I gave up on Hostgator a while ago, and I thought I’d cancelled my account until I noticed they were still charging me monthly (yeah, I should pay more attention to what’s on my CC bill). When I contacted them about it they claimed I never fully cancelled. Here’s a copy of the form I submitted:

HGSales #GSW-[[private]]
October 3, 2005 8:10:40 PM EDT
Subject: CANCELLATION
Department: Hostgator Sales
Request Details:
Your Email: : [[private]]
Domain name: : MaisonBisson.com
Your sites username: : [[private]]
Your sites password: : [[private]]
Why do you wish to cancel? : Poor service.
Do you give us permission to terminate your entire account
as soon as you submit this form? : Yes 

Hostgator’s complaint was that they then responded to that with an email asking me to confirm that I wanted to close the account. Here’s the text of that message:

Greetings.

Was there anything we could assist you with
to maintain your account today?

I ignored the message, as everybody involved knew there was nothing at that point they could do to keep my business. What I didn’t realize was that they were going to hold this over me a few months later when I realized they were still charging me the monthly hosting fees — even though I had checked the box clearly labeled “terminate [my] entire account!”

After being rebuffed by Hostgator, I contacted the Southeast Florida Better Business Bureau about the matter. I’m not exactly sure how these things work, but once the BBB interceded, Hostgator claimed they’d refund the hosting fees (though I have yet to see the refund).

Thing is, based on the comments I get on the original story, and the stuff I just read at Hostgator-sucks.com, I’m not the only one who feels screwed by Hostgator. And instead of fixing their hosting problems and shaping up their shady customer service, they’re trying to C&D the hostgator-sucks.com site.

billing, business practice, customer service, honesty, hostgator, hostgator-sucks.com, hosting provider, problem resolution, shady, suck

I picked Plesk over CPanel as my server control panel because it was cheaper, looked better, and seemed to have all the features I wanted. What I didn’t know was that it came with PHP4 and MySQL3 at times when each was a major version ahead of that. When the good folks at my hosting provider tried to upgrade this, it conflicted with Plesk and they have to back off.

The answer, it seemed, was that I’d have to migrate from Plesk to CPanel to get those features. And now I’ve got a big database project, that’s looking more necessary than ever.

Why? Because MySQL 3.x doesn’t support query caching, boolean full-text searching, or complex subqueries.

In a simpler world, everything would be up to date and working, but in this world I’m trying to find a convenient time to migrate my stuff to CPanel.

mysql, plesk, cpanel, hosting provider, hosted server, upgrade

I switched to Lunarpages last week after the fiasco with my old hosting provider. Now, because of bandwidth and CPU usage, I’m moving to a new server at Lunarpages. I wasn’t surprised about what they said when I got a message from the sysadmins about excessive CPU usage on my shared hosting account, but I was surprised with their proactive and customer friendly approach.

Anyway, I’ll be figuring out my new server and control panel (it’s Plesk, and I’d been using CPanel for a while). Please alert me to any problems you might find with a comment to this post.

tags: web hosting service, excessive bandwidth usage, excessive cpu usage, hosting provider, hosting providers, lunarpages, new server, plesk, switching, web hosting, web hosting provider

Sometime around 10 PM Friday the MySQL server at my hosting provider took a walk. The hosting sysop blamed it on my site and disabled the database that serves it by making the directory the MySQL files are in unreadable. MySQL didn’t seem to handle that condition well, and since MaisonBisson was still piling up queries looking for the content in the DB, things continued to go downhill.

My involvement started around 11 PM Friday night (yes, I’m that dorky). Not knowing what was going on, I started a support ticket with the host. The sysop replied fairly quickly with some MySQL logs that showed nothing, but then didn’t answer any further questions on the ticket until about 11 AM Saturday. The host’s answer was inspecific, but I replied quickly and again I got no replies.

Then, around 2 PM Saturday, the host sent me a message from their abuse department telling me they’d disabled my account (it had actually been disabled for about 15 hours or more by then) because the site was causing problems with the DB server. Apparently, because the scripts on the site were looking for the missing database content and MySQL doesn’t handle things well when the DB files are made inaccessible on the filesystem and because I was still getting traffic (though the traffic wasn’t getting content), things weren’t going well.

Again, however, my replies to support got no answer, and it was about 10 AM Sunday before I got another response from the hosting provider. But it still took until 1 PM before I could get the sysop to restore my access to the site content (under the condition that no public access be allowed on the site until they approved it).

Around 4 PM, after about 42 hours of downtime, MaisonBisson went live with a new provider.

Things I’ll admit:

• I haven’t paid serious attention to optimizing my code for heavy traffic (but I don’t really know what “heavy traffic” is)
• My site was getting a lot of page loads Friday (though it wasn’t record number), and weekend nights can be especially busy (look at the list of popular incoming searches in the sidebar during the weekend and you’ll understand)
• I don’t know how many queries per second I was calling at the time of the DB crash (or how many were running overall), or any other detail statistic of the CPU load I was generating

Lessons:

• HostGator sucks.
• Keep backups up to date (I actually had a good DB backup from early Friday, but I didn’t have filesystem backup)
• Perhaps I oughtta look at some ways to optimize all this.
• HostGator sucks.

Tips For Hosting Providers:

• Don’t treat customers like they want to crash your servers.
• Remember that customers can’t see the system performance stats you can. Involve them early — as problems are developing, but before things crash — so they can start working on solutions before anybody loses uptime.

As late as sometime mid-morning Saturday, HostGator could have kept me as a customer — and I was still considering upgrading my hosting account! — but customer service that was both slow and indifferent soured me.

abuse department, bad customer support, customer support, heavy traffic, hostgator sucks, hosting provider, mysql crash, queries per second, support ticket, web host, web hosting