Weekly Web Hosting Horrors
We've decided to start a weekly digest of web hosting industry events, primarily concentrating on the bad. After all, bad news is great news.. or at least it makes for good reading & some pity.
Alabanza, NaviSite & the definition of pain!
The migration has currently left clients down for more than 48 hours total with no end in sight.
First up on the list is the recent events at Alabanza & NaviSite. Customers are calling it a "migration fiasco" after a recent purchase of Alabanza by NaviSite.
It seems that NaviSite immediately chose to relocate the Alabanza customers to its' own datacenter within days of the company ownership changes. As a result, thousands of clients have been left in the dark. Some rough estimates gauge the number of sites down as a result of the fiasco are over one hundred & seventy five thousand!
Some users on WebHostingTalk are stating quite interesting things, here's what one had to say:
"We were told that NaviSite had fired the entire Alabanza staff and therefore could not continue to run operations at that location, that and the lease on the datacenter was also coming to the end, and NaviSite had been given notice to vacate the facility. NaviSite therefore attempted to rush the migration and made the decision to pack the datacenter up and move it by truck. A source tells me that they are still unpacking the equipment and it could be tommorow afternoon after 4:00PM before the entire network is even set back up."
The migration has currently left clients down for more than 48 hours total with no end in sight. Oops.
Down the Tubes
A number of companies have been affected by downtime this week. Just recently, Servers & Domains became unavailable and no clients of the service have been provided updates from what we're aware.
A great deal of providers have been affected by the Alabanza acquisition including 5 dollar hosting, successful hosting & and many more.
The great white north
A number of Canadian web hosting providers have been recently sold without much notice. HostEasi & UpScaleHost acquisitions went under the radar. Earlier today each provider went off-line & left a number of users affected.
Each of the companies was originally owned by Daryl D'Souza of Technosys in Ontario, Canada. Mr. D'Souza recently took a position with iWeb in Montreal & sold the companies as a result. The HostEasi & UpScalehost servers were migrated to iWeb's datacenter without any notice to clients.
Random Information
NaviSite, a provider of application management, internet infrastructure and hosting solutions for the mid-market, has acquired two privately-held providers of hosting services – Alabanza and Jupiter Hosting – for total cash consideration of approximately $15.5 million.
Baltimore, MD based Alabanza offers a comprehensive suite of dedicated and shared web hosting services, as well as a highly automated proprietary software platform for provisioning and managing high volume hosting solutions. Santa Clara, CA based Jupiter Hosting offers dedicated and complex managed hosting and infrastructure services that include high quality and high bandwidth applications such as IPTV, Video on Demand and Progressive Video Delivery; the company also has a data center located in Santa Clara, CA.
My experience with upscalehost.
I first encountered upscale host about three years ago. I had a extreamly bad experience with another company and I decided to try upscalehost.
At that time Dominic was front man for the company and I can honestly say that he was very decent, he helped me a lot, and they were just very classy. Also I had probably the best hosting service ever. The sites were always up and I had no problems.
Then one day after two amazing years of service my sites were offline for days and I did not know why. No letter, no mail, no nothing.
I finally did some hosting CSI and found out via some of the guys who were affliated with the former company that Daryl was the person to speak to.
Everyone I spoke to indicated that Daryl had been responsible for the accounts and that he was the person to speak to.
I got a hold of him, and he explained that upscalehost had gone backrupt, and he had nothing to do with it. Ok.
Anyways, I explained that I had had the service for two years, paid the bills and I was a little upset that the sites had just gone off the air like that. He offer to set up the server, give me a free month and get the sites back online.
It was easy, because it was the same server, same data center etc.
Anyways under the hosteasi.com label, the sites were offline a great deal, and the service was not the best, but I still stuck around, because it was too much trouble to switch and I really wanted to give the company a chance, cause Daryl had been decent. The problems still continued.
Then last week the sites went offline again. Again no email, and no warning, just like when upscalehost had gone bankrupt. I tried to contact Daryl via the hosteasi.com site, and phone nunber, nothing. Via email at the technosys site, and nothing. I also decided to contact iweb technologies, they had helped me track him down last time.
This time everyone I spoke to at iweb advised that because hosteasi.com was a different company they could not assist me because I was not a customer.
Anyways to make a long story short. I now realise that Daryl is working for iweb technologies, and has been affliated with all three companies, even though he said he was not the owner of upscalehost.com previously.
The run around I got when trying to contact him was unnessacary, because he works at iweb as an account manager, so it was never really a challenge for them to get a hold of him.
Now I have nothing against Daryl but my experience has not been steller. My sites are still offline. It's been a week.
I made contact with Sean the new owner of upscalehost.com about two days ago, and he agreed to get the sites back online. The server is online, but there is no cpanel on the server, so the sites are still offline.
That's my personal experience. From what I have read on the forums, this is the situation for several others as well. I spoke to Sean about this and he suggested it might be a good idea to redirect the hosteasi site back to upscale host, and I am sure it's a good idea, but I have not seen them do it yet.
From the forums I see that many of the guys who were affliated with upscale host the first time, before it went bankrupt are praising it and saying it's a good idea to get a server there, but I think it's a good idea to get an idea of the history of the company, and what has gone before.
If the new owners plan to run it the way it was the first time, before it when backrupt, then I do wish them all the best, because it was a good company. However if it's going to go bankrupt again, with everyone sites being offline, with hosteasi coming back in a year or so, then I don't think that is the way to go.
This was just some feedback, regarding a customer that had been with them for three year. As it is, I hope to get my files recovered, and I wish them well in their new venture. I also hope that with some of the history provided people will be able to make a better informed choice on wither to join the company or not.
Thanks.
I am one of the hosting companies affected by this botched move. All my clients web sites have now been offline for 6 days. I have lost in 6 days what took me 9 years to develop. My company is yorweb.com and my site when it was online was http://yorweb.com. I have been on Navisite conference calls for hours, talked with their sales area, their tech area and am still not online. Management is hiding at this point and you can't get any kind of a response from anyone. In 6 days I have received 1 email from an individual at Navisite. I have received the canned email updates thanking us for our patience. I lost my patience along time ago.
None of my phone calls have been returned. If you call their support line it is in India. It is difficult seeing a business I spent 9 years working on go down this way.
Bill Liverseidge
Yorweb.com
I add this only because Servers and Domains was mentioned by name in the previous posts.
Servers And Domains was a victim of Navisite's "migration fiasco" just like everyone else. We have been posting updates on our help desk at http://snd.helpserve.com/ from the time the outage started for us on Saturday morning. We have also been updating our voice mail messages so that customers only needed to call our Toll Free number to find out the status. So who ever said we were not updating our customers was incorrect.
We offered any customer affected by the outage a hosting package on our Cpanel servers at no cost so that they could get their websites back up as quickly as possible. The outage did not affect our Cpanel, H-sphere or iBiz Panel customers.
As of Monday evening, 3 of our servers were up and running and 3 were down. As of Wednesday morning, 5 of our servers are up and 1 is still down. We are still waiting on navisite to respond today.
Navisite neglected to inform us that the move was taking place. The last notification I received from them was on Oct. 16th, when they said the move scheduled for Oct. 21st was postponed. I did not receive any correspondence from them until I called Saturday morning to find out why all of our servers were down. At which time, I was informed that they were moving and added to their distribution list. That is why we could not provide any advance warning, we did not get any! Even if we had, their prediction was 4 - 10 hours of downtime, not 4 - 10 days.