newwebsite.com 24hrs down and counting

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Posted by SirMarcel, 02-27-2012, 04:57 PM
What promised to be "couple hours" outage turned into 24hrs at the moment. Machines are down, and suppoer doesn't give a damn about answering tickets or even providing a general announcement.

Shame.
Posted by DWS2006, 02-27-2012, 05:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SirMarcel

What promised to be "couple hours" outage turned into 24hrs at the moment. Machines are down, and suppoer doesn't give a damn about answering tickets or even providing a general announcement.

Shame.

They moved all their equipment to a new data center yesterday, if this is for a vps, you'll need to change the IP associated with it. I believe they did send announcements about this.
Posted by SirMarcel, 02-27-2012, 05:13 PM
I did that, the machine comes as "online" in Solus, but that's about it. Even the console doesn't work.
Posted by Hsunami, 02-27-2012, 07:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FiberLightning

They moved all their equipment to a new data center yesterday

Where did they move to?
Posted by VIPTechLLC, 02-27-2012, 08:37 PM
They moved from OnePartner to WindStream.
Posted by sidodol, 02-28-2012, 01:12 AM
Such a shameful, totally ignored the support ticket. Did not even bother to re issue the Direct Admin license due to ip changed. Epic failed.
Posted by muqti, 02-28-2012, 04:39 AM
My VPS was down for almost 24 hours, Though I did manage to work out changing ip of DirectAdmin manually via ssh and then managed to work out, Though license was updated by Floyd
Posted by AdminWHF, 02-28-2012, 05:22 AM
I submitted a support ticket on the 22nd and i've not had a reply.

Just submitted another.

I thought they where moving last week.
Posted by muqti, 02-28-2012, 01:06 PM
So whats the situation? everyone?
Posted by amp3d, 02-28-2012, 10:37 PM
I went down as well. I'm new to the VPS world, only having signed up with them a month ago or so.

Had the same problems as others here, so in the control panel I did a complete new install of Debian and now I have SSH access but no directadmin...

Id install it all myself if it wasnt for the licensing!
Looking for other hosting options as we speak.
It's too bad we arent being compensated for this at least!
Posted by PowerDot, 02-29-2012, 02:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SirMarcel

What promised to be "couple hours" outage turned into 24hrs at the moment. Machines are down, and suppoer doesn't give a damn about answering tickets or even providing a general announcement.

Shame.

My website was down 54 hours; server 24 but DA license wasn't working anymore. Now it is up but SO SLOW
Before I got 300K download speed now only 100K
Posted by Brian000001, 02-29-2012, 01:17 PM
I was down about 11 hours. He warned about 8 hours, so 11 was not unexpected. I don't have a control panel, so I can't say about licenses.

My network speeds at the new data center are a huge improvement. Formerly 1.2M/s from cachefly is roughly 9M/s now. I'm happy for the upgrade.

Communication about the move date being pushed back and when the move would actually take place was poor. We could have used more warning.
Posted by SirMarcel, 02-29-2012, 03:47 PM
my service was restored fully after roughly 30 hours. way too much considering their promise of "few hours" downtime
Posted by p0go, 03-01-2012, 11:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SirMarcel

What promised to be "couple hours" outage turned into 24hrs at the moment. Machines are down, and suppoer doesn't give a damn about answering tickets or even providing a general announcement.

Shame.

If it was only suppose to be a couple hours, and it exceeded that... You don't think they are being flooded with incoming support tickets from everyone? I believe they are aware of the issue and are working as fast as they can to get it resolved for all their clients.

Now, I do understand your fusteration and that they should have a off-site status page or blog where they should be posting updates, or announcements of everything to inform their clients because of there full systems being down, have you checked if they have a Twitter too see if they have posted or tweeted anything?

I also noticed that they posted something that they were switching data centers and moving all equipment. If they got this done in 24 hours, shoot, in 36 hours to me, that would be amazing. This would also be why they are delayed in getting back to you, that's alot of work to move all your equipment, announce your IPs, reload your whole network, then load up all the server gear, and then boot each server making sure everything comes online 100% correctly and safe, then making sure all clients services are up, then doing a full check making sure everything is correct and running smooth, not including the tests and everything they will have to do with everything. Give em some time, I got faith in them, if they are not already back online.

-p0go.
Posted by amp3d, 03-01-2012, 12:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sidodol

Such a shameful, totally ignored the support ticket. Did not even bother to re issue the Direct Admin license due to ip changed. Epic failed.

I too am another very unsatisfied customer.

As if switching data centers on us and taking us offline was bad enough... My server no longer has directadmin working because of the licensing issue.

1 email, 2 support tickets later still no response. After trying to cancel the service, I finally got a response saying they will try to do it tomorrow. They take no initiative to actually respond to tickets unless they have to. No status updates.

I requested 6.00$ back from PayPal, and received a rather insulting response from them. Very unprofessional!

I have since switched servers and I couldn't be happier!

I have saved newwebsites responses and look forward to providing all of you a review on my experiences with this host.

Stay clear of them if you can people.
Posted by Collabora, 03-01-2012, 12:35 PM
A status page on their web site would go a long way
Posted by sentabi, 03-01-2012, 03:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by PowerDot

My website was down 54 hours; server 24 but DA license wasn't working anymore. Now it is up but SO SLOW
Before I got 300K download speed now only 100K

OMG! only 300KB that's bad.

I'm sure newwebsite only 1 man show , because I always get same name on livechat and sales ticket.
Posted by muqti, 03-02-2012, 05:21 PM
I am getting around 700-900kbps on my my VPS1
and around 150-170 kbps on another vps pretty disappointing
Posted by Newwebsite.com, 03-02-2012, 06:28 PM
All I can say is that we did our best to keep people notified all along the way. We have hundreds of clients and a few of them did not get messages either because of spam filters or whatever the reason. We communicated with clients every single day. I am sorry if you did not get the emails that were sent out. We did sent them out though. Everybody is back up now including all the DirectAdmin licenses. All the tickets have been answered.

If you think the move was bad consider that where we were only had one uplink to the internet and one cable cut could have made everybody down for days. We recently had several hours of downtime because the upstream was under attack and they did not know how to deal with it. It was decided at that time to get out.

We are now with a major company who owns a good portion of fiber on the east coast. They are not reliant on anybody else for internet.

I know people will have their complaints but it was for the long term benefit of the clients.
Posted by Newwebsite.com, 03-02-2012, 06:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by p0go

Give em some time, I got faith in them, if they are not already back online.

-p0go.

Thank you. And in fact everybody was back online when you posted this. If anyone was not online at that time it was because they had not told us about any problems.

99% were back online within the 8 hour window. This is because we had already assigned the ip's within SolusVM so as soon as the main node came back online the it was just a simple matter of switching the main ip to one of the new ones.

Of course some are going to have a bad experience. But we have had no more than any other company including the big ones. Sometimes bad things just happen. But most of the time good things happen.

We had a handful of cancellations but one client who went through this ordered 5 more vps's. One gave us extra money as tip for all the hard work. I think it is amazing that the ones who pay the most have the most appreciation and tolerance.

If you had a bad experience please submit a ticket and let us know. We want to know what we can do to make it up to you.

We are moved now and we are not going anywhere any time soon.
Posted by Newwebsite.com, 03-02-2012, 07:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by amp3d

received a rather insulting response from them.

I would like to apologize to you for being rude. I do not know who you are or what I said exactly. But I am sorry if I was rude. Not that its an excuse but it was a very stressful time and sometimes that can affect what we say and how we say it. So again I am sorry.
Posted by ipublishing, 03-04-2012, 09:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by amp3d

I too am another very unsatisfied customer.

I requested 6.00$ back from PayPal, and received a rather insulting response from them. Very unprofessional!

I have since switched servers and I couldn't be happier!

I have saved newwebsites responses and look forward to providing all of you a review on my experiences with this host.

Stay clear of them if you can people.

Me too have the same experience, i was so insulted by the server admin who replies to the tickets as if " why are you wasting our time man.. go and see your work, if you pay more come and ask us" I got so fed up with this company, it seems fully managed means they will update the OS.. It is another misguiding.. So arrogant answering of tickets.. One sales person wrote to me that

""It is because even if we mark the ticket as high priority the answers are given once in a while and the normal average response time is more than 24 hours"

That is not true. In fact every single one of your tickets has been answered within 24 hours which is pretty standard for cheap budget hosting. $6.95 will hardly buy a cup of coffee here. So basically by using a cheap vps whatever it is that you are doing on it is only worth a cup of coffee.

We are doing the best we can for $6.95 clients. "

Is replying to the tickets once in 24 hours an industry standard even for an unmanaged server?

Great company.. nice service.. veryyyyyy polite staff members... Highly recommended if you want to get headache.... I got a feeling that raising a ticket is a bad thing a client can do and you have to raise a ticket to a server company only if you pay more than $50 per month....
Posted by exiton, 03-09-2012, 12:13 AM
Floyd @ Newwebsite might not have the best communication skills, but he is an expert at Directadmin (follow him on the DA forums) and he knows the technical stuff. To be able to run a profitable business with $7 clients (which is normally the cost of a directadmin license with other VPS providers), he's gotta have a bunch of them so when a major event happens I guess we all have to have realistic expectations.

I'm shopping for another VPS and will still consider newwebsite. My greatest fear with newwebsite isn't that a power or internet line gets cut, it's that something happens to Floyd. To be fair though, that same succession fear is valid for most of the smaller VPS providers.
Posted by amp3d, 03-09-2012, 01:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by exiton

Floyd @ Newwebsite might not have the best communication skills, but he is an expert at Directadmin (follow him on the DA forums) and he knows the technical stuff. To be able to run a profitable business with $7 clients (which is normally the cost of a directadmin license with other VPS providers), he's gotta have a bunch of them so when a major event happens I guess we all have to have realistic expectations.

I'm shopping for another VPS and will still consider newwebsite. My greatest fear with newwebsite isn't that a power or internet line gets cut, it's that something happens to Floyd. To be fair though, that same succession fear is valid for most of the smaller VPS providers.

This provider is not experiencing a normal outage, rather they chose to switch locations on us, without properly migrating.
Posted by Newwebsite.com, 03-09-2012, 08:09 AM
Managed means different things to different companies so we clearly define what we mean by "managed." It is clearly stated in the ad what we mean by managed.

Quote:

We will maintain all of the server software for you.
This is only for CentOS and running DirectAdmin Control Panel. We cannot support
other control panels and operating systems with full management. We will also monitor
your VPS every minute and check for uptime and try to restart your VPS no matter what
OS or control panel is being used. If we cannot get it to start for some reason we
will alert you and work with you until we can get it restarted.

So when client asks us to add a domain for him in his control panel and we state that is not what we do then there really is no reason to be mad with us.
Posted by Newwebsite.com, 03-09-2012, 08:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by amp3d

without properly migrating.

True we did not go out and spend tens of thousands of extra dollars to buy unnecessary new servers which would have driven the price up for everybody. We own all of our own equipment. We do not lease equipment from any one. I can see where it would be easy to say just get new servers and migrate the data. But that was not a viable option and this was almost an emergency situation since we had recently learned that the old data center relied on a single upstream for service and we recently experienced several hours of down time because of the upstream provider. We needed to move to a more reliable source for internet and we needed to do it NOW for the sake of our clients.

But we did properly notify everyone 2 weeks in advance so they could properly prepare for the move. There were only a few, as can be seen from this thread, that experienced more than the predicted downtime. 99% were back up well within the time frame given to them.

The move has been done for over a week now. Were mistakes made, YES. Will we make the same mistakes again, NO. We are also locked in at this data center for 3 years so no more moves for quite some time.
Posted by Newwebsite.com, 03-09-2012, 08:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by exiton

My greatest fear with newwebsite isn't that a power or internet line gets cut, it's that something happens to Floyd. To be fair though, that same succession fear is valid for most of the smaller VPS providers.

Nothing to fear. The internet will not shut down if something happens to me.

There is more than one person involved with this company. Something happening to one person will not stop the company from running.
Posted by Newwebsite.com, 03-09-2012, 08:38 AM
The subject line of this thread is very misleading too. Newwebsite.com was NOT down for 24 hours. There were very few VPSs that were down after 24 hours mostly because we simply did not know there was a problem with them.

For instance when a VPS is started sometimes it needs to have fsck run on it manually. SolusVM however will show that it is up and running because technically it is running, but its waiting for the root password to be entered and fsck to be manually run.

Sometimes the new ip's did not take effect because some of the VPSs had been manually configured to use the old ip addresses instead of letting SolusVM manage the ip addresses. Again SolusVM shows that the VPS is running.

The vast majority simply worked when the node was powered up.
Posted by Newwebsite.com, 03-09-2012, 08:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SirMarcel

I did that, the machine comes as "online" in Solus, but that's about it. Even the console doesn't work.

Did we explain in the ticket what the problem was? If not please reopen the ticket and we will try to tell you why it was down for so long. On February 26 the last of the nodes went down at the old data center and were mostly back up later that day.

We started moving machines on February 20. By February 27 the only thing left to do was update a few of the DirectAdmin licenses. If your VPS was still down then it was something unusual.
Posted by Newwebsite.com, 03-09-2012, 09:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ipublishing

Me too have the same experience, i was so insulted by the server admin

This is just a classic example of 2 people from 2 different countries having a hard time understanding each other. I could have just as easily been insulted by the comments from you. But I knew nothing bad was meant by your comments. I knew you just wanted certain things. It was unfortunate that I could not communicate effectively with you to help you understand that those things were simply not included with the package.
Posted by Newwebsite.com, 03-09-2012, 09:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sidodol

Such a shameful, totally ignored the support ticket. Did not even bother to re issue the Direct Admin license due to ip changed. Epic failed.

I do not know who you are or which ticket you are referring to. All of the ip's on the DirectAdmin licenses had been changed by February 27. However changing the ip on the license server is not all there is to it. Commands have to be run on the server itself to update the license. Some clients had locked us out of their VPS and so we could not run those commands until we made contact with them and they allowed us in. We do not force our way into a clients VPS without their permission. Maybe that is what happened in your case. Maybe not.
Posted by Newwebsite.com, 03-09-2012, 09:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by muqti

I am getting around 700-900kbps on my my VPS1
and around 150-170 kbps on another vps pretty disappointing

Quote:

Originally Posted by PowerDot

Now it is up but SO SLOW
Before I got 300K download speed now only 100K

It should be a lot better at this point. We were still setting up bandwidth management in the switch. This is what you should see now:

Quote:

wget http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
--2012-03-09 08:18:52-- http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 205.234.175.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|205.234.175.175|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `100mb.test'

100%[=======================================================================================>] 104,857,600 10.4M/s in 10s

2012-03-09 08:19:03 (9.56 MB/s) - `100mb.test' saved [104857600/104857600]

Posted by Newwebsite.com, 03-09-2012, 09:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brian000001

Communication about the move date being pushed back and when the move would actually take place was poor. We could have used more warning.

The warning went out on February 8. Maybe it could have been a little more clear but we did say BEGIN on February 20. There is no way we could move and reconfigure hundreds of servers in just 1 day. It never occurred to us that someone might take that date given as being the only date. Sorry about that.