OneOnOneInternet.Com - problems? - Knowledgebase

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OneOnOneInternet.Com - problems?

Posted by skarl, 09-20-2004, 01:25 PM
Hi all, I have a domain hosted at oneononeinternet.com and have not been able to access both my web site and the oneononeinternet.com site as well. I have called their support line which directs them to submit trouble tickets over the internet (of course). Does anyone know what is happening with this company? Thanks in advance for any information.
Posted by darksoul, 09-20-2004, 01:38 PM
Their datacenter had some problems. They'll prolly be back at some point.
Posted by blob2, 09-20-2004, 02:38 PM
Don't you mean oneandone.com ?
Posted by skarl, 09-20-2004, 02:44 PM
No, oneononeinternet.com
Posted by Cunk, 09-20-2004, 04:31 PM
What's the customer service number for One On One? The number I had is reporting as disconnected. So you actually got through to them? Then they haven't burned to the ground or been swallowed by a sink hole? I'm panicking here, frantically searching for a new provider. If I can get some assurance that they aren't gone for good I'll feel a whole lot better.
Posted by Cunk, 09-20-2004, 04:54 PM
Hmm. It looks like Alabanza is the cause of this (see thread in the outtages forum here -- I'd post a link but apparantly I'm not allowed to yet) since I believe OneOnOne resells Alabanza. Oh, well. Nothing to do now but wait and look into some redundancy.
Posted by skarl, 09-20-2004, 04:54 PM
I haven't gotten through to a live person, only their automated voice attendant. I have tried literally every option to get to a live person, but no luck to this point. I'm still under the assumption that they are having some type of incident, but if this continues past today I will be switching providers immediately.
Posted by Cunk, 09-20-2004, 05:10 PM
Ooo. They're back. I don't think it was OneOnOne. It was Alabanza. I'm pretty certain OneOnOne is a reseller for Alabanza and there apparantly was a fire in Baltimore that shut down Alabanza's building. See the thread in Industry Announcements -> Providers and Network Outages and Updates for more details. A number of resellers were shut down (all over the world, no less).
Posted by skarl, 09-20-2004, 05:14 PM
They are indeed back - now I just have to wait for my domain to come back online again. Thanks for the heads-up, Cunk...
Posted by loesch, 09-20-2004, 06:09 PM
I have both a personal site and manage a non-profit's site with them. Both are down. DNS check shows NS servers up and then down a few minutes apart. HTTP servers refuse a connection to :80. Mail servers seem to be working. I believe they use OnNet for their NOC and they are down also along with two other hosters associated with OnNet.
Posted by viGeek, 09-20-2004, 06:33 PM
Im able to visit there website, not sure if this helps.
Posted by davidt, 09-20-2004, 07:34 PM
OneOnOne is hosted by Alabanza...they lease a cluster of Alabanza dedicated servers. See the Alabanza thread in this same Outages area. I think that OnNet is also hosted by Alabanza. DT
Posted by sehh, 09-20-2004, 07:55 PM
oneononeinternet.com was affected by the power failure. unfortunately, there was no fail safe system, even though we had been told that alabanza along with their affiliates have a high-tech dual UPS system along with a generator. ofcourse all that was not true and the power failure brought the entire system down. after ~20 hours, its back online now with most sites running. one of the lessons learned: in an emergency, all communication breaks down, none of their email addresses, helpdesk tickets or tollfree phone numbers worked.
Posted by davidt, 09-20-2004, 08:15 PM
Well, actually the 800 number for OneOnOne was working, but totally worthless (as usual), because it was reporting that "all servers are working" today. Obviously, nobody from OneOnOne could be bothered to update the server status portion of their phone sytem, which is typical. They outsourced their tech support to a bunch of morons in Bangalore ("BobCares.com") a long time ago....although they pretend to be Anglos by signing their HelpDesk responses with names like "Bill Hughes" but their quirky English gives them away. Here's an example from "Bill": "Usually the procedure is like AOL will be closely monitoring the server for a small period of 8 days, after which the block will be removed, if no more spoofing activity is detected." Here's some similarly mis-spelled stuff from a "Chad Nichols": "We appologise for the inconvinience this is causing you, but our administrative department have already teken up this matter." Hmmmm....maybe they've moved their Tech Support back to the USA, but to somewhere in the Appalachians... DT
Posted by sehh, 09-20-2004, 08:31 PM
I should have been more specific. Their 800 was not working because we are situated in Europe. It seems their 800 number is not accessible from here. Their support has been kind of weird. I found out that in order to actualy get a decent support i had to talk to someone other than "Bill Hughes". As you have found out, those names are fake and cover for the morons behind them. Not a real problem for me, because oneononeinternet offers access to their servers that others dont (like procmail that allows me to filter my own emails).
Posted by jackpot, 09-20-2004, 10:01 PM
Well... My experiences with OneonOneinternet were not exactly the same. The following is a reply to one of my few support tickets to them ( reply by Chad Nichols ). I had demanded a detailed explanation, and had asked for a refund, and the following was the reply that I had got.... Simple and Polite : My Question : ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To the point at hand: I have noticed (via the details in my email properties box) that my site files have recently been moved from "host 9" to "host 7". I have also noticed that the loading speed of my site has coincidentally slowed down at about the same time. Has my site been transferred to a slower or more crowded server? Due to the nature of my business, my site is extremely graphics-and-multimedia-intensive, and the speed at which its interactive visual elements, rollovers, and sound will download for my visitors is a major priority. When I renewed with One On One this year, Andy Camarata told me that my site was being moved to "a new server" and would download/play faster, and it did. I can only guess that the server he referred to was "host 9", and now that he's gone my files have been moved elsewhere, with an evident decrease in performance. Please let me know what may be done to address this concern, to wit: - Can my files be restored to the "faster" server they were previously on? - Were my files moved as a means of addressing the SPAM & Spoofing issues which I recently asked for help with? Or Does this have more to do with Mr. Camarata's departure from One On One, and is unrelated to my prior inquiries? Or is there some other explanation? - Is there some other way of improving the transmission/download/playability of my business' interactive & multimedia features on the server side at your end? If so, what may they be, and will you implement them? - If there is a package upgrade or adjustment that will dramatically accomplish this, what would that entail? And is there anything that we can do in the interim, before I decide to renew my annual contract in December? I look forward to your clarifcation and advise. I would prefer to hear from either of you by phone (you have my number). Please call collect if you wish. Please tell me if I can receive a refund on the balance of my pre-paid annual contract, if you are unable to address my questions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Answer from Chad Nichols: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi, Your account was moved to host7 from host9 anticipating a disk space crisis on host9. It was a precautionary measure to avoid downtime of your site. Spoofing takes place with reference to domain names and servers have a insignificant role in the incidence of spoofing issues. The factors that affect the speed with which multimedia sites are loaded are: 1) The resource usage of your server by accounts hosted on it. As of now, both host9 and host7 have comparable number of accounts, and the server load is also the same. So we dont have enough evidence to surmise that the server is causing the decreased performance. Though, if you feel this is the reason, we are always willing to transfer your account to host9 now that the disk crisis is resolved. We just want our clients to be satisfied. 2) The design of each page of the site. By this option I am not suggesting that your site is designed in an inefficient manner. I just want to give you some suggestions on how things could be improved. While designing graphic intensive sites, it is always prudent to minimise the graphic content to a minimum per page. As you might be knowing, moving graphics like gifs and flash files take more time to load than static images. Users of your site will be more impressed by one good graphic that loads fast than ten good graphics that takes forever to load. There is no special package to improve site performance that isnt listed on the company website. Regarding your enquiries about refunding the contract fee and telephone support, we as the support department cannot give you a definitive answer. For that we are reffering this issue to our administrative department. They will be in contact with you shortly to clarify your doubts. Thank you for your patience. Best regards, Chad Nichols ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ive got a nice reply from Bill Hughes once, as well. he seemed pretty good with his written English as well ( in case they are really Indians as you claim ) Overall Comments : Pretty good from my point of view Ive seen really pathetic customer support from others before.
Posted by jackpot, 09-20-2004, 10:08 PM
Just now recieved one from Bill Hughes, regarding the services not accessible: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hello, The Network operation center was down with a power outage in Baltimore, and that was the reason why the sites were not resolving. All our servers, along with the others hosted at the datacenter in Baltimore are currently unavailable due to the above scenario. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NEWS REPORT : http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/tr...l-news-breaking Baltimoresun.com staff and wire reports Originally published September 20, 2004, 7:47 AM EDT An underground fire overnight forced some street closures near City Hall and knocked out more than 500 traffic lights downtown, Baltimore fire officials said this morning. The fire was reported shortly after 1 a.m. at Guilford Avenue and Fayette Street, according to city Fire Department spokesman Kevin Cartwright. It blew out four or five manhole covers in the area and firefighters found smoke and flames shooting from one of the manholes. Cartwright said the fire was out, but the flames damaged high-powered electric cables underground, including a cable that feeds the traffic light system. Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. crews were on the scene and managing the electric problems. It was not immediately clear when any of the malfunctioning traffic lights would be back in service. According to city police, Charles Street was closed to Monument Street; Fallsway was closed to Baltimore Street; and Fayette Street was closed between Gay and Charles streets. The cause of the fire was under investigation, Cartwright said. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please note that this was something that is out of our reach. Every hosting firm with servers with that NOC has sufferred the same issue. We were not even able to reply to your support tickets, due to our email / web being inaccessible as well. A few of our servers are back online now, and a few are still to be plugged back by the NOC. Please hold tight if your domain is still not resolving. It shall start working once all the servers are back online. We apologize for the major inconvenience caused, and look forward for your understanding and co operation in this regard. Regards, Bill Hughes ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Seems pretty good to me
Posted by davidt, 09-20-2004, 10:37 PM
This seems to demonstrate that the "Chad" and "Bill" identities are used by whoever happens to address any given ticket. They might even be in Canada now, for all I know, but I can tell you for sure that they were using "BobCares.com" less than a year ago. I was able to prove this by tracing the IP on an emailed response that one of the techs sent me. At that time, they were answering tickets with Anglo names like "Eric Lang" and "Jim Roberts" -- "white bread" names that are designed to fool customers into thinking that they're not from Bangalore (they were, however). Outsourcing sucks....especially offshore outsourcing. DT
Posted by bobcares, 09-21-2004, 12:49 AM
Hi David, Some points I guess I must clarify - 1) Bobcares is based in Cochin and not Bangalore. 2) Bobcares does not use English names. We either use our own name or we do not sign any name. There are cases where customers do not want Indian names. In such cases we do not sign our name. The customer is free to put in a footer with any name. That is not our concern. 3) Also, outsourcing is outsourcing where ever it is located. And if you are against it. Go to some jungle and live with the animals there and have fruits because 2004 and the future is all about a global economy. You sell GM and Ford cars to us and we'll sell support. We outsource our hosting requirements to a US company. Only a moron would not understand this theory of a symbiotic relation. 4) The topic is all about the some company's server not being accessible due to a datacenter problem. I wonder how and why bobcares is put into this thread. Regards Amar
Posted by davidt, 09-21-2004, 02:06 AM
OK...I'm really ready for this, and you're asking for it.... Oops...my mistake. A lot of technology outsourcing is done to companies in Bangalore, including the web portal work for many US banks. A few months ago, I received an infected email message from a computer in Bangalore, which isn't all that remarkable, except that the message was sent to an address that I had created specifically and only for use with the Bank of America. So, here's what happened (I got the bank and their partner, Yodlee to confess this)...some Indian fellow named Sanjai Bajpai took sensitive Bank data to his home computer, a computer which I also proved he used to participate in filesharing networks (which is NOT a secure thing to do), and through sloppy security, his computer became infected with a worm and proceeded to spew out worms sent "From" one Bank customer's address "To" another. This was just one very bad experience with outsourcing to India. It may not be your concern, but to the end user, it is still deceptive. If the HelpDesk tickets at OneOnOneInternet are currently being answered exclusively by BobCares people, then the customers are being deceived. Perhaps they only use BobCares for "overnight" support? Every person I talk to in the United States absolutely HATES the horrendous service provided by Indian outsourcing firms. For one thing, there's the heavy accent over the phone...that doesn't bother me, but that's what I hear people complaining about. What bothers me is when US workers are forced to train their Indian replacements and then they are fired! There have been documented cases of tech workers in the US committing suicide after losing their jobs to India. That's something that bothers me. Symantec (Norton AV) has outsourced most of their tech support to India, and the results are horrible! I carefully filled out a support request for a computer running Win98SE (that was part of the form) and the response I received (about a week later), which came from India (I traced the IP address on the response), started like this: "Hi Chad," (my name is David, so the idiot couldn't even get my name right) Chad, the issue you facing is due to Shutdown Problems in Windows XP. (no, I had carefully selected "Windows 98SE" when filling out the form) I brought this to the attention of some Symantec corporate officers and they were very upset with their outsourcing provider in Mumbai. This was yet another very bad experience with outsourcing to India. Only a moron would risk his or her company's reputation by trusting people in India to interact with customers. That's easy to explain. Someone mentioned OneOnOneInternet's HelpDesk, which is the connection to BobCares. And so a little bit about that: The first OoO HelpDesk response that was emailed to me from a BobCares employee (named "Sheetal") was sent with a return address of "support oneonone.com" in both the header and the body of the message. The problem is, "oneonone.com" has nothing at all to do with "oneononeinternet.com" and so when I sent an answer back to that address, the owner of that company was not happy that the BobCares technician had his computer misconfigured, and was also giving out that address for customers to respond to. In fact, the date on the response from Sheetal was also incorrect...by one entire YEAR! The clock/calendar on his computer was set to May 2002 and yet this response was sent in May 2003. I hope he's either gotten a better computer or has been fired. And then another...."Chandra Brown" (from BobCares, I presume) couldn't follow instructions in setting file permissions. It got so bad back in 2003 that I had to get Alabanza to override the mistakes that the BobCares people were making, because they kept crashing our sites and our server with their blunders. I have complete documentation, if you'd care to see it. So, I hope that your company has made some significant improvements since the work that Sheetal and Chandra were doing for OneOnOneInternet.com. Both the US and India have their own advantages and disadvantages, but the outsourcing of tech work to India is eliminating a LOT of Information Technology jobs here in the US, and they are not usually being done as well by their dirt-cheap replacements. Sorry...that's an honest summary of what has happened. Nothing you can say will make my words untrue. DT
Posted by bobcares, 09-21-2004, 02:50 AM
Let me put it up this way David. Chandra brown is not from bobares. Bank of America is not supported by bobcares And neither is Norton support by bobcares. These guys may be bad. Why do you want to blame bobcares for it also on a thread where they are not talking about outsourcing in the first place. There are many other support companies. Many are good many are not. But then that has nothing to do with India or Indian Companies. There are many good hosting companies and there are many bad hosting companies. Does that mean that US companies are bad ? I do not think so. Also, we do not use our email client to support customers. We provide support via a helpdesk on the clients server. This is done by most decent support companies. Now when a response is send via a helpdesk if you trace it back it would go to the client's server. And finally bobcares does not even give phone support. So accent really is not a problem unless you can make out my accent reading my posts or email. We do understand that many people think support=bobcares. But it is not true. If it were we would be as big as Microsoft :-D We get some times support questions from our site where they ask us to support their dell machine or to even cancel their pan am flight. Here is a typical support request which came to bobcares.com - can u help me? i have visioneer one touch 5300 and lost my software, can u please help me i need to install it due to,needed to recover computer. I replied to the lady saying that we do not support this. She said her provider told her that bobcares support everything for them. Later we realized that one of our client's did host her website and she believes that bobcares supports everything. :-) Lastly, it is sad that many have lost jobs in the US. I am not refuting that fact. And I am sure I would have had similar sentiments like you. We too get agitated when we see somebody take away our clients for 1/4th the cost we sell at. In a global economy such things to happen. However, let's see the good side of life, according to the US government reports the jobs have increased in the US. Also, according to some big research companies the IT demand is going to increase by a amount that the present manpower in the US cannot handle it. So I guess we all would have something to live on. Have a nice day Regards Amar
Posted by davidt, 09-21-2004, 09:25 AM
So maybe OneOnOneInternet stopped using your services? Your point? The Bank of America incident I mentioned was very serious and was due to outsourcing to India. I didn't blame that on BobCares, but you can't defend what happened in that case. Again, I gave an example of horrible support from India, which you can't defend. I was "painting a picture" and the picture is clear. I'm glad you're willing to consider the obvious! I didn't. Oh, yes it does. Every American I've spoken with on this subject has agreed that the quality level of Tech Support has dropped now that much of it is done by minimally-qualified, low-paid workers from your country. I'm not saying that there are no good Tech Support people in India -- just that the ones I've interacted with so far have been bad. Wait, let's go back to your mention of Fords from your previous message. Are you aware that for years, many Americans would only buy automobiles from overseas, due to the low quality level of American cars? The acronym for Ford is "Fix or Repair Daily" and GM and Chrysler (now a German company) have similar reputations. Look at the Wal-Mart corporation....they are an abomination! They're truly evil, but I won't go into that here -- yes, there are many, many bad US companies. That may be what you normally do, but the BobCares worker "Sheetal" (you didn't deny that he was from BobCares) must have not been following procedures, because here's the proof: Return-Path: Received: from phoenix.bobcares.com ([140.99.18.2]) by payne.mail.mindspring.net (Earthlink Mail Service) with SMTP id 19e8H83LM3Nl3p41 for ; Fri, 9 May 2003 10:17:54 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 7386 invoked by uid 1004); 9 May 2003 13:30:40 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO 192.168.1.28) (203.197.151.138) by 73.deru.net with SMTP; 9 May 2003 13:30:40 -0000 From: support@oneonone.com Organization: Poornam To: x@mindspring.com Subject: Oneoneone.com Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 19:40:24 +0530 User-Agent: KMail/1.5 Uncontrolled "globalism" is destroying our world. The standard of life in many developing countries is actually worse now because of the abuses of multi-national corporations, who only care about increasing profits, and not caring for people or the environment. HAH! What a lie. The Bush administration has been the first one with a net LOSS of jobs, not an increase. After losing many good-paying manufacturing and technology jobs overseas, we've seen some slight growth in low-paying jobs, such as those working at Wal-Mart (whose owners keep the billions and billions of dollars or profits and who locks workers into the stores at night, and won't open the doors even if one of them is dying from a heart attack! This has happened.) I read your article (on your website) on outsourcing, and it's not very balanced. You quoted "Carly Fiorina" of HP -- are you aware that she has a HORRIBLE reputation for ruining the company? But maybe she has sent jobs to India, so she's OK with you. But you're right....this argument now has little to do with the topic of server outages, and there's no way we'll settle it here. DT
Posted by skarl, 09-21-2004, 03:42 PM
Wow, talk about your hijacked threads... Getting back to the actual point of the thread, my site hosted through OneonOneInternet is now back up and running just fine. Once I was able to make email contact and get to the help desk to submit a trouble ticket I received prompt responses. If anyone from OneOnOneInternet is listening, you would do well to 1) More accurately update your network and server outage reports, and 2) Find a way for people to ultimately speak to a live person via your 800 line. I realize that you want to keep costs down, but without reliable information on a problem such as the one yesterday, you will lose customers.
Posted by davidt, 09-21-2004, 04:30 PM
Guilty as charged....but I've been working with sites on Alabanza-hosted servers since '99, and with OoO for over two years and have a lot of "issues" with both of them. Ditto...we're shopping around, but after so long with the Alabanza setup, there's a bit of inertia on our end. DT
Posted by Cunk, 09-21-2004, 06:16 PM
Very true. I actually came to this forum looking to research a new web host when I found this thread. I still plan on staying with OoO but I've got to come up with a crisis plan. I'm using a seperate company for our DNS records and they're able to update their tables pretty much instantly with whatever changes I make (no waiting overnight) so conceivably if I had a backup web host I could easily redirect traffic on a whim (although I suspect DNS caching would cause problems -- am I right?). However I hate the idea of shelling out more money for a web host that might only get used once in a couple of years for a few hours. I suppose a better alternative would be to temporarily host the site ourselves on our DSL line.
Posted by sehh, 09-22-2004, 06:33 AM
I'm quite impressed that i found people hosting with oneononeinternet.com. I've been looking for others to talk to, because i can't get many answers from the helpdesk. Their outsourced idiots can barely speak english some times. maybe i should start a new thread about 'self-help from people using oneononeinternet.com'.
Posted by Cunk, 09-22-2004, 12:25 PM
I haven't had any bad experiences with the outsourced help yet. Of course I haven't had to ask anything too complicated yet so that may be part of it. Personally I like how OneOnOne seems to keep adding features and upgrading their existing features. Every once in a while I'll notice a new tool in the control panel. Maybe all the web hosts do that but frankly I feel lucky that OneOnOne was the first web host I ever signed up with and I've been happy with them for several years now.
Posted by sehh, 09-22-2004, 12:48 PM
Technicaly, their 'new features' are mostly crap. Their spam utils are useless since they work based on keyword matching. Their shopping cart util is useless because its limited in use. Their "invision board" is a commercial product and if you ever move to another hosting service you may have problems moving your forums, thus most people install their own forum software. Generaly, i think their hosting service is just average because they give too little storage space for their price. I think thats because alabanze is too expensive and oneononeinternet are resellers of them. Why am i staying? just because their Redhat 7.3 systems are properly configured and allow me to use procmail to filter emails my own way, as well as install custom SSL certificates from cacert.org. I'm just very tempted by the hosting services that offer 1gig storage for the same price and same features. Maybe we should create a small forum for oneononeinternet.com customers/webmasters and share ideas and information.
Posted by Cunk, 09-22-2004, 01:16 PM
Our needs are meager so I suppose I can't comment on OneOnOne's suitability for more complex and larger web sites. 1 Gig of storage is far beyond what we need at this point but I wouldn't hesitate to move to another host if OneOneOne didn't meet our future needs or if I found another well-regarded host that can save us lots of money. I've never had to explore the tools they offer and even if we did need shopping carts or forums or anything like that I certainly wouldn't use what they offer just because it's there. I'd make sure to do the research and choose the best package.