I wish I had your cojones. I mean, I can stand up for myself and all, but your mastery of the language and timing just makes my jaw drop in awe, admiration, and envy.

*note to self* Never, ever, ever piss Mir off.

Sorry you had a sucky day. If it matters, I DID miss you!

Forget Inigo Montoya, I’d be going Medieval (a la Ving Rhames) on their @sses. You have my deepest sympathy and I can’t wait to hear the whole scoop, once you’re safely migrated.

wow - that is insane. i work in IT and while yes i understand what they are saying is not a small issue (it does take time) but i am EMBARASSED to admit we are in the same field with that horrific example of ‘customer service’!! that is horrible! you are absolutely right to complain. i would suggest you also go online, find their CEO’s contact information and give him a call (calmly) explaining everything. I think your patience is amazing as I don’t think i could contain myself as well as you did!
For your new hosting company - i would suggest explaining the current situation and asking how they would have handled it and how they can ensure it will not be repeated there. Hardware failures and corruption happen, we are talking machines. however, the way it is handled and communicated makes a HUGE impression on the customer!

still in shock… i want to call them and yell at them on your behalf!!!

Bizarre. Your requests (for explanation, estimate of time required to fix it, and such assurances they can give that it won’t happen again) are so OBVIOUS that if I were on the receiving end of such an email, I’d be apologizing twice over: once for the problem and again for having to be ASKED for this information.

Quite the story. I haven’t checked any of your sites yet today. I hope — for your sake and for the “service” representatives who would by now be inserious danger of disembowelment by email (if anyone can do it, you can) — I hope the story is over now!

seriously, they should have a back up that they can restore to a spare box while they work on yours. completely unexceptable!! even if only temporary and let you know there will be minimal downtime to move you back and schedule it with you once it’s done.

this is insanity! check your contract, you may be able to get more than your monthly fee back!!!

Spitting nails?

Ho-ly crappe.

I came here to get my Mir fix when your other sites weren’t working. Sorry to hear about the huge crapfest. Hoping the rest of your day is going well.

OK, I’m laughing over here and not at you but at how eloquently you have written about this and mostly about Inigo Montoya. I may have peed myself a little on that one. I’ve been in this same situation for both my hosting service (where I have 6 sites, 3 highly active) and my business phone/internet conncetion. Oh, I tell ya, you just want to smack someone. The host had NO costumer support as well (though they claim to be the ones who give the best) and it was like banging my mouse to make it work though the batteries are dead. My exchange was almost similar but I was way too nice about it. Good for you for sticking up for yourself and I HOPE you went ahead and got a new host. I ended up sticking with mine and I think they’ve learned from their mistakes. I hope, at least. I’ve threatened that I’m outtahere if they let it happen again. But I have a feeling that doesn’t teach them crap unless I actually leave.

I think that, in general, customer support sucks across the board. I see it everywhere and I fully believe it’s a direct result of improper training and monitoring. You know when you hear “this call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes…” (probably my voice, btw!) many companies don’t follow up on these (not all and I know several that absolutely do). I get so excited when someone counts my change back to me! Weird, yes, but it means they care about accuracy and have been trained at some point, maybe even by their mom.

Whew! I’m just glad nothing happened to you or your family. I was staring to panick. I’m very sorry that you are having issues and hope things are back to normal soon.

36 hours, folks. Nothing but ominous silence on their end.

The new hosting is ready for migration, except that all my data is still being held hostage on the old server, and I cannot redirect my nameservers until I retrieve the old info.

Hang in there. We will all come back once your hosting issues are resolved.

Wow, that is just - wow. Completely unacceptable. As someone from “the other side”, allow me to translate:

“We have had a reboot request out for this server for about 35 minutes. The machine should finish rebooting shortly.”
Translation: “Oh crap! I forgot to tell Joe to reboot the server!”

“There are many technical restrictions that do not allow us to support hot-spare servers for unexpected downtime. An OS restore and backup recovery is being initiated for srv4.whsrv.com by the datacenter techs.”
Translation: “There is absolutely no excuse for a hosting provider to not have a disaster recovery plan. But we’re hoping that if we treat you like you’re a moron then you will, in fact, turn out to be a moron and buy our line of bull.”

“Andrew came back to tell me that the disk housing my files was corrupted, and needed to be replaced. He reiterated that they couldn’t offer me any idea of actual uptime.”
Translation: “No one has checked our back-up tapes in months. We have spent the entire day desperately trying to find an uncorrupted back-up. We have now called in a data-recovery expert who is telling us that we’re screwed and that we should check our back-ups regularly.”

“yet another customer service rep entered the fray to let me know that my sarcasm was unnecessary as they’d been perfectly professional with me.”
Translation: “We are frantically trying to find anything to blame on you.”

I am so sorry, Mir. There is absolutely no excuse for their behavior. I hope you have better luck with your new hosting company.

Was it National $&#*(&$ Frustrating Day at work yesterday or what????

Without the benefit of being in the provider’s office to know what was going on there, it certainly seems they could’ve done things differently.

If you build it we will come! Don’t worry Mir we will all go where ever you go!

Can’t wait to hear all about it!!

Good gravy, Mir. What a total pain in the rump!!

Thanks for swinging by my site to let me know where I could find an explanation tho! Like Jackie, I’m glad that nothing happened to you or your family!

I’m sending a pox on that provider, whoever it is.

I’ve been missing you and was so glad to hear that you are at least ok. But Lord! What a huge pain in the ass. I send EVIL thoughts to whoever that provider is!

OMG, Mir, we’ll follow you wherever you go. Can’t believe it’s been this long…they are ridiculous!

Yay! I found you!
Boo! Sucky IP!

I’m just so glad I finally found this other blog of yours that I didn’t know about so I could find out what’s going on. A day without Mir is a sad day, but more than a day without Mir could be hazardous to your health!

Oh I’m so glad you’re not gone forever, I miss my daily doses of retail therapy from you! How are we supposed to get a jump on Christmas without you???

Working in IT, I think Tina hit the nail on the head in her comment. Those guys screwed up big-time and are now scrambling to cover their asses. Sorry about that. Hope your data is recovered - and soon. Bastards.

OMG!!! First, let me tell you, I’m also glad I found you, as all the other commenters I was starting to get worried that something might’ve happened to you (also, I missed your posts).

Second, as an IT professional … what kind of a company does not have back-ups for their servers? Seriously!!

Hope you can get this sorted out really soon. Hang in there!

Ugh! We’ve missed you, but don’t worry, we’ll be back once you are! I love the parrot idea above - and the need for booze and chocolate!

OMG I did not know how much I could love a woman & her website—and how I could be completly obsessed posting ‘what has happened to my beloved want.not’ on various sites–thank GOD babycheapskate heard my numerous crys and found you for me! You are amazing, and know how much you impact lives every day, especially my pathetic, shopaholic ass…your the best Mir—xoxoCarrie

If you read SD’s, you know that Dreamhost recently had a $9.80 something deal for a year of hosting. The SD’ers gave Dreamhost good reviews for everything except email. I have been with NearlyFreeSpeech.net for 3 years and while I have had outages (two?) and one very planned outage for a Sunday evening to physically move their entire operations across town, they have always been INCREDIBLY responsive. I will leave a support incident with the LOWEST priority, and within HOURS I have a response that required research and thought. I would be very willing to pay more for hosting simply for their amazing customer service. I guarantee it! (I’m not affiliated with any service provider but really do love NFS).

I hope you’re up soon, but I bet NFS could get you up and running before your current provider…

[...] to lie to you. The last three days have been tremendously awful. My hosting provider’s “little problem” has still not been resolved, which means the only data I have from my previous web presence [...]

Ok, before I go on, I agree with everyone that you should have gotten better responses and your provider is completly at fault for getting you all riled up. Having said that, it is entirely possible that the problems with your site(s) were resolved correctly and within the best possible time. (I said possible… back off those of you who are saying “but my stuff was up within minutes of problems” with my hosting providor.) This does not in any way let them off the hook for a lack of, or bad communications though.

In reading your post, there were a few problems.

1. Site going down for whatever reason
2. Problem not getting resolved in a timely manner
3. Lack of an ETA to resolve the issue.
4. No backup or backup not available
5. No standby server
6. Lack of communications or bad communications.

Taking these one at a time.

1. Computers die, sometimes for weird reasons that are never fully explained, no matter how much money you put into purchasing the best equipment in the industry, sometimes they just die.
(I think everyone agrees on this one, I just mention it for completeness)

2. To troubleshoot the problems with a server can sometimes take lots of time, especidally if, for example, you have to work through multiple options each one of which takes time, then have to order hardware from somewhere. So, if, for example,
a: the server died at 9:00am, within 15-20 minutes they recognize it and try to remotly reboot it. (this takes about 30+ minutes). b: This not working they go to the physical site (often a ways away from where the people are) and physically reboot the server. (we are now probably at T+2 hours.)
c: They then start a backup recovery for the server (on a large server this can take many hours, lets say 4-6 in this case but it could be 12+) we are now at T+8 hours
d: They realize that the problem is a corrupt drive and need to replace the physical hard drive, so they go to get their spare and realize that they just used it last week for that server with the flaky drive, they ordered a new one, but not on a rush order so they now have to rush a new drive. Since the are now at 6:00pm, they have to wait until the next morning to actually order the drive, adding in overnight shipping, they are now at T+48 hours until the drive arrives
e: getting the new drive in, installing it, and restoring the software, then recognizing that they need to update the firmware on their drive controllers to support the new drive can add another day, so lets say we are T+72 hours until this fictional account is back up and running.
Add in a few more problems, or troubleshooting steps and it is totally realistic that this problem could be down for 4-5 days without any real “fault”

3: Getting a valid ETA on troubleshooting is mostly making up a number. For example, in the above fictional example, each step of the way they would have believed that they were getting close to resolving the problem… then each time they had to restart or order hardware, the ETA moved. Many troubleshooting engineers will not provide ETA’s at all since if they do, and it is not met, the customers are often more mad than if the ETA was not provided. (note some customers are happier knowing all the actual stages and taking the ETA as a ETA for the next step, not for resolving the problem. but it is impossible to know which are which via the phone.)

4: restoring a backup to a server is a timeconsuming job in large servers, and this assumes that there is actually a spare server lying around powerfull enough to support it. most companies will try to repair the origiona server first before restoring to a temporary server. This is not to say that they shouldn’t have, just that it is the attitude that most companies take.

5: Not having a standby server is totally a matter of money, not technical issues, the customer rep was either mis-informed or bull shitting you there. Having said that, most hosting plans do not include standby servers in any form. (in fact, many do not even include backups). This is something that I see many people get upset about when problems occurr, but is actually totally within the hosting plan that they have chosen. For the most part, hosting plans that include actuall standby servers, or redundant servers, wether hot or cold (online for immediate takover of the site, or just sitting turned off, but waiting for a problem and can be online quickly) cost at least twice as much as normal hosting plans. Most people are not willing to pay for this. BTW, if you have hosted with them for 2 years (no idea of the real time), and this was down for 4 days, you are still at 99.995% uptime, or 99.99 for the year. Counting uptime over a one month period is mostly unfair to the provider (as you said, things happen, sometimes outside of their control)

on all of the above, they could certainly have totally made every mistake and had bad servers, no backup plans, nothing spares, etc… but they could have done everything right (other than communications!) and still ended up where you were.

6: Having said all this, the place where they really messed up was in the communications. What should have happened was something like the following:’

a: server goes down, they are notified by some monitoring system and send out a email blast immediatly to their customers effected “we noticed the server was not responding and are investigating the problem, we will let you know immediatly as soon as we understand what is going on”.

b: rebooting does not work, troubleshooting initiated, another email blast: ” we have tried some immediate troubleshooting steps which were not successfull, we understand that your website is critical to you and are working hard to understand the problem. As soon as we know something new we will let you know.”

c: restore failes, email blast again: “we have tried restoring the server from the last successfull backup, and determined that we need to replace one of the drives in the server. Sadly since we cannot order it until tomorrow morning, it will be at least 48 hours until we expect to have the server running again, we will definitly not be charging your fee for this month and sincerely apologize for this inconvienience. If you critically need access to the files making up your site, please contact customer support to arrange for them to be restored to a temporary location (we cannot restore the server to hosting status though at this point). Please be aware though, the process for restoring even one site can take several hours, so providing you access will not be an immediate step. However we will work with you to provide every possible assistance during this period.”

And so on…

So, I am really glad that you are running again and I can get my daily fix… and changing hosting providers seems like a good idea, based just on their way of communicating the problem, but in the case it happens again, just be aware that unless you are actually SPECIFICALLY paying for hot standby or redundant servers, this kind of thing is actually just something that happens *(timing and lack of ETA included)

Dan

[...] out of commission for three and a half days owing to a huge outage at my former hosting provider. I promised you that I would tell the whole story and also that I would tell you who the provider in question [...]