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The importance of Alpha aware hosting

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    #46
    Re: The importance of Alpha aware hosting

    I am sure the "3 month free" is a prorated discount spread over 12 months.

    Comment


      #47
      Re: The importance of Alpha aware hosting

      I have a builder now looking to depart 1and1. His website got hijacked by a redirect to Russia, and they did not help him correct it. Their response was that he could edit that something.something file. He's someone who's perfectly willing to pay for technical support when he needs it. My current hosting was actually more help! They looked at his site and found that the infection was more extensive than what 1and1 said. So, he's gotten it fixed temporarily, and we're making a plan to move him. "No, can't/won't help" is simply not an acceptable answer. A price tag is fine, just not "no".

      Cheap is as cheap does. - aka "you get what you pay for". I think there are plenty of reasonable options that are helpful and responsive when there's a problem, that saving even 3 months worth of hosting might be penny wise and pound foolish.

      ... just my current experience and opinion.
      Wendy Welton
      Architect
      past & future Alphaholic - deliberately falling off the wagon!

      http://www.artformhomeplans.com/

      Comment


        #48
        Re: The importance of Alpha aware hosting

        You don't pay for the first 3 months, but you do need to sign up for a year to get that. So your locked in for a year, and that could be a problem if your not happy, and want to move before that.

        Still haven't signed up with 1&1, but that is still my plan right now. (Could change.) When I researched, the biggest issue I found was that you didn't want to use their email system for support.

        My brother in law was hacked, (not sure what he was using,) but he admits he made a mistake. He opened the FTP for some reason, and forgot to close it, or lock it down again. There are bots out there that search for open FTP sites.

        It does sound like 1&1 wasn't as helpful as they could have been, and that is not good. Were they responsible for the hacking? Would the hacking have happened anyway? These are important questions in my opinion, because if they are responsible, then they should be avoided. But if they weren't the cause, then there wouldn't be any higher risk for them then any other hosting site. If I understand right, ZebraHost sets things up for you, so there may be less of an issue with making a security mistake at that point. I can definitely see the benefits with this, and with their experience with Alpha WAS.

        I didn't know about ZebraHost's cloud hosting option for Alpha 5 before today. That seems quite comparable to 1&1's VPS. But I didn't see a bandwidth listed.

        I thought the alpha WAS didn't work with cloud servers, but I knew they were working on that, and I think this information was from before 11 came out, if I am remembering right.

        Comment


          #49
          Re: The importance of Alpha aware hosting

          I hear very good things about Zebra, and I know they don't lock you in for any particular time period. I myself am with webjogger, who also doesn't lock you in, and am very happy. If they have to service my VPS they tell me ahead, I know when it will happen. If I need help, they help. When that help is appropriately paid technical support, they've been very reasonable - time frames quoted ahead and not exceeded.

          That's a good reminder about FTP connections. Thanks for that.
          Wendy Welton
          Architect
          past & future Alphaholic - deliberately falling off the wagon!

          http://www.artformhomeplans.com/

          Comment


            #50
            Lessons from "the front"

            Well, my little soap opera with Arvixe is finally in the last season, season finale.

            I'm changing my recommendation from "do not host at Arvixe for Alpha Five" to "do not host with Arvixe, period". I ended up with the live version of my website on A5 V10 at Arvixe for much longer than intended. The problems continued, but with outages due to IIS restarting spaced at first a manageable 4-6 weeks apart - but then escalating to 2 weeks, then 2 days. They absolutely were manually fussing with my VPS, and not in a good way, not in a way that fixed the problems. And when I finally got the attention of Sr Management, the attitude was "shoot first, ask question later", as in shoot me.

            I have no doubt that many host there without incident. But if all does not go swimmingly, buckle up. I would advise against hosting there the same way I would advise against buying a car from a dealer with an abominable attitude in the service department. In life, we all draw the short straw from time to time. You simply can't count on every experience every place going as planned. For any person or company, it's not whether they ever make a mistake, it's how they handle it. Arvixe could not have handled this upset customer worse. If somebody was scripting this for TV, the script would be thrown out as "not believable".

            1 - There almost has to be something in their setup that's unique to them, that triggers IIS restarting periodically. Even if I thought they were just the most fabulous company in the world, I would still say "but not if you need port 80".
            I never did get a straight answer, but one of their technicians did finally mention some maintenance software, and their tech support people are absolutely lost without their "award winning" Control Panel, that requires IIS. So I believe there's something in their setup that runs some diagnostics or something, that it uses IIS, and that if IIS is not running when that diagnostic is run, that it starts it.

            2 - It appeared to me that their tech support staff are not experienced computer people. They are trained to do things via their Control Panel only, which uses IIS, and the majority of them are absolutely lost outside of that. I always had to have a supervisor is they couldn't use the Control Panel.

            3 - When there is a problem, they don't necessarily follow through and make sure it's actually resolved.
            The first couple of times this happened I would naively assume they were correcting the problem - come back a couple hours later to find my web site still not running! So they'd stop IIS and not actually look at the website to see if it displayed! That's like the car repair dude replacing your brakes and then not testing to see if the car actually stopped when the brake pedal was pushed! I'd have to call back, and there would either be something else using port 80 (that happened at least once) or Always Up had been manually shut down (what, did they think I had a program running on my VPS because I was too lazy to close things? couldn't possibly ask? do they go into their neighbor's house and rearrange the furniture too?)

            3 - They have no internal quality standards regarding communication, follow up etc. They don't read notes in their internal file. They don't escalate repeat failures up the ladder.
            No matter how many times how many technicians put what "notes in the file" that said "do not start IIS", "must have port 80 free" and "don't stop Always Up" etc - another incident would happen, including Always Up being shut down. I was told to put a big note on my desktop saying "don't close Always Up..." - and I did. I know, unbelievable that I would even have to do that. And btw - I had professional help installing, Always Up was configured correctly, did restart if we restarted the VPS ourselves.

            I had one incident where my website was again displaying their #(%&#^%# control panel login to my customers, instead of my website, and it took me at least an hour to finally get through to the technician that I could not have IIS running. Even with a customer on the phone with the website down saying clearly "cannot have IIS", he still didn't read the file, and didn't believe me - thought I didn't know what I was talking about "every website needs IIS". To his credit, he was at least nice, and did apologize.

            But wait - it gets worse! In the final death spiral of this adventure, when I finally got them to act on my pleas to not just fix it when it happened, but to find out why IIS kept restarting, they made it worse by accessing my VPS manually and then leaving it with IIS running, changing the setting for Always Up and for the WAS instance inside Always UP! I am seriously not kidding. They even changed the setting for the WAS inside Always Up from Automatic to Manual. I'll give them the tiniest bit of benefit of the doubt and assume that when I was calling on a Saturday and saying "you broke it again" and the weekend tech staff was again removing IIS, and I was saying "and it's not enough to just stop IIS, you also have to make sure port 80 is actually free and that the website actually runs, which they did. So maybe changing the setting was just cluelessness and clumsiness.

            4 - I am not confident that a VPS at Arvixe is secure.
            I had many instances where it's clear that their staff was in my VPS without my knowledge. And I had an instance when I got an email requesting security info to reset the password, that I had not requested. When I called them, they refused to even try and see who had asked for it - just said "phone call". That was clearly an attempt to access my VPS by someone with no business doing so, and they wouldn't even look to see if they could give me the phone number for the incoming call. They just said "our protocol stopped the attempt" and declare all to be well.

            5 - Their senior management is arrogant and has the worst attitude I've ever experienced from any company representative. I've never been treated as badly by even the $5/hour kid working at I Hate My Job Burger.
            On Saturday, following yet another outage, I asked the tech person to have a supervisor call me on Monday. He said he'd make that request. So that's "I need a supervisor" request #1

            On Sunday, I responded to a support ticket with "I need somebody in a position of authority to call me on Monday, when I'm calm". So that's "I need a supervisor" request #2. I also moved my website on Sunday.

            On Monday even, after that communication did not happen (not by phone, email, nothing), I wrote an email detailing the whole adventure, and saying that if they did not contact me within 48 hours, that I'd initiate a charge back through my credit card. So that's now the third time I've asked to talk to a supervisor, and yep - put some teeth in it.

            Still Monday - Having already moved my website, and being concerned about security, I went to my RDP to wipe out my data. Guess what - had I not moved my website the day before, it would have been down again. Always Up had been stopped - and when I started it, the WAS was set to Manual, again! Now if my VPS was restored to correct configuration on Saturday, verified by me, and nobody else on my end even has the passwords - you tell me either Arvixe staff didn't do that, or they have a serious hole in their security!

            On Tuesday, I finally got a response. Rather than look into why this customer was so obviously PO'd, I got a terse email back saying that "threat" was "unethical and fraud". Seriously! It also said blah blah blah about how it's a rented environment and we're responsible for configuring....

            I wrote yet another email patiently explaining how we had correctly configured the VPS and that either their setup or their staff, and likely both, was changing it. If it was not correctly configured - a) why was it running without incident for weeks before IIS restarted and b) why could we restart the VPS and have it behave correctly?

            Yesterday, the 2nd Saturday in this end game drama, I finally get another email from the rude dude saying "I would like to track down the source of the issue. Staff should not be changing internal settings within your VPS with your specific request to alter that exact setting. Prior to your lengthy email I had not seen any mention of that. " (Are you friggin' kidding me? a) I told every single tech support person this - read the flippin' file and b) it was in the email on Saturday....) and "If you would like I can still give you a call this evening" - I wrote back and said "yes, call me.... I'm a night owl". He didn't call.

            Oh and that last email he defends his "fraud" statement with "The only way this can be done is if you tell your bank that no service was provided at all, and we both know that is simply not factual. I would consider any statement like that to be fraudulent." Um, no. From their own terms & conditions: "subscriber agrees that the company shall not be liable for any damages arising from such causes beyond the direct and exclusive control of the company. Subscriber further acknowledges that the company's liability for its own negligence may not in any event exceed an amount equivalent to charges payable by subscriber for services during the period damages occurred." Fraud? No. Now we're talking $75 a month here, and I requested 2 months, would have happily settled on 1 month if someone had put his big boy pants on and contacted me when I requested it. It's symbolic, and they don't even get that - the importance of even a departing customer being so angry as to post long winded slams of Arvixe on every forum she can find, vs just moving on quietly.

            So this is also a parable about Customer Service. I like to take adventures like this and use them as a mirror, make sure I myself aren't guilty of similar. So my takeaways for myself are:
            • Even if you're 100% sure the customer is wrong, keep your mouth shut and your hands off the keyboard until you're 200% sure.
            • Attitude, attitude, attitude.
              I just had a new boiler put in the rental apartment at my house. It failed. It failed for 3 weeks! It went from failing weekly to daily to every 2-3 hours - in the winter - and it's her hot water as well as heat - and the reset is in my basement, not hers - I was babysitting it like an infant... It was hell. But - I will use that company again, because they stepped up, followed up, didn't give up, and never once even had the slightest aggravation in their voice.
            • Follow up, follow up, follow up - see boiler story above. I didn't have to call them, they were calling me to see if most recent fix fixed it. If you are proactive - customer feels taken care of. If they have to call you - on a good day customer is stressed, on a bad day, customer is boiling underneath and ready to erupt.
            • Communicate, communicate, communicate - even if you have no answer, at least acknowedge the voice mail or email. No response is a bad response.
            Last edited by WendyWelton; 11-18-2012, 01:27 PM. Reason: obsessive typo checks!
            Wendy Welton
            Architect
            past & future Alphaholic - deliberately falling off the wagon!

            http://www.artformhomeplans.com/

            Comment


              #51
              Re: The importance of Alpha aware hosting

              One other thought - the various "ping" services won't, I think, tell you if your website is displaying a Control Panel Login instead of your website, because it's not a failure to display, it's displaying the wrong thing?
              Wendy Welton
              Architect
              past & future Alphaholic - deliberately falling off the wagon!

              http://www.artformhomeplans.com/

              Comment


                #52
                Re: The importance of Alpha aware hosting

                Thanks Wendy, but we will need a lot more detail

                Non Alpha-aware hosts are either ISS or Apache, hardly anything else exist as far as they are aware. But I would suggest if you had an account from your Host where you were totally in charge, and they never touched your server, you would be better off. Its when their technicians get involved that they make assumptions that cause problems. I remember when I got my first host (before ZebraHost was in business) I had to remove a bunch of software including IIS and it totally baffled them, but in my case they never got involved in maintenance.
                Last edited by Steve Wood; 11-18-2012, 08:31 PM.
                Steve Wood
                See my profile on IADN

                Comment


                  #53
                  Re: The importance of Alpha aware hosting

                  Yikes - Wendy - what a story. Things are hard enough.
                  Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
                  Albert Einstein, (attributed)
                  US (German-born) physicist (1879 - 1955)

                  Comment


                    #54
                    Re: The importance of Alpha aware hosting

                    It gets better. They billed me for the next month! No really, they really did. That part about them not reading notes, not communicating - I rest my case.

                    Oh, and billing comes from Sales. Sales emailed me on Thursday saying "sorry to hear that you are not happy with our service....", so they clearly did hear I was leaving. I guess they thought I was just kidding?

                    I think I feel my sense of humor returning.
                    Wendy Welton
                    Architect
                    past & future Alphaholic - deliberately falling off the wagon!

                    http://www.artformhomeplans.com/

                    Comment


                      #55
                      Re: The importance of Alpha aware hosting

                      I am also considering using 1&1 for server hosting. They are offering 3month free for their dynamic cloud server, and I am wonderiing what your experience is using 1&1. Does their system allow you to install the Alpha 5 App Server easily and publish easily?
                      I have setup my application server, hosted by 1&1. The FTP Server setup was easy, the firewall configuration is still a secret for my. But finally I got it.
                      At the firewall configuration, exception register, unchecked FTP, extended register network settings, check FTP Server, edit the setting of the FTP Server and check the user Name.
                      It took a few hours to find this options. I am not as server manager and we just play around with web databases.

                      I like the 1&1 service is reliable, not to expensive.

                      Cornelius

                      Comment


                        #56
                        Re: The importance of Alpha aware hosting

                        Wendy, thanks for sharing your story, so many lessons

                        Question... who is your new provider and how are things with them ?

                        Comment


                          #57
                          Re: The importance of Alpha aware hosting

                          David,

                          I'm now with Webjogger and very happy with them. I've had my testing sites there for about 7 months. They set things up nicely, with clear instructions for accessing FTP and the RDP, including separate FTP logins for each of 4 testings sites I had them set up for me. So for each one, I log in to it's FTP and see only those folders - helps prevent "grey moments". We recently had some slowdowns and asked them for recommendations. The consensus was to increase ram. There were other ideas bandied about, like disk space, bandwidth etc, and they said they thought I didn't need them. I appreciated that they didn't just make the sale, but instead gave an honest opinion. If they need to do some maintenance, they contact me first and make sure it's an acceptable time for my website to be down, even if only for 5 minutes. imnsho, that's how it should be done.
                          Wendy Welton
                          Architect
                          past & future Alphaholic - deliberately falling off the wagon!

                          http://www.artformhomeplans.com/

                          Comment


                            #58
                            Re: The importance of Alpha aware hosting

                            Originally posted by Steve Wood View Post
                            Non Alpha-aware hosts are either ISS or Apache, hardly anything else exist as far as they are aware.
                            I use Leaseweb and their servers(win) has just operaiting system installed. So if you need to have IIS(hope soon also with Alpha) you have to install it.
                            Leaseweb is for companies and if you want to have support you must pay it (and lot). But with cloud servers you really don't need any support. Leaseweb operates also in USA.

                            Comment

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