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 run an online adult website, an email through this company. Zero communication to give future warning of upcoming repairs or any sort of alternate email advisories on damages from natural causes……
Ye ha! thanks by the bucket load from one chapped reader.
*raises hand* – Also a victim of an incompetent server migration.
The nameservers have gone down three times in as many weeks. Our email and vpn is accessed through a subdomain, so when the nameservers go down, my entire company has no email and can’t access the server. Fantastic. On top of that, the last time it went down and I waited on hold for 40 minutes, I got some guy who matter-of-factly states, “Yes, the website is down because the nameservers are down.” When I asked him how long it would be down, he answered, “eh, probably 2-4 hours” in a tone as if I had asked him how often he goes fishing.
I’m switching to Godaddy this weekend, and will figure out someone else for a host. It’s absolutely ridiculous.
Another victim of an incompetent server migration, September 2009. I’m old school FrontPage user, use “forms” for receiving orders for my business, and the forms have not worked since, so I get no orders. And they can’t figure out why. Gee, they worked fine on the old server!
The name server was down. It took about 3 hours or more to fix. When the name server was back online, it still took several hours for the ftp servers to work. Their toll-free number wasn’t functioning, but I was able to contact their tech support through their regular phone number (954) 334-3449, although there wasn’t much they could tell me other than the name server was off-line.
I too lost a lot of money that day. Considering how much we pay to the Google (couple hundred throusand dollars a year), we paid dearly for clicks on dead links. Add to that frustrated customers who might have gone elsewhere (who knows) and I’m sure it was a considerable sum.
I did receive a month’s courtesy credit for the outage. I’m not sure how to proceed. Who knows how really reliable the next web host provider will be.
Overall, Valueweb doesn’t seem to have frequent outages, and you can’t argue that they don’t work as quickly as possible to bring the system back up. I’m concerned about the trouble of moving our website, the outage as the new IP address propagates, and the outages I might experience with the new entitity. No server will function fully 24/7 365.
VALUE WEB/HOSTWAY has cost me thousands of dollars in business. Their main server is now down. The tech support is horrible. Also someone seems to have hacked into my files on Value Web and put some malicious script in some of my pages. Value Web denies that it’s on their end but I know it’s not on my end. They are NO help at all in tracking down what happened. Tech support has no clue as to what they are talking about. I can’t talk to a supervisor and tech support supervisors I am told do not have phones. Customer service doesn’t care. All tech support is in Bulgaria. I’m changing hosts right away. Value Web is horrific!
What is going on???????? All of my sites are down and my email is down too. http://www.valueweb.com doesn’t work. When I try to call the number on the Hostway.com site, I go thru the voice system, only to get disconnected no matter what I try. I have had websites with Valueweb for over 10 years and never a problem until now. And this is a BIG problem!!!!!!!!!!!! Has anyone been able to contact them??????
I have been with Hostway since 2001. I recently upgraded to the Advanced plan to get more disc space. They completely took down my web site and email. It has taken now 9 days and my company still has no email. My web site is up, but email is key. Support is only barely sympathetic but seem to be aware that things have deteriorated and everything is just being added to a “ticket” that means nothing. It now is in the hands of the “developers” who apparently work behind a black curtain and are pretty slow. I have no idea where I am in the cue to getting this fixed, but these comments here don’t make me hopeful.
Once we get up I am going to switch to 1&1 Internet….anyone have experience with them?
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media
Yes, Hostway is indeed now outsourcing their calls to Bulgaria! Affinity was a great company who cared about their customers and when Hostway took over everything went down the drain! They are closing the fort Lauderdale office and those were the true people of affinity now are being laid off! So sad to see a great company like affinity and it’s employees taken downn! :(
Oh, I forgot to include that it has been an open issue for two weeks. All this after five years of impeccable service from the domestic version of ValueWeb. So much for globalization right?
Value web is destroying my business. I am a small video and film production company in upstate NY. I have been on the phone with tech support for Valueweb (in Bulgaria now???). They have destroyed my website, my email capability and now my clients (some top 100 companies) are not able to contact me. My ad in the yellow pages now leads people to what looks like a defunct business. Is there any recourse for this? My BP is through the roof. AGHGHGHGHG!!!!!!!!!
I started with this company two years ago. I had parked my domain name and 3 other domain names with them. To my surprise, they have charged me $35.00 for renewal each of the other 3 domain names. $35.00 for 1 year renewal?!!! Can you beleive that?!! So I called in to cancel the domain names, they cancelled them but REFUSED to refund me?!!! What type of crapy company is that?!! When it comes to Hostway, please stay AWAY!!!
Lucas J Roh (312) 573-1253
This company is the worst I have ever seen. I let them know I was trying to change registrar, and they deleted my whois info.. now I can’t do anything except renew the domain with them because my other registrar can’t send an email to the domain admin (b/c there is not any whois info) I try to edit on their site, and it gives me an error.
I’ve been trying for over 1 year to get a refund back on their crap hosting.. they said I had to talk to customer support.. I always get a voicemail, leave a message, and am never called back.
I would recommend trying your best to host your domain with a dirty sticky popsicle stick before ever going to hostway.
This is as close as I can get to a contact for Lucas Roh, CEO of Hostway. If you go to this website and search for his name it will allow you to send an automated email. I’m sure I won’t hear back as I’m experiencing the same difficulties you all have, no website or email access for three, going on four days now. No one answering phones, etc.
http://center.spoke.com/secure/search/person/advancedSearch.spoke
Good luck!
I have been a loyal customer with value web since May of 2005 initial there service was second to none however in 2006 something change maybe Affinity was bought out by Hostway not sure but the customer service went down the drain…. Call hold times from 10-20min EVERY call; lost emails no response to emails. Do yourself a favor if you are stating a new business and receive information on a ready web from hostway RUN the other way!!!
Anyone have email of executives at Valueweb, hostway. I am loosing so much business because of these people. I need to write to CEO………oh yeah the award winner who does not care about customers. Wish there was a news article on that. Please any hints on how to get hold the the big wigs, they are probably incompetent also, but what the hell, give that a shot.
Is anyone else having problems getting e-mail through ValueWeb? From about the time they “came up” again, almost every attempt to log into their server via Thunderbird and download e-mail on multiple accounts and domains has resulted in a “server could not be found” or “connection timed out” message. A call to tech support resulted in a smokescreen obviously devised on the theory their customers are idiots who don’t know how the Internet works. To be fair, he tossed out three equally dumb possibilities, all devoid of any problem at ValueWeb.
In my case, e-mail is even more important, on a day-to-day, minute-by-minute basis than whether my site is up or not because that is how my clients contact me.
This cannot continue. At the moment, I’m considering three new homes: DreamHost, SliceHost and WebFaction. Anybody have any real experience with any of those?
J.R.
Don’t choose Speedihost either, I have a single site with them and they can’t keep their mySQL running…
So every other day my site(which is wordpress and a Vbulletin) is down sending me emails about database problems… Sad but true…
So I will be moving from there too as soon as I get a little time…
Kim:)
Hi all,
My advice is to keep your hosting from anything that is related to hostway.
We have been their customers for a few years and I must say that something went really wrong in the past 2 years.
They offer no real customer support, and things that could have been solved in 5 min sometimes take 5 days or more to be solved.
Their mail server crash often, leaving you without emails for days.
Last time my website was down for over 10 days cause they couldn’t set miva merchant on my server (something that takes 10 min top)
We have decided to move to a new host and just regret we didn’t do that some years ago.
Keep away from hostway.
valueweb continues to have connectivity problems to ftp on a significant number of servers.
This is almost a week now that customers are out of service for site hosting ftp access.
I’ve used ValueWeb for almost 10 years without a single problem. All of a sudden, I get an email saying my site is down. It was down for around 24 hours. Finally, it goes back online…BUT…now I can’t log-onto the FTP server. So now I can’t edit my site whatsoever.
Tech support/customer service is a nightmare!
The tech support guys say “it’s an issue with the FTP server”. Don’t worry, we’ll leave this marked as an ‘open incident’ ” . Boy, that makes me feel alot better!
It’s been about 3-days now. Still can’t upload anything to my site. I’ve invested lots of money in a bulk mailing to direct people to a specific webpage. The mailing is just sitting here, because I can’t get that page online.
Any ideas?
Looks like valueweb is back up – longer today.
They sent out a funny ’cause of the outage’ email notice at 3:26am this morning (Friday). It mentions how they will be shutting down the system again at 2am Friday (yes, a notice about shutting down 1.5 hours before the email went out). Nice work :-|
What have we learned:
1. even the most redundant systems can fail when a coolant system breaks
2. if a coolant system can take down a whole host with 80k plus customers, their own web site and phone system, I can only imagine that we are all on a computer in someone’s rental apartment. It can get hot in Florida and I would put my air conditioner on top of my server too.
3. It’s a sign of very novice management who didn’t execute with the first step in fixing the problem – managing customer perceptions – not bypassing water soaked back up batteries. i.e. CUSTOMER SERVICE before technical fix. It’s amazing what we will all put up with if we are just communicated with. I personally would not have such a bad opinion and may even sympathize with them if I was involved more truthfully with the problem and the progress toward solution. At least I could have given my customers honest and more accurate information about the future and progress.
– still moving customers to a new host because –
Primary reasons to leave valueweb:
1. Complete lack of customer service – i can’t believe i was actually hung up on after waiting an hour on hold. I spend over $10k per year with those monkeys.
2. Inability to handle disaster scenarios in both people management and technical management.
3. Proof of network infrastructure beyond capacity to handle current customer base during high traffic periods.
4. Placing an unstable coolant system near a server room.
Mine is not up yet. It was offline from Tuesday afternoon, back online for a few hours, and it’s been off since Wednesday afternoon. I get a “page cannot be displayed” and “unable to connect”. This is the first time in over five years my site has been down for more than a few minutes.
This morning I called every number I could, and finally reached someone in the web design dept. He told me there was a major accident, no one’s fault, couldn’t be helped, etc. I asked him if it was due to Hostway and he said no. But what else could he say? This doesn’t make sense. They should have better back up for “accidents”.
Well, three days and no website. I spent the last day uploading my valueweb sites to startlogic (probably not much better) and I am waiting for dns to probagate. Sorry about spelling. Funny, my site just started showing on the first page of google results the day that the website went down. my forms do not work now and I need to rework the cgi scripts. My shopping cart with hundreds of items was on the valueweb server as webstore.valueweb and I do not know how to fix that problem. I have been with valueweb for many years…where is the emergency backup and 99% uptime???
I noticed HTMLHelp.com is up–are they just taking this one server at a time? I’m getting a “server not found” error message when I try to get into my site–is that the error message all of you are getting?
Would it help if we ALL called corporate headquarters in Australia to complain?
Since commenting, have any of your sites come up this evening? My customers are emailing me, asking me if I am still in business…
I’m completely disgruntled.
Is it even possible to move your web sites when you cannot get hold of the hosting company to do that??
I’ve been with this company (mostly happy) for about 7 years. They have now managed to lose me (and all my web sites) within 3 days–it isn’t so much the outage (which is bad enough on its own) but the fact that THEY DO NOT COMMUNICATE OR ANSWER THEIR PHONES for something that is effecting my livelihood and business.