.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;} <$BlogRSDURL$>

Sunday, April 11, 2004

I know this is not about fantasy, but I did feel like living in a surreal world during last week, though it was more like a nightmare.
I would like to share what happened so that you may prevent it happening to you if you ever try to have your own site on the web. In one line: just beware of CWIHosting.com as a hosting company to keep your sites in.
I had been using their hosting services for just over a year, when last Sunday, March 28th, they just decided to kick me out!
I was checking on my site, just by chance, when it suddenly showed the following error message:

FORBIDDEN:

Site Owner, Please contact your support center for assistance.

I tried to access my control panel to see if there was anything wrong with my sites, like bandwith over quota, or similar, but my password was not valid any more and I could not access the control panel, nor my database.
I had not received a single warning about anything going wrong, so I went to Customer Support and opened an urgent ticket about this.

The reply I got from CWIHosting was:


[Tech: JT] 03/28/2004 12:30 PM

Your site has been suspended due to server abuse/overusage. An email was already sent to you at cwihosting@hypernovels.com

You should refer to that email and respond to it.


The thing is, hypernovels.com is one of the domains I was hosting with them, so the email had to be delivered through their servers. As I found out when I tried to check my e-mail, they had also cancelled my e-mail account and I could not retrieve my messages!, none of them, including, of course, the one they claimed they had sent me!!

So I opened another ticket (CWIHosting immediately closes support tickets even if their reply is not at all satisfactory):

[Opened] 03/28/2004 01:29 PM
---------------------------
In reference to ticket 43623

My hypernovels.com domain is now another pointer to my account, and it seems you have put down my email accounts too, so I can not receive any emails sent to hypernovels.com (you could have copied the email text in your reply).

Please send the email to

clemente_zamora@hotmail.com

with instructions on how to resolve this.

I haven't done anything special today!! what is the cause of the reported abuse?!



Their response was:

[Tech: Not Assigned] 03/28/2004 01:30 PM

We will forward your email address you wish the email to be sent to the individual who sent it.



After an hour I had not received the message:

03/28/2004 02:26 PM
---------------------------
In reference to ticket 43625

I haven't received the email yet.

My sites are still down!

Please tell me how to fix this!

Thanks.



Our Response [Tech: JT] 03/28/2004 02:28 PM
« Status: Final »
-----------------------------
Unfortunately submitting support tickets will not get this issue resolved. The email was resent to the email address you provided several minutes ago. You should make sure your email is wrking properly. If you have further questions please email cto@cwihosting.com


They insisted in sending an e-mail message even though it was obvious something wasn't working. I still had no idea what had happened and they just couldn't bother to enlighten me through the communication channel that did work!
And they still dared to complain about my opening tickets to ask for a solution! I am paying them to host my sites, they stop doing it, and I'm supposed not to even complain?! And, furthermore, there was no other way for me to contact them anyways.


03/28/2004 03:03 PM
---------------------------
In reference to ticket 43628

I have doubled checked and my hotmail account is working properly.

Your silence forces me to reopen the ticket as this is the only communication channel left.

Could you please reply with the text of the e-mail you say you are sending to me?

This is really urgent!

Thanks!


2 hours and a half later I still had no reply, so I insisted:

[Update] 03/28/2004 05:36 PM
-----------------------------
My sites have been down already for over 6 hours!
If you have really sent an email, why is it taking so long to reply to this ticket with that same information?



[Tech: Wade] 03/28/2004 07:02 PM
« Status: Final »
-----------------------------
Hello, your site has been suspended. You will need to contact cto@cwihosting.com regarding this matter. Please let me know if there is anything else that I can do for you. Regards.

Wade Lewis


They just insisted that my sites had been suspended (which was obvious, as they had been taken down by them), but not even a clue as to the reason why!

This is the message I sent to the e-mail address they indicated:





Over 10 hours later I still had no information and no way to get it. I tried to guide them and propose the obvious solutions to a problem of the kind.


03/29/2004 06:42 AM
---------------------------
You have suspended my sites and in the same process you have forbidden me any chances to resolve the problem, because I don't have access to the system any more, nor to my cPanel, nor even to my email accounts! So I have even been cut off from my customers!

Please give me ftp and ssh access to my account, and access to my cPanel so I can at least get a backup of my code and my databases.

I will also add an http redirect so that all traffic gets diverted to another server outside CWI until the DNSs get updated, and then I will need you to open http access to my account so that traffic can be diverted and my sites are up before the 24-72 hours DNSs need.

Thanks.




So finally, the day after my sites had been put down unilaterally by CWIHosting.com, I got an alleged explanation of what had happened. But I was not given any chances to investigate and solve the problem. In fact, the only solution offered was to pay them 8 times more than what I was paying then, and rent a dedicated server with them. Otherwise, I should just leave! But they were holding my data away from me so I could not move my site to a new hosting company. Their strategy was perfect: they were forcing me to pay a lot more if I wanted my data and my sites back! CWIHosting.com was clearly black-mailing me!





I had not made any changes to my server processes in a long time, and the number of visitors to my site had not increased so dramatically, so the only cause I could think of for what they claimed was happening (I had no way to verify it by myself) was that there was some kind of external attack to my account and someone else was using my resources. CWIHosting security would seem to be weak and I was suffering the consequences.


My obvious reply was:


I kept asking for information and offering ways that would allow me to minimize the damage, but neither was granted to me by CWIHosting.com



Our Response [Tech: Not Assigned] 03/29/2004 10:32 AM
« Status: Final »
-----------------------------
Unfortunately we are unable to open the site for you. You will have to deal directly with the CTO via email at cto@cwihosting.com.




03/30/2004 01:40 PM
---------------------------
In reference to ticket 43645

I have tried to contact your TCO, but he doesn't reply to my emails.

I desperately need a dump of my database (tradecar_tradecardsonline). If you are a human being, please, please help me! My sites have been down for over 48 hours and I can't even contact my customers!

All I need is that you put a dump of my database in my anonymous ftp directory so I can download it, or give me access to my account for just an hour so I can take a backup of the database myself (the account won't affect the server as the domains are already redirected to other servers).

Please do something about this. I will appreciate it very much. I don't know what else I can do!

Please don't let me down!

Thanks a lot!


I was now begging for CWIHosting support staff to do something! I just needed a simple thing they could easily do for me to at least put my sites up in another server.


CWIHosting.com support staff was obviously not human, they just repeated once and again their learned response and ignored my begging and my desperation!






03/30/2004 05:53 PM
---------------------------
Following instructions from a phone call I just made to Customer Support, I'm opening this ticket to request that a complete database dump is created and made available to me for download.

Your CTO already did this but the dump created was not complete. I sent him an email about it, but as he is not replying and this is really urgent I called on the phone and was instructed to open a ticket about it and call again in about an hour. Please take into consideration that it is 2:48 AM here in Spain and I can not go to bed till this is resolved...

The database is tradecar_tradecardsonline and the public location for me to download it would be something like http://66.216.127.33/tradecar_tradecardsonline.sql

(please zip (compress) the resulting file so the download is more feasible, as the raw dump will have probably over 100Mb in size).

Please make sure the dump is complete so we don't have the same problem again (last table in the dump file should be 'cc_users_inactive').

Thanks a lot in advance.



[Tech: Not Assigned] 03/30/2004 05:59 PM
« Status: Open »
-----------------------------
Though certainly important to you and CWI, this is not an emergency case as the site/server is not down. This is the only time that status is to be used as it will page our emergency response team. Your request will be completed in a timely manner in the order received. Thank you for your understanding.


When opening a support ticket at CWIHosting they indicate that a ticket should be marked as urgent only if the site is down. They don't say anything about the whole server been down. My sites were obviously down, they were not online. Isn't that an emergency for a hosting company whose business it is to host web sites?!

03/30/2004 06:03 PM
-----------------------------
All my sites are certainly down!
They have been well over 48 hours now!
This is as much an emergency as it can be!



[Tech: Not Assigned] 03/30/2004 06:09 PM
« Status: Client Updated »
-----------------------------
Although this may be an emergency for you, it is not a server down emergency which is what the emergency check box is for. We are aware your site is down due to the fact that it is suspended. We are currently working on your issue and will have a response as soon as possible. However continuing to make these tickets emergency only will make your issue take longer to resolve.


Now they claim an emergency is only when the whole server is down. So if the server is working, even though the sites it is hosting are not, then CWIHosting has nothing to worry about?! They are not providing the service they are been paid for, but that's not an emergency for them, even if the situation has prolonged for 48 hours!


03/30/2004 06:15 PM
« Status: Final »
-----------------------------
Your database has been backed up by the CTO again and he has sent you an email. The specific URL in case you do not receive that email is http://66.216.127.33/tradecar.tar.gz
-----------------------------


They also sent an email message:


Finally! It seemed they had finally listened to me and were returning to me what was mine in the first place, my data!
Unfortunately, when I downloaded the file, and checked it, I found out the database dump was not complete! It contained less than half the tables and content of my database!
CWIHosting support was proving to be the worst ever, but now even the technicians were proving to be unable to use a simple mysqldump command properly! This was unbelievable!
They had not bothered to compres the big file either (well over 100Mb in size!)















So they had already completely removed my whole account, even though they had not sent me all my data yet!

Comments:
I read the following post:
http://fantasyrantsandnews.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_fantasyrantsandnews_archive.html

PLEASE READ THE ABOVE LINK BECAUSE THIS IS 100% EXACTLY WHAT YOU WILL GET WHEN YOU USE THIS SERVICE.
My experience with CWI is similar (I was shocked - them again I am not surprised since I too have been using CWI for one year) only that I have had a worse experience.

Almost every week the site does down (sometimes several times a week) and the SSL certificate does down more often for no reason. There have been times when even the support site was down when you need to tell then to put your site back online.

Well today they shut down our site www.muathe.com because I spammed my subscribers ( I send on average 7 emails to my members per week for one year now) but today it appears that I have started spamming the same members that I had just sent an email some hours ago. Anyway the site was down for two hours and I would not get to their support anyway so I tought here we go again... After about three hours I called the support line was shocked to here that the site was shut down due to "spamming" ... I went off on the poor guy who said that the CTO some damn ass called Jason (this guy is Ruuudee and a smart ass). Keep in mind that I was supposed to have received an email from the very server they had shut down. The guy promised to get the site back online which he did after about 6 hours but the SSL certificate was down and remains down as I write this. We are missing out on some sales for sure here is an example:


This is an enquiry e-mail from Roger Dunifon (rdunifon@adelphia.net)
When I click on the subscribe link, I get the following error:
The page cannot be displayed
The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings.

If you were shopping around for a hosting service please do not give your business to this guys because you will regret it.

Here is what you will get when you sign up and start using this hosting service.

Hello Eric Muathe:

This email is in regards to your account muathe.com which you host on our servers. It has came to our attention that you were sending out a large mailing earlier today. This mailing in its large quantity has flooded the mail servers processing queue. In addition, it appears that we have already received complaints from several postmasters about this mailing. As this is not the first time we have brought this issue to your attention, we have suspended your site to prevent blacklisting like what occurred last time when you sent a large mailing.

As you appear to need to send out large quantities of email, we would recommend moving to a dedicated server. We will be moving your site to a temporary holding server for 7 days. During this 7 day period you will either need to make arrangements to move to a dedicated server or other arrangements. However at this point we can no longer host your site on a shared server as its impact and future risk towards other customers on this server is too great.

Once your site has been moved it should begin loading from that server.

Jason A. Taylor - CTOCWI Hosting.com http://www.cwihosting.comhttp://my.cwihosting.com

PLEASE NOTE: The information in this private e-mail message is confidential and intended only for the use of the intended recipient. Any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify us by e-mail, and destroy the original message. Thank you.

Real Managed Hosting with WIDESCOPE Support
 
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
 
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
 
Post a Comment


This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?