20 replies
I have currently got a VPS with Hostgator. Today my server went down and chat support couldn't help. The ticket was escalated to the advanced team and currently my server and sites have been down for over 15 hours! There is no way of expediting the ticket because it gets queued apparently and the sites were down for one of the busiest days of my year (and still are down).

I can't afford for this to happen again and was wondering if there is any providers with better support than this (happy to move to dedicated for it if I need to) and/or any suggestions on how to create copies of the sites which can be re-directed to if this happens again in the future?

In fact if you can offer any advice on how to prevent this from happening again I would be very grateful.

Thanks
#advice #vps
  • Profile picture of the author Shaun OReilly
    For Virtual Private Servers (VPS), I use and recommend
    LiquidWeb:

    Liquid Web | Dedicated Server, Managed Dedicated Servers, Web Hosting (no affil.)

    Their 'Heroic Support' is simply fantastic. They're very
    responsive and genuinely helpful. They even help out
    with solving third-party software installations installed
    on their servers.

    I used to use HostGator for shared hosting and they
    were fine for that - though for VPS or Dedicated Servers,
    I find that the support and service from LiquidWeb is
    much superior.

    You can also get some reviews and special offers for VPS
    providers over at the WebHostingTalk forum:

    VPS Hosting Offers - Web Hosting Talk (no affil.)

    It's only relatively recently that HostGator have started
    to offer VPS services and it's not really their forte.

    I'd recommend moving to a reliable VPS provider such
    as LiquidWeb. They are very reliable and have great
    support.

    Dedicated to mutual success,

    Shaun
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  • Profile picture of the author auradev
    the way to prevent this is to run two vps servers with a dns failover system, or go with vps.net which has better redundancy in place. Or 2 vps.net servers in different data centers.
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    • Profile picture of the author Bcrewse1
      I have to go with Shaun on this one and recommend LiquidWeb as well. I used them for my VPS service and I would rate them excellent.
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    • Profile picture of the author Tashi Mortier
      It is really sad to hear that this happened. Usually you hear only good stuff about Hostgator...

      But if you really want to avoid something like this in the future, I recommend that you go with redundancy, just as auredev suggested already.

      That means that you have 2 servers and one will jump in for the other if something fails. It is quite complicated to set up, but some hosts can help you.

      That is also why most hosts only guarantee 99 % uptime because something can always happen to the hardware and 99 % means about 4 days a year!
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      Want to read my personal blog? Tashi Mortier

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      • Profile picture of the author michaelwilding
        Thanks for all the help guys, please keep it coming if there is any more. Hostgator told me 2 hours ago they were working on it. I just got back in touch with them to see how it was going and it turns out they weren't actually working on it even though their support told me they were, truly unbelievable!

        I am already talking to Liquid Web about this, may need a dedicated with them if I go with them because they don't have much power in their VPS and I do a lot of database work.
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  • Profile picture of the author trishworks4u
    it's not a secret that I can't stand HG. I have several VPS hosting accounts. The one that I get the best performance and service from is with Futurehosting.
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  • Profile picture of the author imfusa
    I am also at hostgator, and i have a vps level 3, i suggest the following. Log in to your power panel, it is the one with http://yourip/vz/cp. And hit restart container. If that did not help than i suggest chatting them live with tehnicall support and ask for Mr Paul Ng or Lanh Ng, i think they are the best.
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    • Profile picture of the author michaelwilding
      I think it is going to be LiquidWeb.

      imfusa I couldn't login because my servers were down. I talked to chat technicians 4/5 times who couldn't do anything and referred the ticket into a queue that didn't get replied to for over 7 hours. The reply requested information and when sent that didn't get replied to for nearly 8 hours. In that 8 hours I chatted to two technicians who also told me the ticket was at highest priority. I found out from the last that 5/6 technicians I had spoken too previously who had told me they had set the ticket to highest priority hadn't and one had told me they were actually working on the problem when they weren't.

      The actual problem took 10 minutes to solve. It took them over 24 hours to fix it and get my sites backup on the busiest day of my year. I have their highest level VPS and it is not the sort of customer service I expect. I had been very happy with them up until now but I simply cannot afford the risk of this happening again.
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      • Profile picture of the author Shaun OReilly
        Be aware that when you move hosting from one provider
        to another little niggles inevitably come up during the
        transfer process.

        For example, when I moved from HostGator to LiquidWeb
        VPS servers, some of the scripts that I had installed and
        working fine at HG then didn't function right away at LW.

        However, the LiquidWeb support were great at identifying
        the issue and solving it promptly. For example, they had
        different file permission requirements, so it created some
        small challenges with some scripts initially.

        However, after moving I am delighted with their level of
        support, promptness and attention to detail.

        To transfer over, I changed the TTL (time-to-live) setting
        to 14400 to minimize challenges during switchover.

        I also backed-up each entire site via cpanel in HG and
        then imported it onto the new LiquidWeb server before
        changing the DNS settings at the domain registrar.

        So, make sure you have a copy of your site files, databases,
        e-mail forwarders, etc.

        Dedicated to mutual success,

        Shaun
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        • Profile picture of the author rts2271
          Liquid Web is good, I have a partner in my web hosting who specializes in VPS systems and services. brian@newbusinesshosting.com who could clue you in on some things you might be able to do to get up and running now and switch to proactive mode from reactive mode. I'm not sure, unless the server was compromised or the storage system trashed the data, than 15 hours is way to long for a outage with no information.

          Hostgator is great until you need real support. Then your dealing with trained Wordpress monkeys.
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  • Profile picture of the author michaelwilding
    Thank you very much for your kind offer rts, I have now at last got the sites back up and running. I found that the Wordpress monkeys was exactly what I got!

    Just got a dedicated at LiquidWeb and hopefully the migration will go smoothly. Looking into a redundancy server as well.

    Thanks for the advice Shaun, I shall download backups but also have backups with JungleDisk.
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    • Profile picture of the author rts2271
      Hey one more thing. Go buy a cheapy account from like dreamhost or something with a bit of disk space. Set up your cpanel for daily backups and to send the backups to your secondary account. Call the domain name www2.example.com changing just the hostname from www to www2. This will allow you a greater response time in disaster recovery.
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    • Profile picture of the author michaelwilding
      I thought you might all be interested to know that I complained to HostGator about them leaving my sites down for over 24 hours. I got a reply just over 2 days later.

      They told me that unlike their shared hosting:

      'Your websites do not have an uptime guarantee like a shared/reseller account would have because you have direct access to root'

      Even though I am paying 10 times more for my VPS and the error was not actually fixable from my end because I couldn't access the root of the server (otherwise I clearly would have done that).

      The email was clearly a copy and pasted response. That response has told me never to use HostGator again.
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  • Profile picture of the author StrikeNet
    I highly recommend Storm On Demand | Cloud Servers & Cloud Hosting | A Liquid Web Company (no aff link) - they are a liquid web owned company and sell cloud VPS servers. For purchasing cPanel on your server ($20/m) you get managed support as well. It's really an awesome company, with great support!
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  • Profile picture of the author octars
    I Love Servint VPS
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