Status page for ALL UK Shared hosting servers

[byteme]

My last host (although cr*p) had a status page to show ALL of their servers status, whether it UP Down or sickly with a brief paragraph on estimated fix time if it was an ongoing problem lasting more than 30 mins or so.

What this did for me as a VAR is to let me know :
1) they knew about the issue
2) that a resolve would be posted asap
3) I could point my resolds at the page to help in management of hosting and email

What this did for them:

Gave them less hassle on support as the first port of call was the status page so less emails/chat/calls

therefore more time so fix twiddly problems and big ones, less time needed on saying the same thing.


Would this be helpful to everyone?????? Would you all vote Yay or Nay....

[Administrator]

We will never repeat this mistake

Previously we had similar server monitoring page which was made public for customers and someone managed to run kernel exploit on all listed servers.

We will never display hostnames of servers or IPs of servers again in future though we have much better security settings now but one should not be overconfident while running a hosting Business.

[byteme]

Originally Posted by Administrator

We will never repeat this mistake

Previously we had similar server monitoring page which was made public for customers and someone managed to run kernel exploit on all listed servers.

We will never display hostnames of servers or IPs of servers again in future though we have much better security settings now but one should not be overconfident while running a hosting Business.

How about not mentioning the servers by name (any one intent could find out the IP anyway ) but posting attacks and server sickies then?

This would still be helpful to us both

It could be managed without any connection to other servers, just a simple manual post board. It would do wonders to your support requests for the time to write the problem once in html.

[Administrator]

Originally Posted by byteme

How about not mentioning the servers by name (any one intent could find out the IP anyway ) but posting attacks and server sickies then?

This would still be helpful to us both

We have that policy and we post in network status section of our forum if any server goes through any major outage or anything that may result in downtime of more than 10 minutes.

We have managed to sort out all our shortcomings in last couple of years ( mostly in this year ) so there has been no such major problem recently. Only problem we have had recently was due to drive failure on tristar and OpenVZ bug which resulted in downtime for 2 VPS hosting nodes.

We have a solution for this problems as well and now any sort of drive failure wont result in downtime of more than 2 hours nor OpenVZ bugs would create any problems as we have shutdown all services on main nodes.

No Service = No problems

Basically you don't need any service on the main nodes besides the SSH access for creating VPSs. Even SSH access is limited to our office IP on all our Servers.

[byteme]

Originally Posted by Administrator

We have that policy and we post in network status section of our forum if any server goes through any major outage or anything that may result in downtime of more than 10 minutes.

- not always so.

Hmm as Webhosting UK do not publish info re DoS attacks, nor other types of hacker attacks that are clearly going on, there is no explanation and no help on the forum.

I appreciate that total down time would result in mass calls and mass time explaining, but to help your VARs (of which I assume you have many) and to help your support staff, it would be helpful to note if you had seen the problem and diagnosed it with a ETA of a fix, that may NOT be a total outage.

I still hope that webhosting uk would wish its VARs to assist in maintaining a good reputation and good support. It would be good to have the tools to do so.

[Administrator]

Originally Posted by byteme

- not always so.

Hmm as Webhosting UK do not publish info re DoS attacks, nor other types of hacker attacks that are clearly going on, there is no explanation and no help on the forum.

I appreciate that total down time would result in mass calls and mass time explaining, but to help your VARs (of which I assume you have many) and to help your support staff, it would be helpful to note if you had seen the problem and diagnosed it with a ETA of a fix, that may NOT be a total outage.

I still hope that webhosting uk would wish its VARs to assist in maintaining a good reputation and good support. It would be good to have the tools to do so.

There has been no such hacking attempts recently nor any major DDoS attacks. most of the times we reverse DDoS attacks immediately when they occur and posting such small things on forum makes other customers panic. Its not that easy to keep on posting for every problem that we deal with.

Most of our junior support staff members are not much comfortable with English so they never prefer to send any public announcements. We come to know about problems which are posted on forums or those which are escalated to someone from Management Team. If technical people fix certain problems themselves then no one else comes to know about those problems.

[byteme]

There has been no such hacking attempts recently nor any major DDoS attacks

Two of our domain names on our server over the last 3 weeks have suffered email attacks, both our own domain and one other, therefore I feel you are not fully appraised of the information.

[Administrator]

Originally Posted by byteme

Two of our domain names on our server over the last 3 weeks have suffered email attacks, both our own domain and one other, therefore I feel you are not fully appraised of the information.

That seems to be dictionary attack on your domains and this happens only when you enable catchall service for your domains. This problem is pertaining to your account only and it gets sorted by our support team once you notify them.

We cannot post announcement if 1 account gets hacked.

[byteme]

Originally Posted by Administrator

That seems to be dictionary attack on your domains and this happens only when you enable catchall service for your domains. This problem is pertaining to your account only and it gets sorted by our support team once you notify them.

We cannot post announcement if 1 account gets hacked.

If it ONLY affected that account, I could see why, but it does affect the whole server

Interestingly catchalls are on these accounts were originally set to blackhole, and have been reset to blackhole once again (now I have removed all crud mail).

I have noticed that some control panel settings seem to have difficulty remaining set, especially email filtering to discard.

[Cassie]

Originally Posted by byteme

I have noticed that some control panel settings seem to have difficulty remaining set, especially email filtering to discard.

Hey - could this be the problem I am having with my email filters (from another posting) - I am still getting emails through which have been set to discard - I assumed I had set them up wrong - but if they are not working I will open a ticket ............

On the server status page - I would prefer some sort of announcement page on the MAIN page or support page but NOT the forum. I only found the forum many months ago by accident - the naviagtion on the Main page is not very good. It doesn't have to say which servers (I wouldn't know which I am on anyway) but it could let customers know that you know about an issue and definately would stop you getting so many calls and irrate customers mouthing off at you on here.

And if your "junior support staff members are not much comfortable with English" why are you called Webhosting UK

[byteme]

And if your "junior support staff members are not much comfortable with English" why are you called Webhosting UK

Oh god, I was trying not to bring language into this but it IS a factor. It obviously limits us and you the supplier and that is before we look at the hosting

[Administrator]

Originally Posted by byteme

If it ONLY affected that account, I could see why, but it does affect the whole server

Interestingly catchalls are on these accounts were originally set to blackhole, and have been reset to blackhole once again (now I have removed all crud mail).

I have noticed that some control panel settings seem to have difficulty remaining set, especially email filtering to discard.

:blackhole: will never stop Dictionary attack. Any bounced notifications received on any random email address on your domains will be dumped but it wont bounce. :fail: will bounce emails sent on non-existent email address which would stop Dictionary attack as the emails will bounce back on senders.

[Administrator]

Originally Posted by Cassie

And if your "junior support staff members are not much comfortable with English" why are you called Webhosting UK

Our Dedicated Server hosting is completely managed by our Senior Technical staff and they have expertise in English. You can test our Dedicated Server Hosting Support. Level of support is same for both but level of English is different.

You cannot pay £2000 per month to your staff if you offer 24 x 7 support for £19.99 per year. I hope you don't mind compromising language if the cost reduces by more than 90%.

[Cassie]

You first brought language into this thread Admin - I was only making the obvious comment that us - your customers - and any new customers looking for hosting - would expect any company with UK in the title to be a UK company and therefore staffed by English Speaking Technicians.

BTW I didn't just pay 19.99 - I have two hostings with you and one of them cost a bit more than that!

However, whatever I pay, if that company boasts 24/7 tech sup as one of its main benefits we, the paying customer, would expect to be able to converse with those tech sup's.

24/7 support is not much good if they can only speak indian (for example).

[Administrator]

Originally Posted by Cassie

However, whatever I pay, if that company boasts 24/7 tech sup as one of its main benefits we, the paying customer, would expect to be able to converse with those tech sup's.

Let me know what problems you have faced in communicating with our staff. Our Service has never gone down due to language barrier. Grammatical mistakes can never bring your website down.

If a customer knows what he needs and if you think you can wait for 30 - 60 minutes then it is recommended to open a ticket and wait for a reply.

byteme wants all sort of problems to be posted on forums which is next to impossible for our people. Technical people love to work on technical problems only and they never prefer to post on forum as thats not included in their Job Profile.

We never force our staff to do something that they don't like to do. Maybe once or twice they would do so but not on daily basis.