I know there are quite a few regular HTMLHelp.com users that frequent the blog here, so I just wanted to provide an update on the unbelievably pathetic service we are currently receiving from ValueWeb, aka Hostway.
We were notified about a month ago via e-mail that ValueWeb intended to physically take our two servers and move them to another data center about two hours away. But they claimed:
“We plan to have the back up service back online by 8pm EDT on July 28th.”
As worrisome as this sounded, we decided to stick it out with them because they estimated that the outage would be 12-15 hours. The amount of time it would take to migrate to another provider would have been more than this, so I suppose it basically just wasn’t going to be a big enough deal to change.
Flash forward to this weekend, and it’s looking like maybe we should have jumped ship. HTMLHelp.com has been down for more than two days – going on three.
Going on our third day of outage, the worst thing is that the people from Hostway – ValueWeb have gone completely silent. They are not answering their technical support number, nor are they replying to e-mail. In addition to this, they are only sporadically updating their phone recordings – and they have not sent a single update e-mail during the entire event.
Oh, and we aren’t the only ones. There are hundreds (possibly thousands) of other affected customers. There is even a whole thread about it on the ValueWeb forums here – which they’ll probably come along and delete as soon as they get a clue about it. People have been told that there are between 1,300-3,000 affected servers – of which two run HTMLHelp.com.
It is also comical that their Server Status tool is reporting that there are no outages!
Now, I don’t know how they intend to handle this, but their SLAs for hardware issues claim they’ll basically credit you 10% of your monthly fee for every hour of outage beyond 2 – up to one month’s fees. So at this point they owe us for an entire month, but in order to get the refund you have to report it on this Web site… which – yep, you guessed it – is down!
Oh, and their support Web site, http://support.valueweb.net/, also down.
EDIT: Here is some contact information from Hoovers for those who need it:
| Lucas Roh President and CEO |
John Lee VP Global Marketing |
Ho Lee Dir. Product Mgmt |
Donald Eldert CFO |
Bruce Fortelka Controller |
Hostway Corporation
1 N. State St.
Ste. 1200
Chicago IL 60602
United States
Main Phone: 312-236-2125
Main Fax: 312-236-1958
I hope this gets resolved soon, John. I’m kind of missing the opportunities I’m having to both learn and teach that I’ve had with HTMLHelp.com.
Yeah Peter. Sorry about that.:-(
All of the WDG members have been stressing about this for the last couple of days and no one is at all happy.
The good news is that the Blog and the Forums server now appears to be back up. Just waiting for the main site now.
I have to go get some sleep, so I’m crossing my fingers that it’s up by morning.
Take care,
John
My ValueWeb server went down 10 a.m. Thursday, though the migration wasn’t to begin until 8 p.m. Friday. It’s still down, at 5 a.m. (Pacific Time) Monday – nearly four days outage! And as the prior comment indicates, the technical support line just gives a recording, an indication of how many others are likewise down, and instructs those impacted to fill out a “trouble ticket” online. Last night, they gave the wrong URL for the trouble ticket, apparently to reduce the number they’d receive. Absolutely the most dismal service I could imagine.
Please don’t forget to mention that GATE.COM is also involved in this terribble MESS, thousands of servers from GATE are also down after 80 hours of waiting..
Please everyone know that VALUEWEB and GATE.com have BOTH been offline for over 60+ hours. They were bough by HOSTWAY…this is a WARNING for anyone thinking about Hostway dedicated Servers. STAY AWAY FROM THESE THREE (really just one now) COMPANIES!
Re: Eddie’s comment – I’ll take your word on the fact that Hostway, the acquiring company of ValueWeb and Gate.com, is bad news. I’ve had my server with ValueWeb for years – pay $59 a month for dedicated hosting. Anyone have any suggestions of a good place to take my business to once these idiots resolve this problem (or possibly BEFORE they get it together)?? Thanks!
John,
I myself am not too sure about where to go, but I can tell you that I’m running One Man’s Blog on a dedicated server at 1and1.com and have had no major complaints. I do have an affiliate link for them here in case you want to check them out. Sometimes I think they give special offers if you use that link but I’m not entirely certain.
The only problem is that if you opt for the Core Linux server they are running Fedora 4 and this OS is nearing end of life so some people don’t want to run it. However, it has been working great for me for years now so I have no problem with it.
If other people have suggestions I’m all ears. At this point I would even consider offers from hosting providers that would be willing to set HTMLHelp up on a system with more fault tolerance in exchange for a link on the site. I’ve had MANY offers over the years but never took anyone up on it though. It would have to be a really nice hosted solution with load balancing and probably multiple data centers. Otherwise, hosting is cheap, and access to 30 Million Web authors per year ain’t! ;-)
John
As of 9.41am 31 July, http://htmlhelp.com/ and no sub-domain resolves. Mind you, I’m in Australia – but still we’re not exactly third world out here, so who knows what’s going on.
It has just sunk in after getting multiple reports from people that although our second server is running, it is not accessible to most people. I assume it is a DNS issue because if you go to http://207.36.232.161/ I believe you will reach the forums.
I also just called into the help desk for an another excruciatingly long time only to be told that it could be another 24-48 hours. The guy I talked to was obviously a lackey and was just touting the company line. You could tell that they have been beaten up so badly over the last couple of days that they just didn’t care what you say to them (not that I was abusive).
He did not care in the least that HTMLHelp serves tens of thousands of Web developers a day, in fact he told me that they are not prioritizing the order in which they bring servers on line. “We don’t care if a server gets 1 or 100,000 hits a day, they are all equally important to us.”
I read their behavior two ways:
Either way, this is a company that is hurting very, very badly and is going to be at extreme risk of being able to serve hosting clients for the near future.
John
htmlhelp.com is up and running for me, hope it’s the same with everyone else!