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hostquality · #1 07-16-2008, 06:29 AM

Hi!

Our company have a number of shared hosting accounts with Webserve Canada.
One of them went down for more than 24 hours now. Since yesterday I've been sending them tech support emails with no answer.

Their online Live Support always sends me to a form, which I used to do the same thing..with no answer.

Today..for few minutes, all of our websites went down..then back up again!

Anyone here from Webserve, or even a customer of Webserve who knows what's going on there?

BTW, is this a common practice when a hosting company of this size has a technical problem? I thin the first thing is to even hire someone who just answers live chat and says something ..

Thanks

Ignition · #2 07-16-2008, 06:40 AM

They seem to be a large hosting provider but you should expect some form of notice explaining network/system problems from any web host.

**ariss** · #3 07-16-2008, 08:55 AM

Their website is online O.K. right now. I don't think that you'll find anything wrong with the company itself. They are located in Vancouver -- there was an underground electrical fire, and power outage that has affected most of downtown Vancouver, including data centers without any back-up power for the past couple days... not sure if hydro is back on this morning yet.

David · #4 07-16-2008, 09:32 AM

ariss,

"I don't think you'll find anything wrong with the company itself" -- obviously, if they were a half decent company they would have made efforts to notify their clients about this event rather than just remain silent. That, in my opinion, is a huge negative.

Companies should be held accountable to keeping their users in the loop when it comes to any sort of emergency. If their systems suddenly disappear off the net for 24 hours and they're all at the beach (minus a few outsourced livechat folks) there's a serious problem with the company.

**ariss** · #5 07-16-2008, 09:50 AM

David,

Agreed... my wording did not come off very well. There certainly is a major flaw if a company cannot provide, or continue the back-up power necessary to run their customer sites when it is needed. I don't know the details of this company in particular, only that this event has disrupted many companies in downtown Vancouver, and most likely the cause of webserve.ca customer sites being off-line.

iHubNet-Matt · #6 07-16-2008, 09:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by David

ariss,

"I don't think you'll find anything wrong with the company itself" -- obviously, if they were a half decent company they would have made efforts to notify their clients about this event rather than just remain silent. That, in my opinion, is a huge negative.

Companies should be held accountable to keeping their users in the loop when it comes to any sort of emergency. If their systems suddenly disappear off the net for 24 hours and they're all at the beach (minus a few outsourced livechat folks) there's a serious problem with the company.

Agreed. Unexpected things may happen with any hosts, but they have to keep their customers updated with out pushing them into total darkness.

hostquality · #7 07-16-2008, 11:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ariss

I don't know the details of this company in particular, only that this event has disrupted many companies in downtown Vancouver, and most likely the cause of webserve.ca customer sites being off-line.

We've been with them for many years. They're not perfect, but they're OK..

You are talking about this incident.
Well..yes, they published about it on their news page and on the home page
..great

But, if David is not happy having just

Quote:

Originally Posted by David

a few outsourced livechat folks

I would really be somewhat satisfied to find any of them on the live chat in any of the times I waited them before being taken to a "dead" support contact form. Outsourced live chat would at least make me feel there is "someone" still alive who got our complaint on record, and our problem is in process.

The problem is not outage...it is an administrative problem. (FYI...all other websites we have with them are running!)

Also, if their website - and live chat - is up and running, and if I didn't get "any" error or delayed mailer message for the emails I sent..then:
they had our emails. right?

We are still contacting them by fax and phone to even point our only-one-left-down website to any other running server - by changing dns - as a temp. solution...no one wants to lose visitors and emails for two days!

I will let you know if I get any reply

webserve · #8 07-16-2008, 06:06 PM

I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize for Monday's power outage and for the subsequent, and in some cases lengthy, repair effort. Now that we have completed the major repair effort we will conduct a thorough review of the events of Monday with all our providers and take the necessary measures to ensure that our client's online presence is protected. We will further ensure that such an event doesn’t happen again.

Such a disruption was unanticipated but should not have resulted in the outage we all experienced. While most of it was out of our control it was still our responsibility to resolve it and repair our affected systems. I can assure we made every effort to get this resolved quickly.

We, like a number of hosting companies, were down for roughly 4 hours until the generator was brought online. As most of you know there was a fire in Downtown Vancouver that cut power to the building that houses some of our systems and our corporate servers. While our website was offline our head office and call centre were answering any incoming phone calls; but we couldn't send e-mails nor update our website as they were offline. All incoming phones were answered promptly and those clients who called got an update. We also updated the greetings on our PBX system with a message about this outage. Had there been other means for us to communicate we would have done so.

Thankfully we have other Data Centers that were not impacted by this disaster and so only a portion of our clients were affected. This is of no comfort as it doesn’t matter how many of our customers were affected as they are all important. Most issues were resolved Monday evening but a few servers were only restored to full operational status this afternoon.

As others have pointed out we did post a message on our website, http://www.webserve.ca , as soon as we were able to and updated clients as quickly as we could.

Again I apologise on behalf of myself and the entire WebServe team, for this disruption. I can assure you in our 10 year history this is the worst event we have experienced and we will do everything in our power to make sure it never happens again. I thank all of you and our clients for their support.

Sincerely,
Ali Mozaffari
CEO and President

WebServe Communications Inc.

markinmontreal · #9 07-16-2008, 06:29 PM

It is now Wednesday evening and we are still having problems with our web site hosted with Webserve. Our email, FTP and SQL server has been down since Monday and still down. We also had a major problem last week when their DNS server went down. Their "Live Support" has been offline almost all of today and when it is "up" it is hard to actually reach someone.

We are not impressed by their ability to solve problems or with customer relations.

On their website, throughout the entire problems since Monday their Network Status on their web site has been:
"All Servers, Services and Network are running smoothly, no known issues.
Posted By: WebServe Network Administration Team On:
Date: 16 July 2008"

Right.

Be wary.

hostquality · #10 07-16-2008, 07:44 PM

When I called them...the tech support checked..and the site came from the other world and became live!!

Anyways...they should put it clear everywhere on the site:

We still have some sites down.
If your site stayed for more than xxx hours...please contact us,
otherwise please be patient until it gets fixed in this time frame.

That simple!

Hotmail..yahoo..gmail...IRC..messengers ...skype..etc. etc. and other-domain emails also help in these situations!

Thank you everyone

hostquality · #11 07-16-2008, 08:04 PM

Well..
Thanks Mr. Ali for your quick presence and detailed explanation of the problem.
I responded on an old version of this page..without seeing your reply.
In fact, I wouldn't bring the issue here, but only when no one answered my emails..while all of our websites - and your webserve.ca site - were back. That was very weired. Why no one answers?

I sent a fax yesterday and got no reply too.

However, you are an international company...
we are not in Canada ..and calling international numbers in a totally different time zone, and totally different language population - not all of our employees speaks fluent English on the phone!!- is not an easy thing to every international customer.

If you agreed on that .. why don't you just have a backup means for "online" communications like the ones I just mentioned? Or just make email forms and messages being sent to more than account, one of them is located outside Canada?

A blog on a free or paid service hosted elsewhere in Asia or Europe would be a great tool to easily have contact with us, international customers, in disaster times like this.

Anyways..thank you for updating us. We have been customers of Webserve for many years..and we would like to stay more, witnessing your customer support service and communication system revamped and upgraded to a more better level.