What's going on Bluehost?

[ZeroXcape]

My sites have been going off and online all day long. The first time I called customer support, I was told that it would take ten minutes and that someone was already working on the server. Ten minutes passed, the sites were back.

45 minutes later, the sites are offline again.

FTP, SSH, Web access -> all gone.

I've never had a major problem w/ bluehost before, but this is the second time in two weeks.

[Sazuke]

Yup same problem here :confused:
My FTP says that is full, but is not I had it fixed once but since 3 days ago I have it again.
The server is offline... no web site :(

The worse thing is not this...

My affiliates are getting mad with me because its not online :(

[ManasTungare]

My site has been offline without warning for a few hours now. I saw it come back up a few minutes ago, but missing some recent data from MySQL. I also saw a CPanel install dialog at one time, so it looks like BlueHost is rebuilding a few boxes.

I wish we were informed of such changes, if not in advance, then at least as soon as BlueHost themselves were aware of it.

[ZeroXcape]

I assume we're all on the same box, but I've gotten the following information from multiple phone calls:

- It's being fixed and there's no time estimate as to when it will be ready

- The server is dead and they have to find our backups

- I asked to be moved to another server, and I was told that migration takes 2 days and that I would be better waiting

- I asked what I should do while my websites are offline, and one representative told me that if it was that important that I don't go offline... I should look into a two dedicated server solution with a load balancer (not the advice I was expecting to hear)

I've been a bluehost customer for two years, but if it's not up by 4pm EST... I'm moving my accounts elsewhere per the support member's advice.

[Sazuke]

I like that BH is always trying to give their costumers a good service. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Please dont tell my that the SQL data has been deleted, I cant loose this data... it is what makes my web site work... no SQL = no website
Hopefully I will not loose any data :(

[Three Sisters]

Yup - my site's down too. Can't FTP, can't get my emails, can can't to the control panel.

I just called BlueHost and they said one of the servers are down (of course it happens to be the one I'm on... ) and the admin are working on it now. Will hopefully be fixed soon, they said. Said no data would be lost.

I feel much better now. And by the way - they were REALLY, REALLY nice. Down or not - I am really, really happy with BlueHost... And I love this forum!

Smiles to all!

[ZeroXcape]

My sites are back online... hoping it stays that way.

[Three Sisters]

Mine too....

[Sazuke]

???
They are back :D
What? no delay??
OMG

I'm not having delay on loading my web site :eek:

[aceofspades]

it seems the site speeds have been going up

[Gixxer]

Mine were all down as well and now that they are all back up all of the changes
I had made to one of my fourms yesterday are all gone! It's a vB forum just like
this one and obviously they did some sort fo restore from a later time period.

Thanks again for the great communication to your customers that you are
going be doing some repairs and need to take down the server!

Why can't BH notify their customers of repairs prior to the actual repairs?

[alligosh]

Why can't BH notify their customers of repairs prior to the actual repairs?

Quite frankly, because the server did not bother to notify us that it was going to crash is such a spectacular manner.

Basically, it wouldn't come back. The home partition was fine, but the / partition has sufficient issues in the filesystem that it could not be recovered. This doesn't happen very often (thank goodness) but when it does, it is painful for all involved.

I had to drive in and rebuild the operating system, then pull system configuration data from backups. That data doesn't change very often, so was available. The only thing that suffered some loss was the databases. The database backups I had were mostly from this morning at about 1:00 am (MST), with a few that were older. We got the server rebuilt and back online, and verified it functioning by late morning.

I appreciate the tolerance and patience during these, and other, issues. My guys are working long hours to make the holiday season work as well as possible: keep the servers online, make them run more efficiently, and get to a more proactive model to minimize downtime.

-Steve

[ManasTungare]

Hi Steve,

We understand, and thanks for fixing this on a weekend. We hope the box doesn't give you any more trouble. :)

A small suggestion: if something like this were ever to happen again, could you please send us a short, quick email to let us know, so we don't try to speculate ourselves and keep posting to this forum, and can rest a little easier knowing that you guys are already onto it?

Thanks,
Manas.

[aceofspades]

it is kind of hard to send a quick email when the server is down....

LOL

That really sucks alligosh. Computers are never perfect no matter how modern and expensive they are.

[Curvins.com]

it is kind of hard to send a quick email when the server is down....

LOL

That really sucks alligosh. Computers are never perfect no matter how modern and expensive they are.

:D

True, but assuming they have more than 1 server, it could easily be relayed. Not that it's the highest priority to email the client, but when the situation is realized, something even on the homepage might help.

Just a thought, I'm new around here so I'm happy with the price/speed/space/options that I've seen.

-Chad

[alligosh]

I should have mentioned it in the last post, but we are currently building a server that will automatically provide notes on outages, etc. It will allow customers that may be experiencing an outage to go to a webpage (not hosted on their server) and login with their main account to see any notes about their server.

It should be ready in a week or so, and will let the admins tag notes about a server without wasting time that should be spent fixing the issue.

[ManasTungare]

Good idea, thanks, Steve.

[Gixxer]

It's called redundancy! A backup for the backup.

Even if the server did crash, obviously without prior notice which I find hard to believe if you have the right network monitoring tools in place, you should have sent a message to everyone on the box to let them all know what was going on instead of letting everyone sit here bitching about you and BH with no idea of the real situation.

If you monitor your servers properly you should have seen this coming and been able to take preventative measures.

[uzforum]

Well.. Today I started a topic about Bluehost support service - somehow I cannot find it now. It wasn't that pleasant to bluehost, indeed. But I didn't expect that the country of Bush's tirany is following the same rules on web.

I am patient enough, I'll restart the topic tonight, now don't have a time. By the way, to those who read it and deleted it - I found out that my uzforum site is being hosted on box156.

peace.

[pllobell]

Tucknut -

Call them and make sure your IP is not blocked. That was the problem with my site.

Good luck.

[tdronline]

That or make sure you have them Reboot your Firewall - because that has been an on going Problem with Box 180. Seems like every few days I need BH to reboot my firewall so I can edit my site - which I do every morning for my Work.