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
We’ve been using very reliable and inexpensive hosting through our godaddy affiliate account for a little over a year. We’ve migrated customers and started new customers on different hosting options since inception. Unfortunately our own web sites and a significant number of older customers are still on no-Value-no-Web (which by the way is down again as I write this almost 48 hours later).
You can set yourself up on a dedicated with a number of ip’s where you can better control multiple accounts for a lower cost. The machines and support are good. The interface controls are intuitive too.
it’s 5pm EST and looks like (no) value (no) web is down again. They were up for a couple hours.
I guess that they can’t handle it when people use the internet.
Maybe there new motto should be “hosting for when nobody is on the internet and the best customer service when nobody needs it …”
The final proof of ValueWeb’s incompetence and indifference is the fact that they don’t post anything on their System Status Update page ( http://tinyurl.com/6p5ocs ). That would be so easy for them to do. It would take only seconds for them to tell us what is going on and approximately when they expect to have the problem solved. Then many of us would try to be patient. But they cannot be bothered.
We’re dealing with a real garbage can outfit. (P.S. Note that that System Status page hasn’t been updated since April. And it doesn’t note the YEAR . . .)
I am so disapointed in Value Web, this has been going on for almost 3 days now and I have lost so much business and money. I would like to swtch to another provider that is reliable and affordable, any suggestions???
Just Googled Media Temple and found a flood of complaints – many this month – very similar to those about ValueWeb. Also checked out several others and found two with few complaints and several recommendations – WebFaction and SliceHost. Lots of differences between the two (and I still don’t understand what the heck a “slice” is), but would love to hear any comments on them from anyone here. Neither appears on any of the most common “top sites” lists, but one of those has LunarPages in its top position and a quick Google will find a ton of complaints about them. After almost 15 years, finding a decent host that remains decent over time is no easier than it ever was.
J.R.
I’m convinced that valueweb really doesn’t care.
I’m also convinced that they cannot fix the problem.
They obviously don’t care about the loss in revenue that will occur now.
BTW – the phone message continues to say all systems are normal. They must be referring to their own web site which they’ve diligently kept alive but failed to notify customers on.
Is it really possible to work so hard to gain so many customers and build a brand, just to let it all go away in 48 hours?
I’m guessing this is the current formula:
Hostway management really doesn’t care + Valueweb legacy management is holding hostage solutions + complete lack of technical infrastructure for what they offer (false advertising) + complete lack of technical staffing + dismal customer service and management = knot in my stomach facing my upset customers and the mountain of work I have to do to move all my customers.
… fast forward a 36 months … repeat the above, just change the business names.
OMG..
Valueweb is down again…….
Just took a look at MediaTemple.net Grid-Service and was duly impressed, especially since it would cost less for a lot more hosting than I’m currently paying ValueWeb – or DreamHost, where I have been intending to move my ValueWeb-hosted sites. But what their sales page says and what they actually deliver can be two distinctly different things (as we’ve all learned the hard way). Does anyone have any real experience with these guys?
Thanks,
J.R.
Valueweb continues to be out today Thursday May 29 2008 at 11:30am EST. This has been going on since Tuesday evening. I have 40 customer sites on them and they all continue to be dead. I have some of my most coveted customers now questioning our brand. Thanks for screwing us valueweb.
Valueweb has acted in the worst possible way during this. Nothing on their web site, the worst customer service, complete lack of technical capability, and has shown that they absolutely cannot provide any hosting or customer service. Their lack of disaster preparedness goes all the way through to affinity and hostway. Customer service either doesn’t answer or hangs up on you. They made the time to keep their own site up after the outage took down their site and phone systems but continue to be non-existent no the customer service and technical front.
Valueweb has cost me business, thousands of dollars, they created brand damage, have had a major effect on search engine rank, missed crawls, trickle down anger by our customers and haven’t even fixed anything.
They currently claim all systems are normal yet I still have 40 sites down.
This is unbelievable. Who’s running things down there in Florida?
It’s going to suck, but I have to jump ship. I cannot support the lack of customer value and lack of technical capabilities shown by valueweb affinity hostway.
I had first Affinity, changed to Value Web, for 8 years, with never a problem. Now they are bought by Hostway (I cringed when I heard that, but it was OK for a couple of weeks.); now they have been down for more than 24 hours! I just called their tech support, put it on speaker phone; they did finally answer. I asked the guy when they were going to have this problem fixed. At first, he acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. When I explained to him that their website was down and had been for 24 hours, he asked, “What do you mean, just exactly what is the problem?” He said the problem was a power failure and a fire. I said, “I don’t believe it; they just told you to say that, the problem was caused by Hostway trying to cut corners.” He said it should be up by midnight.
P.S. to my comment above:
I just noticed that ValueWeb’s “System Status” page hasn’t been updated since April 23. Isn’t that about the time that Hostway acquired ValueWeb??
What else do we need to know?
I have almost 1,100 pages on ValueWeb. ALL pages died last (Tuesday) night, along with my email. The pages were back up this morning, but now they’re off again. All of them. A few emails finally came through, but now they’re blocked again. No one can write me to ask what’s going on, so they’re starting to telephone. As for ValueWeb, all ITS phone lines are dead. What annoys me more than anything is that their “System Status” page says that ALL IS NORMAL! If this is normal, then I’m looking for another host tomorrow morning.
Like you, I still have one website hosted with ValueWeb. They acquired my former Hosting Provider about 10 years ago. Since then, a prior server outage caused them to lose all my data. Fortunately I had everything backed up. Many of the hundreds of other customers affected did not. About 2 years ago, another server outage caused me to lose all my back email. Yesterday my website went down for almost a full day (not for the first time, but it appeared to be massive as even their own website was down). Today my website is back up and running, but my email service has been down for several hours. I suspect this has something to do with their merging their data-center with Hostway, since their recent acquisition. I currently own several websites hosted by a variety of different hosts. I only have one left over at ValueWeb. Nothing but procrastination has kept me from consolidating them. Screw them all, I’m going to move everything over to a Grid-Service plan with Media Temple.
Any other disgruntled ValueWeb or Hostway customers feel the same?
Here’s the link to the plan I’m looking at:
MediaTemple.net – Grid-Service
Make that both websites down.
J.R.
Well, that recovery didn’t last long. All e-mail accounts down again (including via Webmail), along with one of the two domains I still have with Valueweb.
At least they’re consistent.
J.R.
Folks,
I’m very sorry to hear about the recent outage again. I’m not sure if you guys are aware, but I’m now the CMO for Layered Technologies (http://layeredtech.com). If you need to make a move feel free to contact me and I’ll put you in touch with one of our sales guys who can get you set up with a server usually in 24 hours or less. I’ll try to expedite any for people whose servers are currently down if you just let me know.
Alternatively, drop an e-mail to sales@layeredtech.com and tell them that you are one of my readers and what the situation is and I’ll make sure the team is sensitive to the time critical nature of the requests.
Good luck to all,
John
I am disappointed in Hostway’s sluggish response to customer concerns, as well as their “circle the wagons” attitude when it comes to communicating with their customers. I’ve had several client’s over on 1and1 and have had no major problems. Their customer service & tech support is always just a phone call away.
Let me change that. I looked and anything uploaded for the past 3 YEARS is gone!
ONE of my site’s have come back out of 3. You better check that ANYTHING you uploaded into it for the past 4 weeks is there. Mine has come back with things missing, which oddly are things I uploaded or changed in the past 4 weeks. Also if you have any CGI That might have been compromised. Hostway emailed me back an hour ago after 9 hours, telling me now I have access. To something that seems was only backed up over a MONTH ago!!!
My site just came back online :knock wood:. I’m on the east coast in the U.S.
Still, this put the fear of God in me. I can not afford to lose even one day’s worth of business. Since I know Hostway had a similar problem last year I don’t think I can trust them anymore. I’ve spent the past two hours looking at alternative hosts.
I lost a day of business, it is nearly 3 PM here in South East Asia, still down !!! No pop no site….does someone has any news ?? I guess all emails to me aro going back to senders as if I am out of business….if any news pls…advise, thanks
I just got through at 11:15pm PST on 800-934-6788 to a recording made at 1am EST. It said they had network outages and expected to have it fixed in an hour or two. Along with the usual apologies…
Are you kidding 16 hours – well thats what it seems like, they do have a recording that now says they should be up in 30 to 60 minutes by 2am EST, lets hope, and thankfully I’m in Honolulu so maybe this will all blow over before tomorrow morning or else we won’t have anywhere to report to!
I hear this has been happening for 16 hours so far
I stumbled across this post while trying to figure out while my site & email weren’t working… this is the first outage that’s affected my business and the first I’ve been aware of… thanks for the reference to the refund site I’ll see what happens – this is really helpful because ALL of my clients are hosted by ValueWeb so a switch over will be a big task to undertake. But thanks for all the posts because now I have some serious considering to do.
Valueweb is down since hours, my site is down, no pop since hours and hours, this is incredible !!!!
Well I’m in the same boat too..found out about 5 hours ago. My site was up for me just two hours before that. I knew Valueweb had become Hostway in early May. But I never had problems until today!
the entrance page to my site was up for a few minutes about an hour ago and now it’s gone again. It kept coming up and disappearing.
I’m going to have to leave them after ten years!
I guess I’m in the same boat as everyone else. Who’s leading the pack in reliable, affordable basic hosting services now?
We have been totally down all afternoon too, way into this evening. NO way to contact them. This is seriously disconcerting–have they gone out of business???
I have a large web store with a few, oh, thousand items for sale. This is NOT OK.
We loved Valueweb back when it was…well…Valueweb. Used to be excellent customer service and very little down time. I think after this I’m going to have to move.
this hosting service valueweb are they still in business. The timing can not be worse, 3 newspaper articles on our startup and our website is down, people must think that my company is a joke, while the problem is valueweb. Hope someday I get value from this web.
All three of my sites and POP email is down…no way to get in touch with them.
Anyone have any suggestions for a new hosting company?
My company’s site and all of my customer’s sites are down. No POP email either. No way to get through to tech support. These guys are a joke. Stay away from Hostway.
No other option left than to select another supplier
This is totally hopeless service.
Purely RUDE treatment of paying clients.
http://www.cheap-web-hosting-info.com/compare_plans.php
There are lots of other options.
So far as I can tell, all phone lines and all ValueWeb sites (.com and .net) are down. At least, they aren’t answering the phones, but if they are VoIP, of course, they probably went down with everything else.
And since I keep failing to move my two primary business accounts somewhere else, I’m out of business until they come back. Unless they’ve taken the midnight train to Georgia or something.
At the very least, they should put a recording up explaining what is going on. This all-out silence is, to say the least, disconcerting.
Does anyone HAVE their phone number(s). I have time to let it reing forever for the problems I have……no email…website(s) all down except one (odd that).
I just learned that our email isn’t working either. Talk about frustrating. No one answers the Valueweb support line and all of their web sites seem to be down. Arrrrrrgh!
Looks like the above stories are coming to pass again as I type. No send or receive of my e-mail nor my website “available” – nor are any Valueweb, or Affinity sites available and their phones just ring off the hook… I would ask why they haven’t sent an e-mail, but I couldn’t receive it anyway! This is VERY disturbing!!
Hostway was once a very fantastic place to host a website. The management of this company, however, has lost touch with their customers needs. Management has started a downward spiral into the muck they created for them selves, and only time will tell if there is anything worth saving when the dog and pony show is done. Bigger is not better if you can’t scale your business to match the needs of your growing customer base. Hostways’ suport has gone from fantastic to non-existant in a very short period of time. If you take a piece of poop and copy it all over the US, Asia, and Europe, its still a pice of poop. Buyer beware, things will only get worse from here.
I am still receiving errors to this day. WORST WEB HOSTING COMPANY EVER! Have finally snapped and changed provider. Does nothing work properly nowadays or is everyone just out for your money??!! I am seriously p*ssed off with this company.
Just writing to give an update. I had hundreds of websites hosted with Gate (affinity, valueweb, insert other names here) and it was just too much to move during the outage so we waited. 5 days later it came back on. I had allready lost 10+ customers. Lots of money gone. All Gate.com did for me was give me one free month. I cant move my sites off there fast enough. I’ve got most moved already. Only a handful remaining. I moved to Mosso.com. Everyone there has been Super friendly and nice. No Joke you can get through on the phone in UNDER 2 minutes. Valueweb takes (for dedicated support) over 20 MINUTES!!!
So for anyone reading this blog thinking about going with Valueweb , Affinity , Gate or even Hostway (all the same company) give yourself a break and find a real company that actually cares about it’s clients.
PS. Valueweb was so ashamed of their outage they removed their forum completely because of all the negative comments. HAHA.
PPS. Costco and Network Solutions both rely on Valueweb for hosting so dont use them either.
Personally, I think hostway.com/domainpeople.com has steal my domain name from me. I have host my domain with them for 5 years, without any notification, one day, I just find the name is register by someone else under lease domainpeople(hostway’s child company).
I am going to sue hostway for their wrong behavior, and I am sure, I was not the victim alone. If anyone experience similar problem from them would you email me at yli_j@yahoo.com?
Thanks
Well…looks like any form of customer support from Valueweb/Affinity/Gate is gone. They no longer answer their phones. The emails never get answered. And the outages keep coming. I dont get it. I’m STILL waiting for my block of IP’s to be routed from the move to Tampa. UNREAL.
Stay far away from Hostway. They have given up on customer service.
NOTE: Valueweb took down the support forum. Interesting isnt it? Guess they REALLY wanted to hide that 60 page thread about the Tampa move FIASCO.
Yes, Hostway are down again today and i get this email from support:
We are currently experiencing some peering problems with one of our network connectivity providers.
Our network engineers are currently working on the issue however we have no current estimated time of fix.
We can only apologise about the inconvenience this may be causing you and we expect a speedy resolution.
We appreciate your patience while we deal with this issue.
I have a number of sites with them and my clients get annoyed at me… have no control over this. Called our head office to talk to them but response is very poor… they cant even give a time estimate. The volume of business my clients have lost it un thinkable. Also I will loose creadibility.
Ahhhh
Another outage for me as well…oh and no email message! Funny how they can send you junk to get more money but no outage notices. I had been recommending them as a “reliable” host. Not the best and not the worst….. I may have to re-evaluate my position.
It is another outage at hostway today the 22nd of Aug. Our sites rely on them to do business and we are totally stuck with no one to ask for help. None of their websites looks to be up. What are they upto now ?
Very interesting and sadly appropriate blog entry. As of this writing, we are 1:45 into a complete outage; our site, the hostway help site and our Plesk control panel. I have been on hold for tech support for about 20 minutes. Ouch!
this doesn’t make it any better, but Hostway in general at that time was a mess internally–I happened to know that about half their engineering staff up and left, including some of their senior staff. A lot of their resources went to executing their last merger, and the firm was never good in countering the rate of attrition of staff. It’s just a very sad time for them in general. Perhaps later they’ll wind up near the top, but for now, my advice would be to find a new host as soon as possible.
What was the end result here?
Did the host cough up the 10% off per hour offline?
That would at the end of this mess have been months worth of hosting… I am sure everybody would rather have wanted their host to saty up in the first place, but I am still curious about this.
I have similar problems with the local Internet provider here, the owner simply stopped answering my emails, and Internet here is still not up to speed May when the problems started. I basically have to stay up all night and work while everybody else are sleeping :( This particular provider sent out an email promising that nobody should pay for their connection until full service was restored. Despite that he is still billing us.
We have no other options for Internet where I live right now, which is now forcing us to move. God I hate moving…
Kim:)
They are still billing me!!!
Anyone interested in starting a class action suit or anything. I spent a lot to get my server built up and now I have to leave…Lots of wasted time and money.
SOOOOO ANGRY
Mr Rudy,
Sorry you were having problems with that. If you select the link up in the Subscribe area that says “RSS” it allows you to subscribe… but now that you mention it I don’t know why I never had the Feedburner image be a link itsself! :-)
So because of your comment I fixed the problem and now if you just click on Feedburner it will pop up the page to let you add it!
Thanks for the comment!
John
I can’t add your feed to Feedburner. How I do this?
Typical Hostway. I had an account with them, one of their employees went into the system and deleted my account without my consent. I was furious so I moved everything to another hosting company right away (despite I lost all my web files and e-mail, luckily, I still had 85% of the web site on my local drive). They were not able to provide the reason or consequence of their action, nor did the support staff send me any e-mail like they promised they would on the phone, I would not trust Hostway, and would recommend anyone to stay away from them if you are serious about your business. My web site was down for a week due to this incident and lost couple projects.
One of my clients’ server at Hostway was down for 2 days about a month ago, they said they had an “internal error” but was not able to provide any details. Her IP was blocked by some major web sites and was not able to send e-mail. Hostway’s support staff said it’s a known issue with their mail servers (probably some other people were using their servers to spam). After 2 weeks, the situation was still not resolved, my client lost 4 cases because all the e-mail was returned to her, which cost her thousands of dollars.
These complaints here about their outage and support are nothing new, but sadly that’s the way they treat their customers. There are a lot more better web hosting companies out there, I would just stay away from Hostway.
Is there a place online to see the status of trouble tickets? I assume I’m still in line, but probably I’m not!
Now, they have just deleted again my two tickets saying that the issues are solved.
My two servers are still DOWN and I am back to end of line, waiting for them to stop joking around and see if they will do some grown-up job.
Hi John (if this is the same John) – I emailed you around 11am EST as I was out of office and then on a conference call. I apologize for the delay, but it seems from your post that you’re back online. Congrats!
Hi John P. – Valid point you bring up re: the dedicated/managed servers as we focus on providing high availability in our co-location infrastructure for mostly client-owned gear. We do, however, have a shared environment (website/DB). We can also create a solution that is customized for someone’s needs. I guess it boils down to understanding what one’s requirements are and making sure we’re a good fit so we can help with a quick turnaround time…I do appreciate the opportunity to post on this forum and will do my best to assist those that I can. Thanks, Carol (carol@esnet.com)
FYI eWeek quoted you both of the articles John linked to above.
Server was up at about 9pm Saturday. Went down again Monday/Tuesday and has not come back. Can ping the server, but none of the services are responding and none of my customers can get to their websites. I can’t even get these guys to do a reboot and they DO NOT answer the phone. I called at 2am this morning and left my speaker phone on. The tech support guy answered sometime after 6am and said communication with HostWay is 1 way. What a bunch of BS! What’s really going on??
Valueweb used to be decent but I am jumping ship if my server ever comes back so I can get the latest data. Emailed the Carol lady but she didn’t respond. So now HostGator has my new server up and running. What’s with the support links on their site not working?
Mine has been back up a day or two….
Hey bazooka, How can I get in touch with you to assist in your suit? I’m now in Day 8 (they took my box down two days before the migration & it’s still not up)? EWeek has gotten ahold of the story – http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2165290,00.asp & http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2165828,00.asp
We had multiple boxes go down in the outage.
the most important ones are still not back up.
We have been calling for days, holding hours on end and have not been able to talk to a dedicated support person.
We are currently preparing a 1st class lawsuit against valueweb and hostway for their negligence.
Will keep you posted.
both my boxes are back as of a couple of hours ago.
Marcello – I guess it’s you, me and 48 others! ;-) I’m still waiting to hear back from that gal from esnet. After all this waiting (one week for me) I hate to jump ship just as they’re about to bring up my server, but I am losing confidence in these jokers. Have you heard any more about how we go about getting some credit from ValueWeb for the extended outage, and what that credit will be?
Now, they tell around 50 server are down…
Is everybody here up and running?
Let me know if I am the lucky guy among the 50’s.
Liar, liar! Shame on them.
Well, I for one emailed Carol at esnet to make sure she could really offer a dedicated, managed server up to the specs I had at ValueWeb, for the $59/mo. I pay, with all the rest she offered (first month free, no installation fee, etc.). I figure better to start with a whole new configured server, upload everything & change the domains over to their DNS server, rather than wait on these folks at ValueWeb to get their act together. After one solid week of waiting, and an unreturned fax to the Hostway CEO (some 38-year-old hot shot from Hong Kong who evidently doesn’t feel the need to answer his mail), I have lost confidence in ValueWeb. Who knows how long I’ll wait until my server’s back, and who knows how long they’ll be able to keep their network functioning (since clearly they’re having network problems too). Moreover, I expect Hostway to eventually jack my monthly fees, so I have little to gain by staying if “E Solutions Corp” (esnet) is a decent provider, and willing to offer such a fair package to get me aboard. It’s smart of them to do – I used ValueWeb for more than four years running without causing them any headaches (or vice versa)! Anyone have any experience with esnet??
I believe they are crazy!!!
After I called them this morning and tell that I had 5 tickets open waiting for them to resolve, they told me not to open more tickets. Now, I visited the support panel and they deleted some of those and left just one. I have 2 servers down. And just one ticket…
As we say here: P*** QUE PARIU! CAR*LHO!!! :((
Let’s when this will get an end!!!
Carol,
That is a very generous offer, and I am sure everyone will appreciate it.
The only issue may be that many people are on managed servers so I doubt ValueWeb will allow the hardware to leave. :-( On one hand this complicates issues because it means you can just pick up and plug in servers. On the other hand it simplifys matters for people who had backups of their servers because you could simply provision a box and they could upload stuff to it.
John
Hello, everyone. I checked with John P. about posting this information – E Solutions Corp. (http://www.esnet.com) is located in Tampa only a few blocks from Hostway/ValueWeb. Our data centers are home to a variety of clients including 13 MLB teams, web dev & hosting providers, ecommerce sites, VoIP companies, etc…and with proper authorization, our engineers can easily retrieve your servers.
Our CEO has agreed to match your current Hostway/ValueWeb package, waive installation fees, as well as give you the first month of service free. Send me a note at carol@esnet.com or call our support center 24x7x365 at 813-301-2620 if you still need help getting your systems back online. FYI – We only provide commercial hosting: no spamming, gambling or pornography sites.
Good Luck! Carol
In another 5 hours, it will have been SEVEN days downtime for me. They announced in an email my IP address would be changed, but when I phoned tech support told me I wasn’t actually among those whose changed my IP address would be changed. Then last Thursday morning I went down & was told when I finally got through that in fact at the last minute it was decided I WOULD have to have my IP address changed – BUT they didn’t know what the new address was! A trouble ticket was filled out & 24 hours later they said it was resolved, but still no IP address, or server response. Then the “migration” began. I’ve faxed the CEO of Hostway, I’ve talked to tech support (after hours of waiting) probably a dozen times – and they’ve been very nice (usually). But the tech support person who posted here is full of BS – there’s no excuse for 5-7 days of downtime on a planned “12 hour” outage. By the way, the recording on tech support last night said they were down to “less than 100” servers down with hardware problems at present. Don’t know whether to believe that, though . . .
Funny, I’ve called Valueweb at least twice a day for the last four days and even left my callback number only to be called back by the automated system and left on hold for more than two hours before hanging up!
I find it hard to believe that so many servers would all have hardware failure at the same time! I live in the mid-west and even with our thunderstorms and routine electrical storms I have never lost more than one of my machines from the dozen in my office. Even then, it has only been the power supplies and ups’s.
I suspect that someone in the Valueweb organization did not plan this move correctly. I was told that my client’s server would be down for 12 -15 hours. It has been over 120 hours and still no human contact! Nothing!
I am loosing money! My client is loosing money! And no one is giving any answers!!!!
Valueweb’s message on the phone says that only 100 servers are still down. However, I have a list of IPs that I scripted a ping on and found many more than that still off line.
Valueweb has effectively closed hundreds, if not thousands of business for what is now five days! And no-one seems to be talking to the proprietors!!!!
I can understand needing the man power for the first day to complete repairs. But Valueweb should have been contacting your customers after that.
I also do not understand WHY I HAVE TO SUBMIT A SUPPORT TICKET for you to FIX what VALUEWEB BROKE! The only reason I can see for this is that Valueweb have SOOO MANY ISSUES THAT YOU YOURSELVES DON”T KNOW WHAT IS BROKE AND WHAT ISN”T!!!!
Hello – I’m glad that you stopped by and shared a little more information. I am quite certain that you guys are all doing everything you can, and I’m glad to hear that you are now answering calls, but I tried calling in many times over the past few days and after waiting over half an hour each time abandoned the calls. I was only able to get through twice, and neither time was of any benefit whatsoever.
Now, when you talk about people who did not read their e-mails I don’t know what you are talking about. If you are saying that some people did not know that the migration was even going to occur then that is obviously a bad thing, but your message seems to imply that your clients are at fault for not being aware of this. Frankly I’ve never heard of of a wholesale movement of this sort – and I guarantee I’ve been involved with hosting longer than anyone you’ve got working there. So I wouldn’t blame clients for not expecting this.
But more importantly, people could probably forgive the company for a planned outage if they were later shown that notification had been sent – but this has gone way, way, way beyond anything justifyable. As an example not only was HTMLHelp.com down for over 3 days, our second server which is running our Forums keeps going up and down even to this day. That makes the outage over 5 days old now.
Now, if Hostway doesn’t care to make HTMLHelp.com a priority – and we have tens of thousands of Web develpers per day – then why should we believe that anyone there is actually making progress? Frankly I’m sick of hearing excuses and just want to see HTMLHelp’s two servers stabilize.
John
Don’t know what’s up with the site now, but the forums page hangs at the banner – the blog sub-domain won’t even resolve. At least htmlhelp.com itself works. That’s something, I guess.
I can assure you all, as I am a technical support rep for ValueWeb, that we are answering the calls. Considering that we have roughly 4,000 dedicated servers,we are doing the best we can to answer all the calls we are receiving from the people who did not read their emails about this issue to begin with. We have brought many of our shared technical support reps in to answer as many calls as we can to make sure that we do get these calls answered. If you call the number for Hostway, as mentioned in this post, you will not get much help as that is Hostways Chicago number and ValueWeb is part of Affinity, a company in South Florida, recently purchased by Hostway. Hostway contact information will not help people in any way.
Sorry to see that you are faced with major problems not of your own making. Keep up the spirits. You will come back stronger than ever.
I finally managed to talk to someone at ValueWeb. I chose Customer Service instead of Technical Support and actually got some info. They told me my server was one that experienced hardware failure, but it wasn’t one of the many who had hard drive failure. He assured me my data was still intact, but it was likely a power source or some other hardware that had failed. He hinted that there were many who had various types of hardware failure including hard drive failure.
Gee, and I thought it was all settled for, yesterday!
I’ll keep an eye on this page for news.
In the meantime, don’t loose your nerves, John. And good luck to all who suffers from it.
Frederiek
(htmlhelp member)
Our server is still down and has been down since Friday night. We haven’t gotten any useful information on when this nightmare will end. I thought it was bad enough at 12-15 hours. Now it has been four whole days. ValueWeb and Hostway should go out of business for treating customers this way.
Frederiek,
Thanks for letting me know the forums are down again. We are not yet migrating because Liam needs to make the time to do that and we had thought that we were out of the woods when the server came up the other day. :-(
I will let everyone know via both the forums and the blog when we are planning to migrate to another data center, but in the meantime we just need to wait for Hostway to get us back up.
I will call in again and open another trouble ticket… not that I believe that will do us any good.
John
Perhaps I am missing it but I thought this would make news across the net. I did a google search to see how many other sites were writing about this outage and so for OMB was the only one. I would think something like this would get greater attention. In fact on digg.com OMB has the most diggs on this issue and it is only 30. I would suggest that if you have been affected by this make sure this article has been dugg, reddit, etc. and pass this along to other companies you know have been equally affected.
I put my papers in yesterday. Most of the relocated servers are flatlining and EVERYONE is standing around wondering what to do about it. This is going to to on for days/weeks more.
Server migraine
I have (I believe so) two dedicated servers at ValueWeb and the service they used to provide was very good (until now).
10 days before the migration, I got a new server from m5hosting.
Then, I moved everything very important to them. But I left tens of clients hosted on my old servers, because the outage was suppost to be only 12-15h… Now I don’t know if I wait a “little” bot more. I haven’t made backup of everything on one of the servers. And, ironically, that server is up (ping responding) but I have no access to any port.
That means that they have (part of) the network running, but the servers are not.
I really hope this nightmare ends today.
Very shitty. We are still down too. Both of our servers have been up/down from the beginning. Even though service has been great up to this point, I’m really getting fed up. I wonder how many businesses are losing revenue over this crap.
The forum is down again?! What’s up? Or are you migrating?
Server migrations are never easy as we’ve been through a couple migrations ourselves in the past year and a bit. I feel for both customers and the vendor. But, it is a basic responsibility to be active on forums, and accessible by phone and email during these times to ensure customers get status reports during the scheduled downtime. From our experience, it puts customers at ease and gives them a level of transparency that is somewhat comforting. I expect the same from the people I do business with, as I’m sure most do.
John,
That is very opportunistic of Verio, and it’s a great idea. ;-)
I would venture to guess that your managed servers are considerably more expensive than the Hostway servers since you are selling the NTT managed dedicated servers, but I’m sure your VPS product would probably meet some people’s needs.
Of course, the NTT servers and service would be much better than Hostway’s, so if people have the money and are willing to pay for the premium service I’m sure it would be worth it.
John
I am a sales representative from Verio, Inc. (www.verio.com). Verio is offering all current Hostway/Valueweb customers specials until August 10, 2007 to move your account to Verio.com To take advantage of the special, you must call me directly at 877-273-3190 x 8483 or by e-mail at jtharp@verio.net This offer applies only to Virtual and Managed servers.
Darin,
I imagine you’ll agree with me that the only way we would stay with them after this fiasco is if indeed they did give us 6 months of free hosting. ;-) Although as John points out, their SLA says they will only give one month maximum…
Incidentally, if anyone needs it, I’ve appended the corporate officer’s contact information to the post in case letters or faxes need to be sent. This information came from Hoovers.
John
Yep, my server with valueweb is *still* down also! I’m sure I’ll be refunding many clients because of this…
Well, the prior comment about this supposed rebate said they cap it at one month’s fees (for me, $59). And by the way, I’m still down, and as of this morning tech support said only about half the problem servers had been brought up so far. Since my server went down Thursday morning at 10 a.m. (because they said they had to changed IP addresses at the last minute, for some unspecified reason), I’ve been down for 4 days and counting. I faxed a letter to the Hostway CEO this morning (a 38-year-old wunderkind), espressing my displeasure. Sigh . . . .
Hmm… 75 Hours, less the 15 hours of planned downtime and the 2 hour grace period, yields 58 hours unplanned downtime. That’s 580% of our monthly fee, or almost half a year of free hosting.
Too bad they’ll go out of business giving everyone half a year of free hosting.
htmlhelp.com is up and running for me, hope it’s the same with everyone else!
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
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.
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
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!
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!
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..
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.
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
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.