Reseller loosing money

[sonaht]

Hi all

I have a reseller account.

Due to the recent attack on the silver res. server I have suffered losses, that amount to more than a few thousand $.

One customer cancelled 12 hosting packages, and today I had amother one that withdrew payment for 2 hosting packages.

In all fairness what I am supposed to do with you people just telling me to look at the forum and read the administrators posts concerning the servers downtime?

Can I direct my customers to the forum, so they can read the posts as well, and obviously as by magic they will forgive me for the lack of proper service and forget all their lost emails, and their site being unreachable ?

I have written a number of tickets and spoke many times on the live support.

All the times no one spoke a single word concerning compensation or even something remotely near such matters.

Am I the only one who suffers from this ?

[Alan B]

Hmm. You have a silver account, at $24.95/month, and yet for a few hours of DDOS attack you lost "more than a few thousand $"? Why don't I believe you? Some clients, when they have a complaint, try to exaggerate the magnitude of the inconvenience by claiming that they have lost huge sums of money. On just a silver account, I don't believe that you lost many thousand dollars.

However, it is unfortunate that you and your clients were inconvenienced by the DDOS attack. These attacks can and do happen at any web host. It's a fact of life that there are jerks out there.

As for losing e-mail, they would not lose any e-mail if you paid a little extra to have backup mail servers. I use external secondary nameservers and external backup mail servers on my own domains and for all my important clients. If you want more info. I can post it here.

[sonaht]

Amazing

I would expect a staff member to make a comment but no ....a staff helper did

The ddos has been affecting the silver reseller server since last week.

A new customer had 12 domain names with 12 distinct hosting packages.

Another had 2 with the option of creating portals on them.

They saw the service and obviously did not wish to pay. ddos or not you should try to explain to a customer that everything will be ok "sometime in the future" and by the way never mind your lost emails, their lost anyway ....lets wait for the new ones WHENEVER they arrive.

Please change your signature "I am not WHB staff and I am not paid. "....you keep reffering to me as a client !!! I am not a client of yours unless you're staff.

Usually i do not flame in any forum but this time .... i have paid for the service, I lost because of the lack of it and I will not stand for any person telling me otherwise or making smart a.. comments on how "clients " tend to exaggerate the magnitude of theis problem.

[Alan B]

I never referred to you as my client. I referred to you as a client, since you are WHB's client. As for you expectation of what someone might post here, that's your problem. You posted here, in the public forum, which invites comment from other members. If you want to speak only to WHB Support, then do so in a Support ticket. I commented as I saw it, based on my experience. I will not engage in a flame war with you.

[sonaht]

Neither will I.

To set the record straight, I have been a satisfied client for nearly two years.

The last 10 days though have cost me alot of money, believe it or not.

That is my point all along, since no staff member will engage in any kind of conversation concerning compensation.

[Sergey S.]

It is a fact that a ddos attack can not be prevented in 100% of cases. Even the largest websites can be taken offline and it doesn’t really matter what hardware is installed and operating. Those responsible for such events are constantly finding new way to saturate connections and cause problems for hosting companies.
And unfortunately the period of ddos attack in many cases can not be changed by the most skilled technical teams.
We apologize that the service has not yet been up to standard, but please understand that the blame lies with those behind the ddos attacks and they can happen no matter where you host.

As for Alan B – he is truly an independent helper who has done a lot for the hosting community and customers, particularly helping with whole bunch of stuff.

We would like to sincerely thank Alan B and hope that situations when he gets blamed for actually being the greatest independent help never ever take place.

[sonaht]

It is not Alan's B independant position to comment that way about somebody's problem.

He can, as he does frequently, help ... but he should not take places and try to defend whb, as i presume you are, the staff, pretty capable of doing so yourselves.

We can shift the blame to those scumbags who started the ddos, no problem with that.

It is always convenient to point the finger to the ones hiding in the shadows.

[Sergey S.]

Dear Sohant,

We are not shifting the blame. It is a fact that the people who are conducting the attack are the one to blame.

And unfortunately they are doing it with a shared server, which means on the one where the clients initially agreed to share the environment.

Once again we apologize for the situation and the inconveniences.
And believe us we did everything we could to minimize the damage, if there had been steps we could take to prevent this situation or stop it when it was taking place - we would have done so.

[Matt R.]

And to add to Sergey's post, DDoS attacks are only started with malicious intent. They are difficult to immediately mitigate and almost impossible to prevent entirely. Our firewalls are some of the best in the business but DDoS attacks can and will still cause service disruption. I do believe we communicated openly and honestly about the problems we faced and we definitely did our best to resolve them asap - they cost us money, they cost you money and is a crappy situation for all.

If you (or your clients) want a solution that is 99% safe from DDoS attacks, it can be done but it's serious money involving geo-load balanced muliple locations. Even these can sometimes be susceptible - most of the high profile websites have been taken offline at some stage or other.

[rictorres]

Hmm. You have a silver account, at $24.95/month, and yet for a few hours of DDOS attack you lost "more than a few thousand $"?

I don't know about his account. But my reseller account was offline for at least 50 hours in two weeks.

I didn't loose any clients because the important ones uses Google Apps (in my case email are more important).

Thank God that the attacks have stopped.

[omniuni]

Sonaht, first of all, I would like to mention that for all the help that Alan B. gives, I too have noticed that he does not have quite the finesse for dealing with people. It would do him good *cough* to remember that if he wants to help WHB as best he can, showing the utmost respect to their clients who post on the forum is always a good policy to follow.

Now, DDoS attacks do happen, and I recommend that you work out a system with your clients so that they know how to contact you in the case of an outage, and that you can keep them up to date. I have had one of my websites go down. My client was fine with the downtime, so long as I kept them informed every few hours as I got word from WHB on what was going on. Matt R. is quite right about how difficult it is to handle DDoS attacks. WHB uses some of the most well-equipped data centers in the U.S. If a server goes down from a DDoS, not only isn't it their fault, but you should be glad that you've got such a good service behind your server! If you were with another host with a lesser data center, it is most likely that the DDoS would have taken even longer to be resolved... believe me, I've dealt with bad hosts before. I didn't lose my client, but I did move them to WHB!