Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : My issue with PolurNET

[PolurNET]

DH gave a reply saying they won't censor content and pointed to this page: http://abuse.dreamhost.com/libel/

This is really sad considering this individual can link to a number of sites as much as he wants and there is not much we can do... we acted honestly on our part as demonstrated, but the OP has been posting biased and extremely wrong information.

Here is the proof as promised, from our helpdesk:

http://img508.imageshack.us/my.php?i...titled2iy7.png

Notice by his own admission, he had 10,000 visitors that time. This was the only reply we got (also note, it was nearly 24 hours later), after that no communication was received; we assumed it was solved. I had merged the tickets at the time, but he did not actually reply to the abuse ticket, rather made 10 new ones too...

[Keith W]

Is the OP in the same country as you? If they are why not sue then in the courts for libel?

[Mike V]

Just FYI PolurNET that screenshot shows some details of the customer he didn't reveal here. You may wish to blur out a couple more details thre. That screenshot also shows you handled the customer professionally and did what any sensible host would do.

I wonder if we'll see another big-on-drama-short-on-details post from buzzdroid again with a link back to his site .

[PolurNET]

Originally Posted by Keith W

Is the OP in the same country as you? If they are why not sue then in the courts for libel?

Unfortunately no. I'm will be in law school though, so once I do have the means I'll get the last laugh.

Originally Posted by Mike V

Just FYI PolurNET that screenshot shows some details of the customer he didn't reveal here. You may wish to blur out a couple more details thre. That screenshot also shows you handled the customer professionally and did what any sensible host would do.

I wonder if we'll see another big-on-drama-short-on-details post from buzzdroid again with a link back to his site .

Yeah, I thought about censoring, but he exposed our company in such a way that this warrants revealing some information about this scammer. He violated all our terms of service and privacy policy already (Clause 5) so we're not obligated to follow it for him anymore.

I wonder too, he's probably going to invent more stories to prop his fake information. I wonder how people like him can knowingly post false information and attempt to mislead others without being afraid of the repercussions. Truth and justice must eventually be served, whether it will be now or later. He's likely a minor not mature enough to realize it...

[buzzdroid]

Our Response,

As we stated in our post, we agree our site had too much traffic. We understand shared hosting (meaning, we read the TOS). We understand that our site was causing a problem on the shared server and we apologized to others on this server for whatever problems we may have caused them. We fully accept that suspending the account was warranted given the circumstances. This is all discussed in our original PolurNET review. There is no need to continue to post about how we deserved to be suspended. Please, just read the original post.

The problem was that PolurNET’s support was unresponsive, abusive, and delayed. We don’t believe this is the way a company should do business, which is why we posted the review.

PolurNET has posted multiple times on this thread. We are alarmed by the accuracy of their postings. We are pleased that they just posted some of the files from our support incident because the files refute what PolurNET said on this very forum and support exactly what we said in our Polurnet review.

Let’s review.

July 1, 2007, approximately 10am mybiggestcomplaint.com, our tiny idea starts getting recognized around the world.

ONE DAY LATER: July 2nd We get suspended in the early afternoon. We never received one warning from the company, so we can’t be exactly sure when they suspended us.

IMMEDIATELY, upon noticing the site was down, we began emailing for help. The latest note requesting help is 3:39pm. This is nearly 30 hours into the traffic spike. Anand mentions in this thread that he has multiple support tickets for help from us. He has posted two screenshots of emails we sent him.

Monday July 2nd 6:48 pm. PolurNET responds, but does not tell us anything about how we can resolve the problem or get our files unlocked. Anand has posted a partial excerpt of this email earlier in this thread, it was the one that was on some other company's template.

Now, let’s look at PolurNET's inaccurate statements.

Anand, by your account in this thread, you let the resource usage continue for 2 days (30 hours is more accurate, but whatever you say) at the expense of other customers, without a single email to us until 3 hours after you shut us down. You say 3 hours, we say 6.

In any event, putting things in a light most favorable to you, again, by your account, you waited 3 hours to respond to our 10 (your count) email requests which you consider to be excessive. Your "Live Chat" never worked and you have no phone number. We were under the gun and we could not send you a letter. We should point out that this happened in the middle of the day on a Monday, a time when a rational person would expect pretty normal support, don’t you think?

Exactly what research did you do in the 3-6 hours after you suspended us that you could not have done in the previous 30 hours since you first noticed the ongoing problem?

You've said that it was impossible to give advance notice to a site that is abusing resources. Is it impossible to send an email to a client once you realize what is going on? Might you have sent an email within an hour of noticing the problem? How about the first day? How about the second day? Why did you let the problem persist without notice, and affect your other customers without so much as one email to us about the problem until well after you had suspended us.

You say in post #24 of this thread that you unsuspended the account within 10 minutes “of a reply requesting that we unsuspend since he forgot to enable wp-cache or some module he mentioned that would lower cpu usage”. That's not the way we remember it. And that's not what the emails show.

You posted the support ticket history, well ... at least part of it. Your ticket shows an email from us on 3 July 2007 at 5:46 PM.

The email you posted is the email we sent you on 3 July 2007 at 5:14:32 (screenshot with timestamp and header at mybiggestcomplaint.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/polurnet7-3-514pm.jpg) which was a copy of the email we sent you on 2 July 2007 at 9:45:30 PM EDT (screenshot with timestamp and header at mybiggestcomplaint.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/polurnet7-2-945pm.jpg). You did not unsuspend the account in 10 minutes, instead you waited 24 hours.

We quite literally resent the first message to see if you would respond on day 3 of the fiasco. Although we had abandoned PolurNET, at this point, we didn't know if you were alive or dead and had planned to keep resending the email until we got a response.

We had already solved the problem by moving to our new host. We were just curious as to whether or not you would respond. You posted 3 images of emails spliced together, but you did not post the entire support history. Again, Anand, by your own account there were “dozens” of emails.

Where are the other emails we sent you? Why didn't you post those, too? You said in post #27 of this thread that "he mentioned the wp-cache thing on a separate ticket (which I forgot to mention previously, as I only reviewed all the tickets now --- there were a dozen)".

You reviewed the tickets now?

Did you review the tickets after you wrote post #14 in this thread where you said, “He did not reply to any of the abuse reports, and only today we hear about this individual again.”?

This whole thing could have been avoided with one friendly email telling us about the problem. This could have been made less difficult with a quick response from tech support once you locked us out, or operational "Live Chat", or even a phone number.

This was a very simple problem, we were getting too much traffic and we wanted to resolve the issue. You were completely unreachable during an important time of need for a client. It's really that simple.

You never contacted us prior to suspending us. You let the problem persist for 30 hours without notifying us of the problem. You sat on support emails for an unreasonable amount of time. You did not unsuspend the account in 10 minutes, you waited 24 hours.

The last few posts from you have had you contacting our current provider to remove a post on our site? Don't you have "free speech" in Canada, too?

To the other posters in this thread and this forum, what amount of time do you consider to be reasonable response time for support tickets?

One poster (amygdela) suggested working with the customer who experiences a traffic increase like ours. Amygdela had great ideas like contacting the client the FIRST time they exceed cpu limits or offering to migrate visitors to another mirror server. Are these things that other hosts consider when dealing with customers?

[Outlaw Web Master]

07-02-2007
User Domain %CPU %MEM Mysql Processes
tcsmith3 mybiggestcomplaint.com 12.09 11.75 0.1
Top Process %CPU 93.0 /usr/bin/php index.php
Top Process %CPU 96.0 /usr/bin/php index.php

07-01-2007
User Domain %CPU %MEM Mysql Processes
tcsmith3 mybiggestcomplaint.com 2.56 2.50 0.2
Top Process %CPU 134 /usr/bin/php index.php
Top Process %CPU 104 /usr/bin/php index.php
Top Process %CPU 91.0 /usr/bin/php index.php


I don't think any other server owner would have done anything else other than suspend the account, to keep other accounts on the server happy.

Maybe "if" they could have set up an account on a vps or bla bla, but "if"'s the middle part of life so they say.

However, I see issues on both sides here. I can see Polurnet's point as server owner, but I can also understand Buzzroid's dissatisfaction and anti climax with such a sudden interest in his site only for the account to be suspended.

I had the same kind of issue with one of my clients....his site and a lot of the scripts he custom coded wrongly made my server basically time out cause it effected it so badly. People were squealing like banshees...so no matter how much I liked the guy, my other business client's needs had to take priority and the account got suspended, time and time again. I eventually got him fixed up with his own dedicated and told him to dump the badly coded sripts etc. He paid no attention really and within 12 weeks or less his server's gone tits up again and that is after a reformat.

I don't see the profit in it for either side to keep this ongoing.

As someone stated in the post somewhere above, "all news is good news" or thereabouts.

Also...Buzzroid.....hopefully you don't find yourself having leaped from the frying pan into the fire by moving onto DH... huge space + huge bandwith for peanuts = please read our aup/tos very carefully.

good luck to both parties.



OWM

[biggerboy]

Well, I have to side with PolurNet on this one, but sorry to say there really isn't much you can do. The user is no longer hosted with you, and does have Freedom of speech do to the fact that DreamHost servers are located in the USA. Unless you can go after him for libel there really isn't much to do here. Might as well just continue to satisfy other customers then worry about these users.

[Dave Zan]

Originally Posted by PolurNET

DH gave a reply saying they won't censor content and pointed to this page: http://abuse.dreamhost.com/libel/

There was a thread about that eons ago. What you're asking them to do is a potential legal issue, but hopefully they'll teach that in your law school.

Then again, you don't have to go to law school to learn a valuable lesson that biggerboy just gave.

[biggerboy]

Originally Posted by Dave Zan

There was a thread about that eons ago. What you're asking them to do is a potential legal issue, but hopefully they'll teach that in your law school.

Then again, you don't have to go to law school to learn a valuable lesson that biggerboy just gave.

Wow must be the first and only time that has happened

[PolurNET]

Originally Posted by buzzdroid

One poster (amygdela) suggested working with the customer who experiences a traffic increase like ours. Amygdela had great ideas like contacting the client the FIRST time they exceed cpu limits or offering to migrate visitors to another mirror server. Are these things that other hosts consider when dealing with customers?

Several members agreed to our action: when a site is crashing a server, one must take action. There's no possibility of notifying you in advance to take action when a server is down, is there? Our first priority is restoring access to the majority of clients, not to a single site abusing resources and causing downtime (132% CPU as a matter of fact).

We were under the gun and we could not send you a letter. We should point out that this happened in the middle of the day on a Monday, a time when a rational person would expect pretty normal support, don’t you think?

Under the gun for crashing our own server? Quite the contrary, we were interacting with our datacenter to bring the server back up, and only once access was restored, we were able to find your site was the culprit. Did we ever impose a dedicated server on you? NO. Did we ever force you to upgrade? NO. In fact, we gave you access back to your site once you sent a reply stating you "forgot" to enable wp-cache. We followed through our normal support policies. Your method of resolution is flawed: perhaps you'll understand that when you've got 200 customers on the same server being abused by a single user.

Moreover, we never guarantee live chat support. Our guarantee in response time is 6 hours on the helpdesk; we replied within 3 hours as shown on the helpdesk ticket. Your dozen tickets were merged, and the main ticket was presented on the support tickets. You don't have a concern for other clients on the same server, while we're trying to respond to them. You only want us to answer you and do everything to your satisfaction... what about the others, our policies and our servers?

Also note that we make the terms of our TOS/AUP, not you. If we find a site abusing resources in such a way that it affects other clients, we have every right to take immediate action. You can't complain that we followed our own policies, that are clearly outlined everywhere on our website, including our forums that we directed you to.

Exactly what research did you do in the 3-6 hours after you suspended us that you could not have done in the previous 30 hours since you first noticed the ongoing problem?

Clearly, you're not familiar with dedicated servers or datacenters. We contacted the datacenter, they were unable to bring the server back online or restore ssh access, we then expected a DDOS attack, so requested the server behind a Cisco guard. Ultimately, we were able to login, obtain statistics of the site(s) creating issues, and your site was undoubtedly on the top with 132% CPU usage at peak.

You've said that it was impossible to give advance notice to a site that is abusing resources. Is it impossible to send an email to a client once you realize what is going on? Might you have sent an email within an hour of noticing the problem?

Check above. Seems like you want us to operate your way, which we're not able to do for obvious reasons. It's a tedious process to figure out issues and when a site crashes a server causing frustration for over 200 clients on the same server, it's not something to take lightly. If we knew in 1 minute it was your site, would we have notified you? Yes, but obviously we didn't, can't you understand this point?

We had already solved the problem by moving to our new host. We were just curious as to whether or not you would respond. You posted 3 images of emails spliced together, but you did not post the entire support history. Again, Anand, by your own account there were “dozens” of emails.

As I mentioned duplicate tickets were merged as I noted several times. The other tickets did not contain anything different, so why would we post them?

The last few posts from you have had you contacting our current provider to remove a post on our site? Don't you have "free speech" in Canada, too?

It's 'free speech' if we're able to respond on your blog without being censored. How are we supposed to defend our actions? Obviously, your biased comments are the only one visible on your site.

However, I see issues on both sides here. I can see Polurnet's point as server owner, but I can also understand Buzzroid's dissatisfaction and anti climax with such a sudden interest in his site only for the account to be suspended.

Precisely, OWM! He was arrogant enough to request his site unsuspended after he crashed a server for hours with hundreds of clients. All he wanted is us to make ONLY his site work, regardless of whether other customers sites were alive or dead. He thinks we held him hostage for something we gave him plenty of opportunity to fix; in fact, something he himself caused. We did NOT charge him any fees, impose upgrading or anything similar. It's pathetic to be self-centered, but worse to be greedy without concern for others. He wants us to operate his way, not the way we defined in our policies and have been working for years. Essentially, he wants us to be his personal agent and he doesn't have a concern for others in this situation: clients hosted on the same server, or us as a company dealing with a disaster by his own admission he created... he calls this 'hostage taking'?

Originally Posted by biggerboy

Well, I have to side with PolurNet on this one, but sorry to say there really isn't much you can do. The user is no longer hosted with you, and does have Freedom of speech do to the fact that DreamHost servers are located in the USA. Unless you can go after him for libel there really isn't much to do here. Might as well just continue to satisfy other customers then worry about these users.

Yes, I want to move on... Problem is that he has linked his blog to possibly hundreds of sites in an attempt to post his one-sided story. We have no opportunity to resolve the situation or make him understand the circumstances. Basically, he believes his method is the only right way, and our actions are wrong defending the interests of the majority of our clients, instead of this user only. He did not even submit a cancellation request, abide by our resolution policies or TOS/AUP. He even debates that 132% CPU is improbable, demonstrating an ignorance about how servers operate. Yet, he still does not agree his story is seriously flawed and that our main concern was for the greater interest of our clients not just him. I'm surprised his tone did not change in his latest reply despite the overwhelming support for our position.

Undoubtedly, we will move on, but having this situation with a stubborn client is frustrating to say the least and we don't know what will make him perceive the truth instead of spreading flawed statements. Hopefully he will realize this and we'd be glad to cooperate with him to make ends meet.