this! My sites are down 15 hours and counting...

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Jun 2005
    Location
    Indonesia
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    23
    I heard of that. I if we owned shared hosting or reseller hosting, we can't do server monitoring. So that we don't know if there is something could happen in their server. Usually, if you have scripting problem, it's maybe their action that could suspend the hosting account. But in case of this, the server admin should notice you and ask you to change or delete the script and with deadline time given of course.
    Techindo.net - Affordable Price Hosting with PHP, MySQL, Reliable speed fail over cluster hosting for high traffic sites.
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  5. #5
    Sounds like there are communication errors on their side. The best thing to do in your case would have been to chmod your script to 000 so it wouldn't run. That way at least your account would be live. Then they could have contacted you to fix it.
    Eleven2 Web Hosting - World-Wide Hosting, Done Right!

  6. #6
    You can't chmod your script if you don't have any access to your account!

    Have you tried phone support? I had a problem just after my account was set up a couple of years ago. The owner actually answered the phone on a Sunday and had my problem resolved in a short time.

    Jeff

  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by jlgreer1
    You can't chmod your script if you don't have any access to your account!
    Yeah obviously, but Hostgator can and should have instead of suspending the site. That was what was meant by my post, that HG should have not the client.
    Eleven2 Web Hosting - World-Wide Hosting, Done Right!

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Location
    Newport Beach, CA
    Posts
    2,923
    Just something to think about. 99.99999999999999999999% of the time the author of software will blame the host. It's entirely possible that a script can arbitrarily get stuck in a loop or otherwise cause problems. Servers are not all the same. O/S, versions of packages and most importantly permissions differ. while it's probably not likely the problem was the software, it's very possible

    That being said 99.99999999999999999999% of hosting companies will almost immediately blame the developer of the script/
    Show your reciprocal links on your website. eReferrer

  9. #9
    Join Date
    May 2002
    Location
    Internet / Colorado
    Posts
    1,660
    Quote Originally Posted by e-places
    Just something to think about. 99.99999999999999999999% of the time the author of software will blame the host. It's entirely possible that a script can arbitrarily get stuck in a loop or otherwise cause problems. Servers are not all the same. O/S, versions of packages and most importantly permissions differ. while it's probably not likely the problem was the software, it's very possible

    That being said 99.99999999999999999999% of hosting companies will almost immediately blame the developer of the script/
    Hah very true, good point, I once had a nice ring going with php devs blaming modernbill, modernbill blaming curl, and curl blaming the server admin, boy that was fun.

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Aug 2004
    Location
    Earth
    Posts
    8,154
    Will have to wait for HostGator's response to this, there are always two sides to every story

    I was a pretty happy Hostgator customer until today with two shared accounts, even promoting them as an affiliate.
    How long have you been with them?

    Sometimes the web host needs to take drastic measures to do what seems right to them.

  11. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by e-places
    Just something to think about. 99.99999999999999999999% of the time the author of software will blame the host. It's entirely possible that a script can arbitrarily get stuck in a loop or otherwise cause problems. Servers are not all the same. O/S, versions of packages and most importantly permissions differ. while it's probably not likely the problem was the software, it's very possible

    That being said 99.99999999999999999999% of hosting companies will almost immediately blame the developer of the script/
    very good point, and if you're caught in the middle it's no fun...i still cannot judge today if it was the script or a server config issue that caused the high memory load. i only know that this script is running fine without any server load issues for many webmasters on some very high traffic site networks. in total my sites were offline for 17 hours. plus i continue having problems on the server my account was moved to over the last few days, had to keep their support busy. of course there's two sides to every story, but i still think that

    a) hostgator's abuse department should first contact a webmaster and give him an hour or so to remove the problem before just moving everything and then not be reachable for hours!
    b) obviously their "moving" script is not working properly, other users have experienced this. when taking such drastic measures they should at least make sure that the procedure works fine. this resulted in all the downtime and it took them way too long to fix their own screw-up.

    plus i keep having the impression that the quality of the hostgator support has deteriorated drastically and that their 2nd level support is completely understaffed. livesupport is always very willing to help but what they can do is very limited. i have moved the domain with that script to another host and i will gradually move all my sites aways from hostgator over the next few weeks.

  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by WN-Ali
    How long have you been with them?
    for about 9 months.

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