Valueweb collateral damage

August 3, 2007

I’ve hosted standalone servers at ev1servers since 2003.  This past March I had a problem and received some moderately bad customer service, so I decided to look elsewhere.  I migrated most of my sites to gate.com, a lower cost option - I don’t have many hosting needs anymore, and it was a decent value for price/performance.  Valueweb acquired gate.com (an affinity company) in April, and a few weeks ago emailed me that 1) I needed to change my IP and 2) my server would be physically moved from Miami to Tampa, and this would take 12-15 hours.

My move took more like 18-20 hours, but no matter, it wasn’t *that* bad, right?  Well, I had a ‘base’ IP and I was paying for 7 more IPs (or 8?).  The extra ‘virtual’ IPs quit working on Monday.  Then this morning the base IP quit working.  You could ping it, but there were no responses from the server.  It’s *still* just hosed - no response.  Valueweb doesn’t answer their phone anymore - at least, I quit holding on after 45 minutes - I don’t have that much time to hang on the phone.  It would have made my 5th call to them this week, and the answers are always pretty much the same.

A few people I’m still hosting or providing DNS service for have been understandably upset, but there’s little I can do.  http://digg.com/tech_news/HostWay_ValueWeb_Worst_Server_Outage_I_ve_Ever_Seen has more on this issue than I could write.  This is, by far, one of the most insane displays of incompetence I’ve seen from an IT company in my 15+ years in the business.  Not much more I can say.

I had a bad feeling last night, and was starting to try to pull down files and database stuff from the server, but the connection was continually interrupted every few minutes, so I never got a full backup.  I had not cancelled my previous ev1 server yet, so I have this as a backup.  One of the first questions I got was ‘why is your blog showing April?’ - Sorry everyone - until valueweb gets my server back up, I can’t access any of that old content.  I’d just copied some of iin an email this morning to someone, figuring they didn’t have time to go to the blog, so I may be able to retrieve mostof my OSCON posts.

I’m getting a new ev1 server and will be migrating things yet again from this server to a new one, ideally this weekend or early next week, so there may be a bit more flux.  I have to say, this has been a horrible week, and I could not recommend valueweb to anyone, but I’m sure others have made that point more eloquently than me this week.

If I’m hosting a project for you, or you’re having DNS or email trouble, call me at 919-455-8488 and I’ll work through what I can with you ASAP.

Posted in Personal, Uncategorized