Finding a webhost with decent a decent support department is difficult, as any experiences you read about are generally, like yours, when things have been less than ideal.
I've had wildly varying experiences, however the one time I was in a similar situation (one of my sites had been compromised as had a spammer-script installed on it) the host at the time (1and1.co.uk) sent me an email alerting me to the exceptional load being produced by a script on the site, and the email included the filename of the scripts involved (which of course, turned out to be the spam-generator scripts) - no doubt in your situation something similar would have helped you too.
They then "disabled" the offending script (I think by removing it's execute permissions) and asked me to investigate. Of course, I didn't need to re-enable the script!
I hope you do find a decent webhost with a good support dept.
Steven Hodson
· 2 years ago
Even though I did have a similar experience with excessive server usage and being regulated to a non-production server until the problem was solved at least I still had access to everything to do with all my sites.
along with that I did recieve prompt replies and help - as much as they could give considering it was a php script causing the problem they said - turns out upgrading to 2.2.1 of Wordpress fixed the problem.
So during your hunt I would suggest taking a look at Lunarpages - if you have any questions about them just email me and I'll do the best to answer.
and it's good to have you back :)
Paul OFlaherty
· 2 years ago
Thanks Steven I'll check them out.
Rex Dixon
· 2 years ago
Try the one I use for Nuclear Inbox LLC. Cheap, and pretty easy to use.
Rex
Andy
· 2 years ago
Enzo sounded a bit sarcastic saying "have a nice time!" after the first support chat!
I despise support chats...all they do is show how incompetent the business you're dealing with is.
Paul OFlaherty
· 2 years ago
LOL I can't disagree with you there Andy :)
Richard Pendergast
· 2 years ago
Similar experiences with Dotster here. I have every intention of pulling them up on their service level guarantee as soon as I move my sites elsewhere and aggressively chasing a refund.
Over 3 days we were down for upwards of 9 hours over 3 separate episodes. After finally exploding at them after firstly trying to reach them via online chat, email, and even phoning another country directly, I was told in no uncertain terms that 24 hours downtime is entirely acceptable in this industry.
The fact that my site was down due to their actions, and the fact that I was unable to even do anything about it due to their maintenance of the software I use to control my VPS, and the fact that I pay for premium services with these guys did not even come into it. Do not go anywhere near Dotster.
I buy my domain names there and host DNS etc, but hosting is something these guys just don't get.
Anyway, enough ranting. I've been trialling the MediaTemple grid service, and am very impressed with what I have seen so far. I have no intention of letting traffic spikes force a break in service again, and have this time gone with someone who specifically caters for it with automatic scaling and load balancing.
Hope it all works out man. I hate to see someone else going through this.
Tricia
· 2 years ago
Hey Paul I was just reading Andy Beards blog and saw that you had a similar problem to what I went through. Mine started on June 26th with Lunarpages and ended with them suspending my site on July 21st - at least they gave me time to try to find the problem but they were no more helpful that your host was.
They tried to force me to move to VPS - after slow support replies I finally relented and told them they could move my sites to vps on a monthly account as I knew my sites didn't require VPS just yet.
I only agreed so that I could get my sites back on line and keep working to resolve the problem that they'd been absolutely no help in identifying.
Unfortunately the support team decided to tried to lock me into a two year VPS account! They billed my credit card $642 bucks! This was also after they told me that there would be a $75 an hour charge to move my sites from the normal shared hosting C-panel account to VPS. When they told me of the $75 fee I said for them to stop everything they were doing and to send me more information, but that's when they went ahead and changed my account from shared to VPS and billed me $642.
The support team at Lunarpages told me that they couldn't tell me what time my site started acting up. Nor could they tell me which site. You'd think that they could at least tell you which domain had the problem??? I've got 10 domains on my account - 11 WP installations, 1 CMS run by Joomla and one very large HTML based site. It's kind of hard to pinpoint what might possibly be one poorly written add on when you have that many files and domains to go through. Grrrr!
I've sinced moved to HostGator and I've had no problems in this first week.
Oh all my sites were fairly up to date at the time that my problems started but I went through everything and made sure I had the latest updates on all my plugins, got rid of ones that weren't essential and went over everything to make sure that there wasn't any files on my account that I hadn't placed there.
If you really think Akismet was your problem - well deleting a large amount of spam that Akismet had caught, you might want to also add the Bad Behavior plugin to your site. It hides your site from most spam bots. Prior to beginning to use Bad Behavior in February I was getting as much as 400 to 500 spam comments (caught by akismet for the most part) on my four busiest blogs, and lesser amounts on my slower blogs. Since installing bad behavior I average perhaps 10 akismet spam per day on the busy blogs and sometimes only 1 on the slower blogs. Huge change and it's much easier to see real comments that have accidentally been captured by Akismet too!
Paul OFlaherty
· 2 years ago
Thanks Richard, Tricia and everybody for sharing your experiences with me.
@Tricia .. Yeah I'm sure it was Akismet, or at the least Akismet which triggered it, possibly by timing out when the spams were being erased.
Anyway, thanks for your "Bad Behaviour" suggestion. Andy mentioned it to me before but I never got around to looking at it. I'll have to revisit it now ;)
All Comments
I've had wildly varying experiences, however the one time I was in a similar situation (one of my sites had been compromised as had a spammer-script installed on it) the host at the time (1and1.co.uk) sent me an email alerting me to the exceptional load being produced by a script on the site, and the email included the filename of the scripts involved (which of course, turned out to be the spam-generator scripts) - no doubt in your situation something similar would have helped you too.
They then "disabled" the offending script (I think by removing it's execute permissions) and asked me to investigate. Of course, I didn't need to re-enable the script!
I hope you do find a decent webhost with a good support dept.
along with that I did recieve prompt replies and help - as much as they could give considering it was a php script causing the problem they said - turns out upgrading to 2.2.1 of Wordpress fixed the problem.
So during your hunt I would suggest taking a look at Lunarpages - if you have any questions about them just email me and I'll do the best to answer.
and it's good to have you back :)
Rex
I despise support chats...all they do is show how incompetent the business you're dealing with is.
Over 3 days we were down for upwards of 9 hours over 3 separate episodes. After finally exploding at them after firstly trying to reach them via online chat, email, and even phoning another country directly, I was told in no uncertain terms that 24 hours downtime is entirely acceptable in this industry.
The fact that my site was down due to their actions, and the fact that I was unable to even do anything about it due to their maintenance of the software I use to control my VPS, and the fact that I pay for premium services with these guys did not even come into it. Do not go anywhere near Dotster.
I buy my domain names there and host DNS etc, but hosting is something these guys just don't get.
Anyway, enough ranting. I've been trialling the MediaTemple grid service, and am very impressed with what I have seen so far. I have no intention of letting traffic spikes force a break in service again, and have this time gone with someone who specifically caters for it with automatic scaling and load balancing.
Hope it all works out man. I hate to see someone else going through this.
They tried to force me to move to VPS - after slow support replies I finally relented and told them they could move my sites to vps on a monthly account as I knew my sites didn't require VPS just yet.
I only agreed so that I could get my sites back on line and keep working to resolve the problem that they'd been absolutely no help in identifying.
Unfortunately the support team decided to tried to lock me into a two year VPS account! They billed my credit card $642 bucks! This was also after they told me that there would be a $75 an hour charge to move my sites from the normal shared hosting C-panel account to VPS. When they told me of the $75 fee I said for them to stop everything they were doing and to send me more information, but that's when they went ahead and changed my account from shared to VPS and billed me $642.
The support team at Lunarpages told me that they couldn't tell me what time my site started acting up. Nor could they tell me which site. You'd think that they could at least tell you which domain had the problem??? I've got 10 domains on my account - 11 WP installations, 1 CMS run by Joomla and one very large HTML based site. It's kind of hard to pinpoint what might possibly be one poorly written add on when you have that many files and domains to go through. Grrrr!
I've sinced moved to HostGator and I've had no problems in this first week.
Oh all my sites were fairly up to date at the time that my problems started but I went through everything and made sure I had the latest updates on all my plugins, got rid of ones that weren't essential and went over everything to make sure that there wasn't any files on my account that I hadn't placed there.
If you really think Akismet was your problem - well deleting a large amount of spam that Akismet had caught, you might want to also add the Bad Behavior plugin to your site. It hides your site from most spam bots. Prior to beginning to use Bad Behavior in February I was getting as much as 400 to 500 spam comments (caught by akismet for the most part) on my four busiest blogs, and lesser amounts on my slower blogs. Since installing bad behavior I average perhaps 10 akismet spam per day on the busy blogs and sometimes only 1 on the slower blogs. Huge change and it's much easier to see real comments that have accidentally been captured by Akismet too!
@Tricia .. Yeah I'm sure it was Akismet, or at the least Akismet which triggered it, possibly by timing out when the spams were being erased.
Anyway, thanks for your "Bad Behaviour" suggestion. Andy mentioned it to me before but I never got around to looking at it. I'll have to revisit it now ;)