The Personal Site of Dan Masters

Vip-Hosting Problems

I have tried to hold off as log as I could to try and not post about the terrible service that I receive from VIP-Hosting. Unfortunately it has come to a boiling point now.

Today, again, my hosting is down along with e-mail access. When calling Vip’s technical support I was told that a switch was down and they were replacing it. At the writing of this post that was an hour ago.

I guess I should consider myself fortunate that I was even able to talk with a support person. Most of the time when the hosting goes down you get “We are having a lot of calls right, please leave a message”.

Let me not forget to mention the issues that I was having with performance on all of my WordPress blogs that I have hosted with them. Pages were taking up to 30 seconds to load if the would load at all some times. I initially reported the issue to them with them responding that the had done a query of my DB and that everything looked fine.

After struggling along for another few weeks I reopened the ticket. This is how that went (you need –

[May 25, 2006 12:03:26 PM] Q: Re-opening this issue. Problem not fixed. Visualroute software shows –

| 15 | 40 | 66.55.78.18 | idano.net | ?Houston, TX, USA | | 44 | -x | Idslonline IDSL-NET-01 |

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40% loss. Sent e-mail to Mark Carruba with 7 reports showing loss at VIP Hosting Location and ping time outs.

Please fix.

[May 25, 2006 2:10:30 PM] A: We have forwarded this to the network admin. The ticket will automatically be closed by the system 24 hours from now.

[May 25, 2006 7:59:48 PM] Q: This ticket needs to remain open until the issue is resolved.

[May 25, 2006 8:15:15 PM] A: Sir we have checked the site and we have checked with our upstream provider and we cannot determine why you would be experiencing this problem.

[May 25, 2006 11:17:57 PM] Q: You can’t figure it out? This is not a solution. I sent you plenty of information which shows that it is an issue at your data center. If you are telling me that you are not going to fix it then I have no alternative but to report you and move my sites to another provider.

The goofiest thing about them is that when your hosting goes down their web site still comes up. They must be hosting it with someone else.

Anyway, it looks like I am now going to need to switch over to Jodo Host. They offer the same basic package except that they give you more space and bandwidth and actually answer the phone when you call.

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Of course I had to write this offline so this is getting posted the next day. In all my hosting was down for at least 6 hours that I could tell. Goodbye VIP Hosting.


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Comments

One response to “Vip-Hosting Problems”

  1. Dan Avatar
    Dan

    yes, I know what the problem was to this particular issue. During that time frame, MS SQL servers were being exploited and the VIP Hosting team was trying to patch those exploits. But they were crashing and being restarted etc. Causing the website to come up but not the databases. MEANWHILE website running coldfusion that had database connections to MS SQL were requesting these databases that were not there. The way coldfusion works, it keeps requesting the database until it gets it. Coldfusion was getting over worked causing the webservers to run really slow, until they crashed completely. Causing websites to go down completely. The techs at viphosting were getting calls from me and other hosting resellers like myself (we network) and we telling them about these issues, they were pretending that they did not know about them. If though I knew they were getting other calls, because all my friends in town came over to my office and got on my phone system and called on different lines. This is after we were down for an entire week. We lost clients becuase of this. I have so many clients, I cannot move them in one day. Anyways, if you have problems with VIP Hosting, then put in a trouble ticket, call customer service and silently move you site.