Server4You Bailed?

Portal Home > Knowledgebase > Articles Database > Server4You Bailed?

Posted by moltar, 11-22-2005, 04:33 PM
Seems like the whole S4Y network is out. I can't ping nor resolve my hosts. Main S4Y site is not responding either. Anyone knows whats going on?
Posted by b3n, 11-22-2005, 04:35 PM
when I call sales, it sales due to a large volume of calls, they cant take any more nad send me to a message machine, but it wont take messages
Posted by maxhest, 11-22-2005, 04:36 PM
Some of the international sites are up. But, indeed the s4u main site is down.
Posted by moltar, 11-22-2005, 04:39 PM
Which sites are up? I just want to know if they are on the same network as the rest....
Posted by maxhest, 11-22-2005, 04:58 PM
.de is up. Google them and see if you can find more international sites.
Posted by moltar, 11-22-2005, 05:01 PM
Oh i see, you mean those international sites. I thought you meant customer's int sites. Still down btw.
Posted by Kyndig, 11-22-2005, 05:11 PM
Server4You network went down about 20 minutes ago. No network, no website, no nothing. And they're not answering their phones...
Posted by Mark L, 11-22-2005, 05:21 PM
server4you.com ? http://dnsreport.com/tools/dnsreport...server4you.com It shows fine from there, but I cannot reach server4you.com
Posted by gilbert, 11-22-2005, 05:25 PM
how come they kept swsofts website up though? http://www.sw-soft.com/ i thought it was on the same network or at least it used to be
Posted by stevey, 11-22-2005, 05:26 PM
loads fine here in uk
Posted by ex0034, 11-22-2005, 05:29 PM
Yes, they have been down for quite some time. No answer from them. I hope they've not gone bust and run away in the night. This kind of downtime and no phone support, notification emails sent, nothing.... totally unprofessional.
Posted by gilbert, 11-22-2005, 05:31 PM
oh i guess there back up and running now, they told me in a chat window
Posted by stevey, 11-22-2005, 05:33 PM
maybe you missed it but i can access the site fine, maybe its a problem on your end, have you done a tracert to find out if its a problem with the route your taking to get there?
Posted by ex0034, 11-22-2005, 05:36 PM
Okay, S4U is now back up but running very very slowly. Very very very very slowly indeed (hit and miss). I hope they put some proper emergency support in place for the next time. At least an answering machine message telling us what's going on and and ETA.
Posted by ioda006, 11-22-2005, 05:59 PM
Confirmed. They were definitely down for quite some time there. Had somone tell me around an hour and a half ago that mine was down. Also confirmed - Definitely up and running again, but extremely slow. So since server4you is one of the 99.999% uptime places that means we're well over 5 minutes of downtime. Do we get something special? I want a free month or two.
Posted by Mark L, 11-22-2005, 06:01 PM
"I want a free month or two." lmao.
Posted by ex0034, 11-22-2005, 06:02 PM
Still very slow there by the way.....
Posted by Kyndig, 11-22-2005, 06:16 PM
Luckily it was just 1 server on that network. We're packing it up now and moving it to one of the other networks I use. Looks like it was a router issue? Was told the route was not getting past New York. None the less, "do it once, shame on you - do it twice..shame on me"
Posted by ex0034, 11-22-2005, 06:18 PM
Just got word from them that it was a DOS attack, the source of which they have identified. Surprised by that explaination as there was absolutely no response (not even the hit and miss or extreme delay you normally get with DOS). Unless of course they pulled the plug and cut the whole network off because of DOS against one machine there?????
Posted by ioda006, 11-23-2005, 09:52 PM
I made a couple of posts about this in my log (one, two). If you don't read those you should at least hear the call one guy made to s4y. I think that's what a lot of us were experiencing.
Posted by ioda006, 12-12-2005, 08:04 PM
Looks like server4you is down.. again. more problems? just offline for fun? DoS attack again? who knows!? anybody else notice or have info?
Posted by gmak, 12-12-2005, 08:06 PM
Looks like their entire network is down. I can't get to any of my servers or any of theirs from within the UK.
Posted by Albo, 12-12-2005, 08:10 PM
Unbelievable! Their whole network is down and they have been pretty stable in the last 2 years that I have been with them. ddos attacks now and then but nothing major of this magnitude. I would like to know the root cause of the downtime also...
Posted by RyanD, 12-12-2005, 08:14 PM
this should be in the providers downtime forum, not dedicated servers... mods?
Posted by bdmcnitt, 12-12-2005, 08:15 PM
yes, the entire network, including the server4you.com site and all control panel sites are down. and, of course, there is absolutely no way to reach them because they don't answer the phone. very very poor service in 2005.
Posted by dkitchen, 12-12-2005, 08:46 PM
Doesn't look brilliant ...
Posted by music, 12-12-2005, 09:02 PM
ditto "this should be in the providers downtime forum, not dedicated servers... mods?" kinda makes me think that the mods are slow to move non-paying or less paying advertisment companies.
Posted by bdmcnitt, 12-12-2005, 10:21 PM
down again today. http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showth...ght=server4you http://brianmcnitt.com/wp/2005/12/12...here-art-thou/
Posted by ioda006, 12-13-2005, 02:30 AM
indeed :/ they werent down for long though
Posted by bdmcnitt, 12-13-2005, 03:58 PM
And they are down AGAIN today. Ping to server4you.com Generated by www.DNSstuff.com at 19:56:44 GMT on 13 Dec 2005. Pinging server4you.com [69.64.44.43]: Ping #1: * [No response] Ping #2: * [No response] Ping #3: * [No response] Ping #4: * [No response] Done pinging server4you.com! (to do an IPv6 ping for a domain name, add a ':' before the domain name)
Posted by ex0034, 12-14-2005, 04:49 PM
This is becoming beyond a joke!
Posted by lahrcorp, 12-16-2005, 03:16 PM
It seems server4you has important problems. No answer for tickets, No answer for e-mails, no telephone for something else than sales. They told one of my VPS has been hacked on November 2005, since that date the service became worse and worse. They say things they cannot prove or they do not want to. I am still waiting answers.
Posted by Caper_Kev, 12-19-2005, 10:17 PM
Hi All i too host on server4you and have been happy up to now. i started an online chat with sales and asked what was going on, i was told that according to their EULA that i was responsible for backing up and restoring my sites. I know this but it wasnt what i asked, i wanted to know why all my sites were down. This person then responded "didnt i read my email" after saying what are you talking about, the person responded with a cut and paste of a suppose email that should have went out to subscribers. It says that they have had a major hardware failure and accounts and sites maybe lost and they are trying to rebuild and it might be a few days before things are back. apparently they are moving the people affected to a new "raid server" one would have thought it was already on one. The person i talked to was not very friendly and does anyone have any recomendations of other hosting companies. Thanks Kevin
Posted by Grrrrrr, 12-20-2005, 07:39 PM
Well just to chime in here... I host mine and about 40 clients with server4you.... they have all been down for an entire week now. I find it inadequate that they think they can send and email to you...which in my case goes through the same servers that are...uh...no worky. And then treat you crappily when you ask what the ETA of repair is. I got the "you should have a back up we are not responsible" gambit from some b*** technician as well. I didn't ask when my stuff would be up...I could care less if the sites are there at this point...I have the backups ready...but it's hard to upload a site when the server is not available. I better start shopping around.... especially since I think it is going to be heck to get any hosting fees recouped from this.
Posted by Caper_Kev, 12-20-2005, 11:00 PM
Dear Sir/Madam We regret deeply to inform you that one of our vps servers hosting several of our virtual private accounts suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure late friday, December 16. We are currently working to recover as much data as possible, but feel we must prepare those affected for the worst possibility: some accounts may be a complete loss for the next several days until we are able to rebuild those accounts on a new raid. We request your patience as we continue this laborious effort. We request that you please refrain from tying down tech support with inquiries, since it will be prohibitavly difficult to assess the status on a specific VE and will only divert our tech support staff's time away from the task of rebuilding. Thank you for your understanding as we continue the work necessary to rebuild these accounts. this is the actual replay from tech support from a ticket i was able to create today. Glad they care about their customers NOT!!! Kevin
Posted by bdmcnitt, 12-21-2005, 02:35 PM
Ugly. You should probably look for a host who backs up their shared servers. I know that Verio does this. If a machine is backed up, even the worst recovery should only require a few hours. Seeing that S4Y doesn’t backup their machines, they should at least be able to direct you to a new server for you to use while they work to restore data from the old. Sorry to hear the stories of woe.
Posted by bdmcnitt, 12-28-2005, 11:45 PM
Once again, the entire server4you network is down tonight. The fun just never ends with serever4you.com. Ping to server4you.com Generated by www.DNSstuff.com at 03:44:45 GMT on 29 Dec 2005. Pinging server4you.com [69.64.44.43]: Ping #1: * [No response] Ping #2: * [No response] Ping #3: * [No response] Ping #4: * [No response] Done pinging server4you.com! (to do an IPv6 ping for a domain name, add a ':' before the domain name)
Posted by Shaw Networks, 12-29-2005, 12:59 AM
Website loads fine for me, I don't think server4you.com will reply to any ping requests.
Posted by Mark L, 12-29-2005, 02:51 AM
Loaded fine too.
Posted by rts2271, 12-30-2005, 12:50 PM
New here but as I am experiencing the same issues with Server 4 You I thought I'd share my experience. I lease a Power dedicated for application serving. No http web services. I have been with S4Y for nearly 2 years. Up until recently all I had to say was top notch. I know people paying 3x as much for crappier service. Support tickets prompty responded too as well as a decent amount of technical excellence. In short they knew there stuff and were well well worth it. Then comes November. Not sure when but the server would experience latency spikes and complete losses of connectivity. The first support ticket explaind it as a DDoS attack at a switch that was taken care of. But it didnt stop there. First only one or two times a day same above described symptoms for 10 minutes. I decided to wait a few days as DDoS'ers unless it's coordinated have a low attention span. Two weeks later same thing. Except now the spikes occurr durring my servers prime time. I file another support ticket and get roughly the same answer shaken up a bit. All through the month of November this continues and I file a total of 5 support tickets. All with the same quip responses from some ignorant chick on the night shift. These have moved from segmented network outages to complete outages at the S4Y datacenter in St Louis. By December I am begining to grow tired of this. At the same time Im trying to be patient with a company thats given me a good solid year of service with not one real complaint on my part. At this time a call to Level 3 is in order for me to see what there response is to how they deal with DDoS as they are the primary upstream provider for S4Y. As expected I got the usual Tier 2 NOC escalation procedure that I have seen with Saavis, UUNet,MCI etc etc. This seems like then a problem they should be moving up the ladder and have blocked by Level 3. The outages continue. Durration is always about 10-20 minutes. Times are pretty much the same nightly. To me it sounds like a spammer running a cronjob at a preset time. However one thing comes up EVERYTIME on every outage server4you-gw.stl1.us.inetbone.net (63.208.32.162) 361.854 ms 361.072 ms Everytime theres a outage this sucker pops up as the broken link. I verified this by doing a traceroute from and to the server durring a event. I had traceroute set to go off when it lost connectivity to my Virginia server for more then 3 minutes. So great we have a culprit. I give this information in a support ticket and think ok this is cool cause theres a point of failure that can be examined. Pings inside the network durring a outage are fine meaning it's the switch getting bombed. Low and behold I get this chick again with some absolutely dismissive answer saying she's unplugged a machine to deal with the problem and everything in umpa loompa land should be happy. Apparently she didnt test her theory cause the network was down as she wrote the reply. I snapped. I have decided to post the ticket here. I have edited my language because it was unprofesional, rum induced and to be honest more for my benefit of venting before I dump this crappy provider who has fallen from a very high performance standard they had set with me previously. This is ticket #22 relating to this issue. Done: 2005-12-29 21:56:51 Category: Technical Support Contact: RTS Problem Description: Another attack. See last night's ticket because it's about the same as this one Error Message: see above Author Message RTS 2005-12-29 21:59:35 Have you thought about just blocking the offending addresses with a limiting script on a firewal box. It's not hard to do. Or better yet put it to your upstream provider. Any serious NOC will block DDoS attacks. RTS 2005-12-29 22:02:58 Can you move me to a different switch to avoid this or something. I really can't put up with this any longer and have to think about moving the server. Your service has really deteriorated in the last 2 months to a point it's virtually unusable for high availability hosting. Anna R 2005-12-29 22:41:05 Dear customer, The question about movng you to a different switch will be sent to our network administrator. Right now I have disconnected one server from your switch to prevent following DoS-attacks. Please don´t hesitate to contact us for any further questions or problems. Our Support Team will be happy to assist you. RTS 2005-12-29 23:56:39 Well its been up and down since I posted the last message. Maybe you should stop disconnecting servers and FIND OUT THE XXXXXXXXXXXX PROBLEM. It's not difficult work. Google network security, DDoS iptables and Level 3's NOC escalation. This isnt rocket science and you people apear incompetent of late. Apparently if you google server4you most the links are about how the service has gone to the crapper last 2 months. You all are into me for a considerable amount of money if I have to move my server because of ths crap. RTS 2005-12-30 00:10:27 down and up. You peple need to seriously hire competent NOC staff. Any CNA or CNE wouldve had the trouble mopped up in under 12 man hours and a documented handling procedure in place. Anna R 2005-12-30 01:35:10 Dear Sir, Thank you much for your attention to the concerned request. Please be kindly informed that S4Y technical department does the best of it to help and support all incoming questions and inquiries, including ones, regarding recent DDoS attack. I would like to inform you that though S4Y offers unmanaged servers and the security of a server is up to the customer, we are willing and ready to support you in case of such problems, like DDoS. Unfortunately in the last 2 weeks the level of incoming DDoS attacks has increased and despite all our efforts to block them it may happen a specific server to suffer its consequesces. Considering this, please be kindly informed that technical department is working on this problem and together with our main network administrator, we are doing our best to resolve the DDoS problem in the shortest possible time. Really only our main administrator can solve the questions about global network policy and firewalls on switches. He is available during the business days working hours. RTS 2005-12-30 10:02:07 This DDoS attack isnt my problem you idiot. It's your network being attacked not my server. How come this problem cropped up in the last 2 months and before was a non-existent. Before when a complaint about a network issue was filed it was resolved within 24 hours. For the last 2 months however the quality of techinical support relating to YOUR network has dropped to a nearly non-existent. Please cmon. Your answer is unplugging server as stated above? Some answer. I think thats like what a fourth grader would do when faced with this situation. Someone technically saavy would sniff the network and either blacklist the offending networks at the switch. Quoting you I would like to inform you that though S4Y offers unmanaged servers and the security of a server is up to the customer, we are willing and ready to support you in case of such problems, like DDoS. Dont you ever, EVER try to pass your problems off to me you incompetent turd. My server is secure. Your network isn't you XXXXXXXXXXXX. Do you know what XXXXXXXXXXXX customer support is? It's when some XXXXXXXXXXXX vendor blames the problems on the customer. Not only is this problem unrelated to me other then the symptoms but it's network wide. How the XXXXXXXXXXXX is that my issue your helping me with you awful jackass. If my language seems terse it's because I have put up with Technicians like this Anna R with her short nonsensical answers and no real solutions. Do you need links to the nearly 200+ blog and forums I found thru google with YOUR customers with the exact same complaint as mine? Do you not realize that the next phase is your customer base will be eroding as now when you google server4you you get your page and a series of pages with complaints about your service going to the crapper? Youve lost dozens of customers from this issue. You have cost me hundreds if not thousands of dollars with this issue. Fire the retards and get yourself qualified NOC techs. RTS 2005-12-30 10:06:30 Quote from above Really only our main administrator can solve the questions about global network policy and firewalls on switches. He is available during the business days working hours. I think thats the guy who needs fired. Maybe he needs a pager or better yet a book on networking for dummies. So in a nutshell I'm looking at Server Central and trying to turn this from a problem to a opportunity by expanding the server quality I provide to my customers. However as far as Server4You goes they used to be decent for dedicated servers. I could see how they could be lacking in VPS or Webhosting. But dedicated white boxes they honestly used to be about as good as anyone out there for the best price. The only thing that comes to me is theyve picked up some new staff that really does not know there craft. Last edited by rts2271; 12-30-2005 at 12:56 PM.
Posted by Lpal-Patrick, 12-30-2005, 01:04 PM
I didn't read your whole essay there but i skimmed through it to see you have cursed them. That's not a good idea. No matter how much it's thier fault and they have ****ty support. As once you start cursing them, things won't get better.
Posted by Mark L, 01-02-2006, 04:37 PM
I have edited my language because it was unprofesional, rum induced and to be honest more for my benefit of venting before I dump this crappy provider who has fallen from a very high performance standard they had set with me previously. This is ticket #22 relating to this issue. That's what he said. He knows it's not a good idea.
Posted by lahrcorp, 01-03-2006, 10:37 AM
Problems still are the same. Yesterday, more than 5 times offline / server down. I have requested refund.
Posted by bdmcnitt, 06-19-2006, 12:12 PM
And again. Tracert to 69.64.32.146 Generated by www.DNSstuff.com at 16:10:00 GMT on 19 Jun 2006. Hop T1 T2 T3 Best Graph IP Hostname Dist TTL Ctry Time 1 1 0 2 0.5 ms 66.36.240.2 AS14361 HOPONE-DCA c-vl102-d1.acc.dca2.hopone.net. 255 US Unknown: 819d1c36 2 0 0 0 0.5 ms [+0ms] 66.36.224.232 AS0 IANA-RSVD-0 gec2.core1.dca2.hopone.net. 0 miles [+0] 254 US Unix: 17:10:01.761 3 2 1 1 1.3 ms [+0ms] 66.36.224.189 AS0 IANA-RSVD-0 ge-4-2-125.car2.washington1.level3.net. 0 miles [+0] 253 US Unix: 16:10:02.251 4 1 1 3 1.5 ms [+0ms] 4.68.121.161 AS3356 Level3 ae-2-56.bbr2.washington1.level3.net. 0 miles [+0] 251 US Unix: 16:10:02.302 5 23 22 22 22 ms [+21ms] 64.159.0.49 AS3356 Level3 so-3-0-0.mp1.stlouis1.level3.net. 0 miles [+0] 247 US Unix: 16:10:02.355 6 35 41 27 22 ms [+0ms] 64.159.4.142 AS3356 Level3 ge-7-2.hsa1.stlouis1.level3.net. 0 miles [+0] 248 US Unix: 16:10:02.437 7 35 23 22 22 ms [+0ms] 63.208.32.162 AS3356 Level3 server4you-gw.stl1.us.inetbone.net. 0 miles [+0] 248 US [Router did not respond] 8 * * * 99999 ms [+99999ms] [Unknown] [Unknown - Firewall did not respond] 0 miles [+0] 9 * * * 99999 ms [+0ms] [Unknown] [Unknown - Firewall did not respond] 0 miles [+0] 10 * * * 99999 ms [+0ms] [Unknown] [Unknown - Firewall did not respond] 0 miles [+0] 11 * * * 99999 ms [+0ms] [Unknown] [Unknown - Firewall did not respond] [4 hops with no response: assuming we hit a firewall that blocks pings] 0 miles [+0] 12 13 14 15 Analysis: Number of hops: 11 Last hop responding to ICMP: 7, UDP: 7, TCP: 7. There appears to be a firewall right after 63.208.32.162 (hop 7) that blocks ICMP, unwanted UDP, and unwanted TCP packets. Legend: T1/T2/T3 are the round-trip times in milliseconds (1/1000ths of a second). T1 uses a proper ICMP-based tracert (Microsoft style). T2 uses a UDP-based traceroute (Unix-style). T3 uses a TCP-based traceroute (port 80). Since many ISPs now block ICMP and/or packets to unknown ports, T3 (not used by many traceroute programs) typically shows the best results. Best times may be theoretical (if it takes 80ms to hop 10, and 50ms to hop 11, we say the best time for hop 10 is 50ms). If no reverse DNS entry is given for an IP, we display 'unknown.example.com' if the domain name is known.
Posted by Tyler, 06-19-2006, 12:52 PM
New outages are best for a new thread Thread closed.