Server downtime and customer support

[JohnMC]

Hi everyone,

i want to keep this brief but constructive and complete as possible, bare with me. Ive been very frustrated with my server (rs17), ive experienced extreme slow downs and unresponsiveness too often, ive discovered my server ip black listed with too many major email providers and ive received what i would consider below average support.

Let me save you the time by saying that i understand the nature of shared hosting and even the internet as a whole and let me assure you my perspective isnt of whb but rather whb vs my other current hosts and past hosts. Shared hosting is inherently troublesome, but i didnt know that until i joined whb. In my other experiences a hosting company has notified me of issues before i realized they existed and corrected even things like mail provider black listings and notified me as such, the frequency of down times has never been bothersome and when servers have had issues i always-always found information about it in the official forum threads or status pages, my experience here has been significantly less then that.

let me be specific about my issues (or what i think my issues are), i often experience slow downs in service, i suspect this is because of runaway server processes or some sort of server abuse. My sites will appear to be down or come back with an error 502, i suspect this is an outage or abuse of the MySQL server. I often find my server is black listed with a major email provider, again: server abuse i suspect. When i submit a ticket for support, techs have denied the existence of a problem, stated the problem was likely with my connection while disregarding a webpagetest.org result i submitted and always (until i mentioned it) gave me no technical information about the issue beyond 'its fixed' even if it may not of been 'fixed'.

its crossed my mind more then once that server audits should be performed more often and that technology must exist to recognize and deal with abuse or overloads faster.

I want whb to provide a great service and im sure they do too and ill be the first to admit that the prices to features ratio was too good for me to pass up but i truly hope i dont have to walk away with a 'you get what you pay for' mentality because at the end of the day cpanel features, shell access or whatever gets you excited doesnt really matter, its if people can see your website and that you and your clients are happy.

[Alan B]

I'm not saying your site wasn't down, but please make sure it is really down the next time it appears to happen. See this blog article for simple ways to check if your site is actually down, or if perhaps you just have connection issues:

Is your web site down? Maybe, maybe not.
How to test your web site. Tips if you think your web host is down | Official WebHostingBuzz Company Blog

It's surprising how often someone thinks a site is down, but it turns out that the site is up for other people but there is some routing issue on the wider Internet or with that person's ISP.

As for e-mail blacklists, that is an ongoing problem on shared hosting. Usually a server's IP(s) get blacklisted because another user account on that shared server was spamming, either consciously or due to an insecure script. I admit that WHB hasn't always been pro-active about blacklists, and it's been necessary to inform them of the blacklisting. There are web sites on which you can periodically enter your server's mail-sending IP and the tool will check it against multiple blacklists. If your server is on any major blacklists, send the information to WHB Support and they will take steps to have the blacklisting lifted, once the offending account has been dealt with.

[Matt R.]

John,

Thank you for your post. You have picked up on the nature of shared hosting but the skill and performance of a shared host can be shown in how it runs and loads it servers. For the most part, we do this very well but there are a few bad eggs in our basket and I'd agree RS17 is one of them. This has been earmarked for an upgrade over the next few days. We are improving how we monitor and report overloads with a view to reacting much quicker.

We will keep you informed.

Matt