CWI was down AGAIN today (all day)

See for yourself:
**mod edit**
link removed. When I checked that it gave access to customer e-mail addresses. I'm sure they would rather those addresses not be made public to spammers etc

Taken from Excite:
http://msxml.excite.com/_1_22UIUPS0...start=&ver=3005

Wow. A lot of people's sites were down that day. And look at the various excuses people got as to why their site was down.

I didn't know that 'tina' (secretary) is actually 'tina barnes' perhaps related to CEO marcus barnes.

Maybe the decimal is off on their up-time policy. It should have been .99% instead of 99. %

excuse 1:
We located an account on the server that was consuming resources beyond the limits set in our server abuse policy. This caused the server load to spike and performance to decline rapidly and ultimately cause the server to freeze. We were forced to reboot. The problem has now been alleviated. The load has been stabilized and the server is running at optimal performance. We apologize for any inconvienence this may have caused. Their was no data loss. If you have any further difficulty, please let us know.

excuse 2:
There was a problem earlier regarding this server that your site was on. It was a networking issue that was causing various problems depending on what area you were at. It has been resolved and is now working properly.

Perhaps its husband and wife reselling - you never really know if you don't do a lot of research into the company first. You have to watch out for resellers that have no control over their own hardware and don't provide technical support (except the couple hours/day they are home from their day job and online.) No disrespect for CWI - this doesn't mean they are a setup like this - but its something representative of such... Company run by two individuals with close relations, and different excuses to different users. These excuses are also for problems that don't normally exist, most hosts have rlimits in place to ensure that one certain account can not overload the server bad enough to cause this kind of problem.

Per moderator edit, the link you erased is available on every major search engine. Perhaps CWI screwed up by allowing that site to be publicly available in the first place since it apparently does contain detailed customer information.

A search of Excite, for example, looking for 'cwi support closed tickets' will reveal the link to CWI closed support tickets as seen here:
http://msxml.excite.com/_1_22UIUPS0...start=&ver=3005

Excite will produce a listing amongst which 'CWI Hosting.com Online Help Desk' is shown.

If they can be so irresponsible as this, people have the right to know. Especially direct customers.

I agree customers should probably know about that. I edited the link here though as I felt linking to it directly wasn't in the best interests of their customers. After all it's hard enough keeping junk mail out of your inbox without your hosting company allowing access to every harvester out there.

It does seem a very odd thing to have available to anyone (even customers) though. I can't personally see where showing closed tickets to people would offer any good at all. Maybe they should seriously reconsider their support area

Greg Moore

I can think of one good thing about this, but the numerous down-sides outweigh the one upside.

Providing customers access to this system is kind of like running a forum for technical support - I think forums are great for customers to help each other, but direct customer support should be more personal. Giving access to all tickets or to an open support forum makes the support process very hard as you can't provide exact details, passwords, etc.. This is one of my numerous downsides, no point to list any others.

The good thing is that if you are they are too lazy to build a FAQ and Knowledge Base, customers can search through old tickets to find answers, or search through a forum to find answers.

Again, personally - I have to agree with it being a very odd practice, though there are some notable web hosts out there who also do the same and provide pretty good services to their customers, without investing time (or perhaps its just due to lack of simple PHP and MySQL programming skills for some of them) into a FAQ/KB System.

It looks like CWI finally repaired that security hole. What a good idea that was. I wonder, prior to fixing it, how many hackers were able to get their hands on CWI customer's Email addresses, their user and password information (which we saw customers entered on many of their support tickets), their personal criteria (as entered on each customer's support center profile), etcetera. What an oversight on their part, eh?!

It was fun looking while it lasted. We noticed there were whole days that went by without any open tickets being looked at, worked on or closed. Customers had no idea that it was not only their issues being ignored.

Perhaps this can be attributed to their small support staff. A small staff is always over-worked leading to personnel strolling into work whenever they feel like it. That would account for the days of extremely slow (if any at all) support.

In summary: If you can't keep such simple information secure, how can anyone trust you to keep their site secure?

Ahhhh, one can hope for quality hosting..........

SITE DOWN? - February 12, 2003 - UPDATE REGARDING THUNDER4:

This server experienced a hard drive failure before noon on Tuesday creating a bad superblock on the disk. We have installed a new secondary hard drive at that time and the server is up and running. Client's data on the primary hard drive is secured, however clients on the secondary hard drive will have to re-upload their web files. Any databases, email forwarders, filters, domain aliases, pointer domains and email lists will still be intact as well as your primary login. You can use the file the backup utility in your control panel creates to restore your web files or if you did not use that, hopefully you have your files on some other media. Additional email accounts will have to be recreated as well.

CWI's newer servers do redundant backups to Dell Power Vaults, but on a weekly basis, and under any circumstances clients should safe guard their own important files. We utilize the best providers and equipment, however hardware failure, though rare here, can happen. This is a valid SLA incident. (editor note: in other words, no refunds) We apologize for the inconvenience.

Strange - I would have thought the primary drive would have been for client data and the secondary drive for backups.

That would have been my assumption as well. Seems they just fill both drives with client data.

While people really should keep current backups of their websites, it's fairly common practice now for a web host to make backups of each server's data - if for no other reason than good PR when bad things happen.

Greg Moore