Hostcentric

Hostcentric hosts web sites

Fred Langa's Dead Web Site

October 21, 2004. Don't Use HostCentric Web Hosting by Fred Langa in the Plus Edition of the Langa List newsletter. A web site of Fred's was non-functional for a week, despite the underlying problem being fairly simple.

My Dead Web Site

December 4, 2003. A Thursday. Around 11PM I get an email from someone that a web site I run, which is hosted at Hostcentric, is down. Sure enough, the home page now looks like this:

This is not a DNS issue, looking at the web site by its direct IP address produced the same result. Thinking the home page got clobbered, I tried to FTP to the web site to replace the index.htm file, but I couldn't get into the FTP server.

Time to call technical support - but no. Hostcentric has no technical support after 9 PM, I have to wait 10 hours (until 9AM) to speak to someone on the phone. Even then, I have to call Florida on my dime, they do not have toll-free technical support.
Update: July 27, 2005. They now claim to have 24x7 telephone tech support at 866-897-5418. As I am no longer a customer, I can't verify this.

Time to email for help - but no. There is no email address listed for technical support on hostcentric.com.

Time to use their web site to enter a trouble ticket - but no. The web site is broken and I can't enter a trouble ticket. :-(

Eventually, the trouble ticket system on their web site came back to life and I got in touch with a Hostcentric employee (John) using an online chat facility. At about 12:30 AM (Saturday December 5, 2003) the person I was chatting with said the problem was understood and they would re-build my web site on another computer. I gave him my FTP userid/password. I asked him what next and he had no idea. All he could do is pass along the problem. He did not know how or if anyone would contact me with status updates. He created a trouble ticket, but didn't tell me that and certainly didn't give me a ticket number to refer to later.

December 5, 2003. 10 AM. No change at all. About 10 hours after notifying Hostcentric, the web site still said "twig" and nothing else. I call Florida for tech support and get put on hold and wait and wait. Eventually, a person asks if I would rather be called back. I leave my phone number and get a call about 1.5 hours later.

The person who called said they are moving my web site to a new server. This was not news. He was apologetic and blamed it on a hardware problem. There was nothing he could do to speed it up and he had no idea when the site would be back on-line. Its now over 12 hours (at least) and all I can do is wait.

3 PM. No change at all. By now I have signed up with a new web hosting company and am well on my way to building a new copy of the web site at the new company.

8 PM. No more Twig. Now the web site says "hello". Nothing more. A view source on the home page shows there is no HTML at all. Just the word "hello".

I don't care any more as the new web site is up and running. The DNS servers for the domain have been changed to point to servers run by the new hosting company. Four people on four different ISPs now see the new web site. From now on, I check the old web site by IP address.

December 6, 2003. 11 AM. The web site still says nothing but "hello". I log in to the tech support section of hostcentric.com and it says:
Web server w13125 is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Our System Administrators are aware of the issue and working on it.
I enter a request for support saying that my site has been down for 1.5 days.

2 PM. It still says hello.

8 PM. It still says hello.

December 7, 2003. 1 AM. It's gotten worse. Now the old web site won't even say hello. It fails to load. I can't even ping it's IP address.

And what of my plea for help that I entered electronically yesterday? It's been closed. They said my web site is fine. Not quite. Denny from Hostcentric wrote:
"Your site is now up and running. Due to a Linux kernel exploit on this server, all of the data was moved to a new machine".

Besides not being true, this explanation of the root problem conflicts with the earlier one about it's being a hardware problem.

Hostcentric did not email me with updates to trouble tickets. This despite the fact that there is an email address associated with the trouble ticket. Later however, they did.

1 PM. The web site is back to saying Hello.

6 PM. The web site was not reachable. Some pings worked, some did not. When it was reachable, it still said Hello.

8 PM. I get an email message from Hostcentric saying the web site is back. I suspect they are looking at the new site and don't realize it. Or, they may have changed the IP address of the old site, which I was told they were not going to do. The IP address that I know about, still returns just "hello".

What a disgrace.

December 9, 2003. 11AM. When I try to close out my account, Hostcentric adds insult to injury. This web page has a list of their forms, including a cancellation form for shared hosting. However, that form, is not found. Of course.

8 PM. The old web site is back! I got the following email message from Denny:

I am sorry for the confusion. Your site at 216.65.111.222 is now up and running.
Please let me know if there is anything else I can help you with.

A five day outage. (Note: The IP address above has been changed)

Server Move

Late 2002. For years I FTPed the web site they were hosting to "sammy.virstualscape.com". Then the web site was moved to another computer and no one told me. FTPs run fine, but old pages appear on the site because I am uploading them to a computer no one sees. I learn this because a ping of the web site and a ping of sammy.virtualscape.com return different IP addresses. I change FTP program to go to FTP.mydomain.com (which has the same IP address as the web site) and all was fine. Turns out that nine days ago they sent a message about a server upgrade. Despite having two email addresses for me, I didn't get the message.

English

July 26, 2005. This page in the technical support section of their web site is dated June 17, 2005 and discusses their on-line chat facility. After apologizing for long hold times when calling them on the phone, the page says:

"We are working many of the issues that have been reported with the upgrade as quickly as possible, and understand that you may be feeling frustrated ... If you do not wish to chat we an agent, you can also try calling us after normal business hours, when phone volume is usually lower."

Must be painful to read for English majors.

Created December 9, 2003

Page last updated: July 28, 2005