SurfSpeedy outage

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Posted by alexro, 12-21-2004, 01:44 AM
Due to some technical problems with NS1, some sites hosted with SurfSpeedy are down for more than 7 hours.
Posted by Adrian Andreias, 12-21-2004, 03:42 AM
Make that 12 hours....
Posted by Adrian Andreias, 12-21-2004, 03:50 AM
But how come they can not be found right now. I tried using their live chat 12 hours ago and now and no one is answering. Submited a support ticket, no news.
Posted by alexro, 12-21-2004, 03:57 AM
You should try again the live chat and wait until they respond. It could take more than 15 minutes but wait until someone accept your chat request. You get level 1 support on the live chat. If your problem is more complicated you should leave a support ticket. For a reply to your support ticket you should prepare to wait 24-48 hours to get a reply. First reply is generally from their level 1 suport staff (those people who are in charge with minor problems, lost passwords, etc) then, if the problem is more important is escalladed to their second or third level (server administrators). Last time I talked to their support staff they told me that they have a minor problem with a nameserver but things are taken care of. It's a minor problem but a major downtime. Well, it should be arround 12 days of free hosting if you consider what they are telling here: http://www.surfspeedy.com/pop247.htm Last edited by alexro; 12-21-2004 at 04:03 AM.
Posted by Adrian Andreias, 12-21-2004, 04:02 AM
Yep, talked to them. DNS issue, fixing right now. Major downtime...
Posted by alexro, 12-21-2004, 04:16 AM
I just wonder why they don't have a support forum...
Posted by Adrian Andreias, 12-21-2004, 04:21 AM
Because would be to many angry people in the same place..
Posted by prtdca, 12-21-2004, 01:02 PM
Well this was the last drop for me... I'm with SurfSpeedy for some 50 days now and there was a lot of outages and downtime... I just purchased a new, more expensive, web hosting. I'm not that rich to buy cheap hosting anymore... sorry surfspeedy but i suggest that you go back to the grocery business or where you came from...
Posted by alexro, 12-21-2004, 02:29 PM
Surfspeedy official answers: "Our administrators are already working on the issue resulting to your site and email not being available. We expect the issue to be resolved within the next few hours. We thank you for your patience and please contact our support team for further details." "the problem is actually rooted on our datacenter and we are still waiting for upsates" (updates) "We are currently experiencing dns network issue. Our team of technicians and administrators are currently working to resolve the issue and resume service as soon as possible." "we are hopeful that within the end of the day, everything is resolving fine" Note: it's almoust 24 hours since my site is down because of SurfSpeedy.
Posted by neXolt, 12-21-2004, 03:45 PM
Well this is my final straw with surfspeedy , I have had problems with there mysql database, my own dns request took along time to create and now 24hours + downtime , and my clientexec is down with all my billing data, all that said I have always found them freindly nice people quick to resolve most issues, fast and good at there jobs.
Posted by prtdca, 12-21-2004, 04:57 PM
the MySQL issues were not only your problem... but they tried to convince me that only I have this problem and probably it's becuase of my connect.php script (lol) and now I see other people saying that they have had this 'MySQL lost' problem... well I hope they (and others like them) learn at least that there is no point in over-reselling... a buck for 3 months, hell, they must have got everybody signinup with them... no wonder the server hanged so often becuase of the too many processes... Last edited by prtdca; 12-21-2004 at 05:02 PM.
Posted by alexro, 12-22-2004, 02:05 AM
more than 36 hours since my site is down
Posted by Adrian Andreias, 12-22-2004, 04:21 AM
My sites are up. The downtime was for about 18 hours for me. Very interesting thing was that they kept telling me that we should wait for the DNS propagation. But this would not work nslookup mydomain.com THEIR.DNS Which would mean that the DNS did not contain records for my domain. In a few minutes I've convinced them that it's not a propagation problem and it worked after another hour. Unprofessional anyway, since I had to do the debugging myself and without that info my domains could be down even now. I think it's pretty easy for them to "skip" fixing a domain... Well, afer all these problems, anyone wants the 1$ refund? lol I guess you really get what you pay for Last edited by Adrian Andreias; 12-22-2004 at 04:25 AM.
Posted by DanniRod, 12-22-2004, 09:12 PM
I cannot deny that I have received what I have paid for. My investment of $1 for the first three months on the standard web hosting package; 2000 MB space, free setup, 65 GB bandwidth transfer for $6.95 per month, allowed me to evaluate Surfspeedy.com's services without much of a risk for the past one-and-a-half months. Therefore, I consider this a dollar as well spent! Unfortunately, the duration of web hosting services was cut short. Surfspeedy.com did not meet my expectations as a customer. To me, a web hosting service is excellent if I receive peace of mind, along with the following characteristics: Courteous (Surfspeedy.com: yes) Prompt (Surfspeedy.com: no) Knowledgeable (Surfspeedy.com: yes) Responsive (Surfspeedy.com: needs improvement) Interested (Surfspeedy.com: needs improvement) Accessible (Surfspeedy.com: needs improvement) Fair (Surfspeedy.com: needs improvement) After repeated problems associated with repeated web site downtime, DNS propagation, slow servers, and lack of responsiveness toward urgent support tickets, I have decided to cancel my web hosting plan and move my web site to another host. The final straw was the outage that began around 2 PM on 20 Dec 2004. 56 hours later, and the issue is still not resolved, although I have received responses from the Surfspeedy.com tech support team, that it should be resolved "within a few hours". In hindsight, I realize not to buy a $1 a month hosting plan and expect tremendous customer support or even high levels of reliability. That's not to say that you can't find great performance for $1 a month, but there is a limit to what can be provided at low cost. ------------------------------------------------------------ A detailed DNS Report generated at http://www.dnsreport.com some 50 hours after the Monday afternoon "crash" reveals: 1. WARNING: Your nameservers report somewhat different answers for your NS records (varying TTL, for example). 2. ERROR: You have one or more lame nameservers. These are nameservers that do NOT answer authoritatively for your domain. This is bad; for example, these nameservers may never get updated. The following nameservers are lame: 207.44.204.43 3. Your DNS servers leak stealth information in non-NS requests: Stealth nameservers are leaked [ns14.surfspeedy.com.]! Stealth nameservers are leaked [ns13.surfspeedy.com.]! This can cause some serious problems (especially if there is a TTL discrepancy). If you must have stealth NS records (NS records listed at the authoritative DNS servers, but not the parent DNS servers), you should make sure that your DNS server does not leak the stealth NS records in response to other queries. 4. WARNING: Your SOA (Start of Authority) record states that your master (primary) name server is: ns13.surfspeedy.com.. However, that server is not listed at the parent servers as one of your NS records! This is probably legal, but you should be sure that you know what you are doing. 5. WARNING: Your SOA REFRESH interval is : 14400 seconds. This seems a bit high. You should consider decreasing this value to about 3600-7200 seconds. RFC1912 2.2 recommends a value between 1200 to 43200 seconds (20 minutes to 12 hours, with the longer time periods used for very slow Internet connections; 12 hours seems very high to us), although some registrars may limit you to 10000 seconds or higher, and if you are using DNS NOTIFY the refresh value is not as important (RIPE recommends 86400 seconds if using DNS NOTIFY). This value determines how often secondary/slave nameservers check with the master for updates. A value that is too high will cause DNS changes to be in limbo for a long time. 6. WARNING: Your SOA EXPIRE time is : 3600000 seconds. This seems a bit high. You should consider decreasing this value to about 1209600 to 2419200 seconds (2 to 4 weeks). RFC1912 recommends 2-4 weeks. This is how long a secondary/slave nameserver will wait before considering its DNS data stale if it can't reach the primary nameserver. 7. WARNING: You only have 1 MX record. If your primary mail server is down or unreachable, there is a chance that mail may have troubles reaching you. 8. WARNING: One or more of your mailservers may be claiming to be a host other than what it really is (the SMTP greeting should be a 3-digit code, followed by a space or a dash, then the host name). This probably won't cause any harm, but may be a technical violation of RFC821 4.3 (and RFC2821 4.3.1). medicalassistant.net claims to be host s3.myhostcenter.com. 9. ERROR: One or more of your mailservers does not accept mail to postmaster@medicalassistant.net. Mailservers are required (RFC822 6.3, RFC1123 5.2.7, and RFC2821 4.5.1) to accept mail to postmaster. medicalassistant.net's postmaster response: >>> RCPT TO: <<< 550-"The recipient cannot be verified. Please check all recipients of this 550 message to verify they are valid." 10. WARNING: One or more of your mailservers does not accept mail to abuse@medicalassistant.net. Mailservers are expected by RFC2142 to accept mail to abuse. medicalassistant.net's abuse response: >>> RCPT TO: <<< 550-"The recipient cannot be verified. Please check all recipients of this 550 message to verify they are valid." 11. WARNING: One or more of your mailservers does not accept mail in the domain literal format (user@[0.0.0.0]). Mailservers are technically required RFC1123 5.2.17 to accept mail to domain literals for any of its IP addresses. Not accepting domain literals can make it more difficult to test your mailserver, and can prevent you from receiving E-mail from people reporting problems with your mailserver. However, it is unlikely that any problems will occur if the domain literals are not accepted. medicalassistant.net's postmaster@[67.19.37.4] response: >>> RCPT TO: <<< 501 : domain literals not allowed 12. Your domain does not have an SPF record. This means that spammers can easily send out E-mail that looks like it came from your domain, which can make your domain look bad (if the recipient thinks you really sent it), and can cost you money (when people complain to you, rather than the spammer). You may want to add an SPF record ASAP, as 01 Oct 2004 was the target date for domains to have SPF records in place (Hotmail, for example, started checking SPF records on 01 Oct 2004). So, what gives?????
Posted by DanniRod, 12-27-2004, 12:04 AM
My site NEVER came back up again on the Surfspeedy.com servers!!! My website vanished on Monday, 20 Dec. 2004 around 2 PM. Interestingly, I did, 43 hours later, find a working web site on the Internet under my domain URL. However, the "last updated" entry in the META tags revealed what I was looking at was an OLD version of my web site from five weeks earlier; the exact date when I switched web hosting services from Adfreehosting.net over to Surfspeedy.com! Needless to say, certain updates from after that date, such as new pages, directories, and MySql Moodle were missing on that server. Also, interestingly, if I accessed the new server at Surfspeedy.com directly via WS_FTP I was able to verify that all NEW web pages, directories, and MySql Moodle were still there. My browser, however, would go to the OLD version of the web site still on the Adfreehosting.net servers. I conclude, and concur, with the poster that said: "I am convinced that this was not a propagation problem!" I say, it was either "not" a propagation problem, or "more than" jsut a propagation problem. But don't take my word for it, I am not an expert. I am simply a customer who required reliable web hosting services, but I can look at this and say, it's very strange!!! Danni R.