Why no explainations?

[roban]

All of my sites were down this morning. I assume there was something wrong with the boxes my half dozen or so sites are on. What interests me is since we have this forum why is there no explaination posted here about these outages?

It would seem there are many accounts affected by this with a waning sense of security towards Bluehost. A simple post about these things would go a long way towards restoring confidence.

[ranchnachos]

All of my sites were down this morning. I assume there was something wrong with the boxes my half dozen or so sites are on. What interests me is since we have this forum why is there no explaination posted here about these outages?

It would seem there are many accounts affected by this with a waning sense of security towards Bluehost. A simple post about these things would go a long way towards restoring confidence.


I agree. While the downtime is "normally" only for short durations, it happens at LEAST once a week for me. (BOX 22)

Currently as I type this, I have 5 websites that are hosted and are all down at the moment. My cPanel will not even load for me. I know others have mentioned this as well and I have NEVER seen an official repsonse as to why our websites go down so often.

I'd sure as hell like to know why,or else I may just take my business elsewhere.

[Ducati]

Maybe the admin or mod boxes are down too ? :)

[walker]

I realise this is more about the need for an official response, but as for the reason why, the suggestion that the DNS servers went down seems plausible given the 500 error when sites were unavailable yesterday and today.

Also, the fact I could login via SSH and see all of my files on the webserver (box87) suggests it was actually up (the 'uptime' command indicated it was last rebooted seven days ago), just that the site couldn't be browsed due to DNS problems.

What concerns me (apart from the silence) is that this DNS problem has not only been recurring for the past two days, but that when some serious downtime took place across the entire bluehost network today, there was absolutely no way of making contact. (Today UK was middle-of-night at Bluehost HQ.) The bluehost.com site was inaccessible, the help centre was inaccessible, the forums were inaccessible (unless you have the IP Address). And if you thought that didn't matter because there's an emergency option when you dial support, well think again. I was hung-up on twice after two five minute waits. When I finally got through this afternoon (after the bouts of downtime were continuing into a fourth hour), I was given an explanation (see above), but no apology.

If Matt Heaton's blog (mattheaton.com) is anything to go by, Bluehost.com prides itself on its exceptional customer service. I think it's time we saw more evidence of that, particularly in the aftermath of the past couple of days. The lack of official acknowledgment for server downtime just seems ludicrous.

[rando]

Steve came in at 4am this morning when he was sick to fix this. He spent at least 6 hours here and he looked like hell when he left. Our nameservers were being whiny.

[thicke]

Steve came in at 4am this morning when he was sick to fix this. He spent at least 6 hours here and he looked like hell when he left. Our nameservers were being whiny.

Is Steve the only person that could fix this? Why should he have to come in when he's sick to resolve such a problem, doesn't he have a backup? What if he had won the lottery instead and didn't come in all?

It's been my experience that when a server makes a whinny noise, it's indicative of a hardware problem.

[ranchnachos]

Is Steve the only person that could fix this? Why should he have to come in when he's sick to resolve such a problem, doesn't he have a backup? What if he had won the lottery instead and didn't come in all?



After just finishing reading through some of Matt Heatons's blogs.. he states that he now employs over 50 people for this Bluehost.com -- you would think there is more than 1 qualified person that knows how to fix Nameserver problems. Especially since the one person who knows how is out sick!

[Dave]

Steve came in at 4am this morning when he was sick to fix this. He spent at least 6 hours here and he looked like hell when he left. Our nameservers were being whiny.

Nice reply... I would have been much more confident in BH if you had a more humble excuse, and less of a "whiny" one.

. .

[alligosh]

I apologize for the outage. It was a bad one.

Without going into too many details, it was a cpanel bug that caused the primary nameserver to run out of memory. On any server that is bad, but on a nameserver that is Really Bad.

Of course, this is why we have a secondary nameserver. Servers occationally have issues. It's the nature of the beast. This time, however, it went in a way that caused the secondary to loose some of it's zones and not respond appropriately. That makes a Really Bad into a catastrophy. Not everyoine was down, but enough were. But then, one is enough, isn't it?

Ironically, last week we started looking into ways to increase redundancy and add more stability to the nameservers. 100,000 zones is a lot of zones to handle for anyone, and it changes the dynamic of how you do it. It is even different that 50k or even 80k.

Needless to say, the nameserver plans are being escalated in priority, and we will do whatever we can to not repeat any given issue in the future, and to try and see issues before they happen.

oh, and I do have anouther admin now, and he's quite competent to fix nameservers. The issue there is that he has only been here for about a week; I'm not sure I have even given him all the passwords yet, much less given him time to learn all our systems.

One thing you can take from this: Matt and I (and the rest of the staff) are commited to fixing issues and giving the best service possible, even if we have to prop outselves against a wall while rebooting servers.

[walker]

Thank-you *so* much for that response. It means a lot. :)

[Kemper]

Thanks for the explanation Steve. I think it makes everyone feel a little better when they know exactly what happened and what's being done to avoid it in the future.

[bob_ib]

Good report. Thank you for that. Although I'm brand new to this host and still setting up, while looking around for hosts I searched no further when I noticed this forum. That a host is brave enough to provide an open forum is one thing but that staff participates speaks well for addressing customer concerns (even though there are days when you feel you should be receiving combat pay).

Bob

[thicke]

Thanks Steve. That really makes me feel a lot better that everyone's concerns were addressed in your response.

I hope you get to feeling better. Heck, I hope you win the lottery. ;)

[ranchnachos]

Nice to see a formal reply on the situation.

Keep up the good work.

[JCsDesignz]

Nice to have a formal reply but if Bluehost are working so hard to fix it why all these major problems almost a week later ?

[rando]

Nice to have a formal reply but if Bluehost are working so hard to fix it why all these major problems almost a week later ?

Which major problems? This problem went away when steve posted about it.

[ranchnachos]

Which major problems? This problem went away when steve posted about it.

You said it correct. "This" problem, went away, after the acknowledged fact that BH had Nameserver issues with cPanel.

I've experienced 2 seperate occurances of downtime within the last week alone(and that's just when I was here to catch it, trying to use the service i paid for.), but there could of been more!

But in any case, downtime == major problems for any host!

If I was running a true business with Bluehost, and not just a few personal websites for myself.. I would have already picked up and left.

If I had an e-commerce website set up to make me money.. and my visitors couldn't get to it, I would be furious.
If I had invested alot of initial money to get my business going.. and I kept experiencing downtimes like I've seen since I came to this host... oh man would I be pissed.

Luckily for you guys, I'm not pissed. Just upset for the fact that alot of us customers continuously have downtime, no matter which physical server computer we're on!

Now I do understand that running a hosting service may be hard work, but that's the nature of it as Steve put it. If you are having problems.. come out and tell us! Create a front page news section, or a private members only forum section to tell us PAYING members what the **** is going on!!

To keep having continuous downtime and not get a response, equals seriously bad customer service in my book. And I know about customer service.. as I've worked in the grocery industry for the past 7 years.

Bad Customer Service == Bad for Business.

Regards,
Kenneth Gessner.
http://myownworld.org

[rando]

You said it correct. "This" problem, went away, after the acknowledged fact that BH had Nameserver issues with cPanel.

I've experienced 2 seperate occurances of downtime within the last week alone(and that's just when I was here to catch it, trying to use the service i paid for.), but there could of been more!

But in any case, downtime == major problems for any host!

Did you call customer support for these downtimes?

We have not had any major downtime since the nameserver thing. There have been a few times where one specific box has had a problem, but we always fix those as fast as we can.

I can assure you, these problems you're having are not widespread. When you have an issue like this, please call bluehost support and tell them. They're trained to track down exactly where the problem is, and if necessary, escalate the issue to the technical department so that we can fix whatever did go wrong. That's one of the main reasons our support department is there, and why we're open almost 24/7 (which we will be soon).

But please, don't just assume we know about it and then complain about it on the forums a week later. I can't do anything to fix that.

[lex]

Thanks for the explaination. Currently I'm getting the annoying CPU exceeded error!!!!

[rando]

Thanks for the explaination. Currently I'm getting the annoying CPU exceeded error!!!!

Besides when it happens during a backup, I've never seen the cpu exceeded error hit anybody it shouldn't have. I've seen you get hit by it three times today, and it was for this:

Tue Mar 14 13:13:21 2006: used 30.06 seconds of cpu time for HTTP Request: stangette.com : POST /community/chat/getxml.php HTTP/1.1
Tue Mar 14 13:13:56 2006: used 30.06 seconds of cpu time for HTTP Request: stangette.com : POST /community/chat/getxml.php HTTP/1.1


If something's used 30.00 seconds of cpu time, that means that it was running and eating up a lot of cpu until it was automatically killed by our rogue process killer. You can see this information in your ~/tmp/cpu_exceeded_logs/ directory. You used two of these within one minute, which therefore means you were using an entire cpu's worth of box load for your site.

I would contact whoever wrote that script to get it fixed. It doesn't always do this, but it does do it on some occasions.

[betiryan]

The bluehost.com site was inaccessible, the help centre was inaccessible, the forums were inaccessible (unless you have the IP Address). And if you thought that didn't matter because there's an emergency option when you dial support, well think again.

I tried the 1-888 number on the front page, it's the only one I know. Got the message that "Bluehost offices are closed" - My site is down, can't log in to the control panel, even the "other" way....can't open an ftp session....but! I can ping the box102 and do a successful tracert. This is fourth time my site has gone down; the first three times their firewall was blocking my ip address (why??? never did find out) and now I have no idea what's going on. Ipower is starting to look good. It's the same price as bluehost.

Does anyone know the emergency number?? HELP!!:confused:

tia for listening to my sad tale of woe,
Beti

[cimages]

I'm having the same problem...I just signed up with them from old hosting company. Never had a problem, never went down. I'm switching back & getting my money back from blue host, they are worthless.

[betiryan]

I wouldn't go so far as to say they're worthless. I've been with them over 2 years now and the last month has been the only time I can honestly say I've been so frustrated as to start looking at other hosting companies.

I think (imho) that perhaps they are growing too fast. All of a sudden they have over 115,000 customers. Maybe they are having trouble keeping up with the customer service for that many sites, or the equipment issue is always a bear when your business grows so fast.

I know that's no excuse and it doesn't really help with the lack of response or explanations. I'm just not ready to jump ship unless this on-again-off-again, with no explanation continues. Hang in there and see what the next month brings.

TIA,
Beti;)