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Dathorn problems
| Posted by subigo, 02-09-2004, 11:16 PM |
| I figured I would give a short review on Dathorn since I first signed up a month ago.
The first three weeks were perfect, not a thing wrong. Fast account creation, fast servers, great uptime and support. But as of 3 days ago everything has started to go down hill.
I am on one of their new servers and apparently it has been getting attacked, so of course what does this mean? Well, the server was down for about 12 hours straight and has gone from being slow, normal, to down every few hours for the past three days.
I did a lot of reading about them before I signed up and everything I heard was good, and even now people are telling me that this is not normal and to just stick with it, well, how long would you stick around if it was your sites?
Understand that Dathorn has offered a refund to anyone who requests one... but the fact that I just moved all of my sites to them a month ago makes me want to wait a little longer (moving hosts is not one of my favorite past times).
Anyway, it has started to cost me money and if it is not fixed by tomorrow I am going to find someone else. Am I being premature? Would you stick around a little longer?
PS - I have been getting this error on all of my forums since they last went down. Anyone know what it means?
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Could not query forums information
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SQL Error : 1030 Got error 28 from table handler
SELECT f.*, p.post_time, p.post_username, u.username, u.user_id FROM (( phpbb_forums f LEFT JOIN phpbb_posts p ON p.post_id = f.forum_last_post_id ) LEFT JOIN phpbb_users u ON u.user_id = p.poster_id ) ORDER BY f.cat_id, f.forum_order
Line : 165
File : /home/religion/public_html/forums/index.php
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Thanks.....
*I am afraid I am going to leave and then the problems will be solved, blah blah blah... Up until now, this was the best first month of any host I have been with
Last edited by subigo; 02-09-2004 at 11:19 PM.
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| Posted by oodie, 02-10-2004, 01:51 AM |
| I can't (and don't want) to tell you what to do. It boils down to how much you trust your host and whether you are comfortable with how they handle things.
I hand an account with Dathorn last August and 2 weeks after that my server was hit by DDOS attack and was up & down for about 2 weeks. No compensation was offerred or given because refund was not in their TOS. At first I still put high hopes on Dathorn due to good reviews in WHT. But after a week I started to get impatient and embarassed at the same time because I just set up my _first_ paying customer a week before. As much as I want to stay with them I had to think about my customer. So I decided to move ...
Are there any hosts that you have in mind? Are you sure they are reliable? It's not easy to find a host that offer what Dathorn offers at similar price. Think carefully before you make up your mind.
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| Posted by simcoweb, 02-10-2004, 03:54 AM |
| Well, i'm a Dathorn user. That is until I got up this morning to receive an email telling me my account was suspended due to claims of 'excessive CPU usage'. No warning, no 'hey, can you fix this issue', no nothing. Pfft...there went all 30 of my customer accounts. To make it worse...they forced us to absolutely turn off 5 of them or they'd completely suspend our account (after they had reinsated it earlier in the day so we could at least download files and start moving the sites). One of the sites draws a measley 17 customers per day but they claim it was using to much CPU resources. Hmmm?
The other is a forum based site. Nothing there but a message board...which they provide as part of their hosting account services. Invisionboard...right there in the control panel. Customer clicks a couple of times...voila....you have a message board. However, use it and your account is using too much CPU. Go figure. There's a total of 260 members in their forum. Too much resource usage.
I have a problem with anyone turning off our sites without first notifying us in some way and at least giving us an opportunity to rectify the problem. I also have a problem with anyone telling me that a site that doesn't even use a gig of transfer every month is using too much CPU resources. And, I have a problem where i've been given ultimatums to turn off my customer sites without having an opportunity to figure out where the problem is and correct it. The customer didn't do anything wrong. Why should their site get turned off? And, I have a problem with not being provided with any evidence or information about what is hogging all the resources as claimed.
Nope, just 'your account is suspended...have a nice day'. Funny thing is we thought we were great customers of theirs. NO problems, paid every month, no porn, no spam, just a nice quiet customer.
Oh well, anyone know a good host for reseller accounts? We need one desperately.
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| Posted by net-trend, 02-10-2004, 04:25 AM |
| Just to be fair, everyone host has their downs and ups. If the server was really being DOSed, there's only so much they can do about it.
It's unfortunate that has to happen, but at least a refund will be granted if needed.
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| Posted by simcoweb, 02-10-2004, 04:31 AM |
| This is true. But in the same token...NO host should simply turn off an entire account without notification to the customer. Nor should they force the customer to turn off specific customer accounts by threatening to turn off all the accounts under our master account. A simple email would have saved a ton of aggravation. Instead we were treated like we have a tail.
We're still hoping someone will respond with a good reseller recommendation. I have 30 sites I need to relocate.
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| Posted by net-trend, 02-10-2004, 04:35 AM |
| If it was stated in their TOS/AUP that they can suspend/terminate sites violating the TOS/AUP without notification, then they really aren't doing anything wrong.
Of course, the best course of action will be to email the account owner involved. But in some cases, it's better to have one angry client rather than a bunch of them.
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| Posted by simcoweb, 02-10-2004, 04:45 AM |
| True..if it's stated. But, of course, every host states that in their TOS and AUP. But it turns out to be a lot of double talk. For example, here's their sales pitch right off their site:
Note the last sentence. Would you call a site with 17 visitors a day one of the most demanding? So.... who determines what the threshold of CPU abuse is? And, why wouldn't the provider be obligated to provide the customer with specifics as to the abuse AND a warning shot that there IS abuse. AFterall, even the site admins get a warning email when one of their customer accounts gets to 80% of their bandwidth usage. Why can't we receive something that says we're in danger of resource abuse?
Personally i'm not saying it's totally wrong to suspend an account. But I do think it's wrong when they do it without any warning or explanation as to what the problem is. And, using extortion to get you to disable accounts immediately without justification.
Once again, just my honest opinion.
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| Posted by net-trend, 02-10-2004, 04:53 AM |
| That's a good post. Resource abuse limits vary from host to host.
Hosts that overload accounts on a single server are more sensitive to resource abuse than those that do not overload their servers.
I guess everyone has their own way of doing things. Best of luck with your searching for a replacement host.
Try findmyhosting.com or hostsearch.com to help you get started. Don't always count on recommendations, what works for one may not work for another.
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| Posted by oodie, 02-10-2004, 04:57 AM |
| I agree on that. But it's how they communicate with clients about the problem that matters. If it's your site that's down, no doubt that you'll be anxious, a little impatient maybe, ask questions to get updated. And it certainly doesn't feel nice if you were told to shut up in a curt manner.
It was not in their TOS so that was out of question back then. If I have high trust on my host I'd decline even if they offer refund. But at least I know they care. I notice that Dathorn recently offer refund for their server downtime. Not sure if they change their policy. I think it's a nice token from their side.
Agree again. But _can_ suspend doesn't mean _must_ suspend, furthermore without any notice.
simcoweb,
There are a lot of recommendation for reseller here if you do a search. Names that are often pop-up are httpme, kualo, bluewho, idologic, clook, unitedhosting, etc.
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| Posted by 1boss1, 02-10-2004, 08:37 AM |
| Agreed Simcoweb.
Alot of hosts sprout "Unlimited this and Unlimited that" in big bold letters, but you need a microscope to read anything about CPU usage.
They can also offer massive space and bandwidth, but when you start using it they can terminate your account on "CPU resources" because they are oversold and can't really meet the space/bandwidth you are promised.
There's always two sides to a story, you may genuinely have a rogue script causing problems although from what you have mentioned there's nothing major there.
Will be interesting to hear Dathorn's response to the termination and lengthy downtime.
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| Posted by coight, 02-10-2004, 09:10 AM |
| simcoweb don't agree with you. If your sites are causing such an issue as where it's impacting a server severly enough then they have every right to suspend you. What do you think they should contact every reseller abusing their resources and wait for them to adjust the usage?
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| Posted by eliquid, 02-10-2004, 10:03 AM |
| uhm...
Let me say this, Ive been with dathorn for 1 year and 3 months...
They were my first reseller provider and I learned alot from them. They have grown and changed alot...
They will suspend or terminated your account without notification and they will not hand hold you at all. Reply tickets can sometimes be downright rude sometimes and when they go down they stay down for a good time.
Now on the other hand, I learned that I cannot put all my eggs in one basket from dathorn, and thus moved my clients to another reseller and moved my main site to a 3rd reseller account, ensuring uptime for support of my customers. I still use Dathorn for some small "personal" sites and backup storage.
I dont need help from them anymore as they never seems to go down on my server (cpanel07) but when it does go down I know it will take some time as it only goes down for a dDos.
Price is great and Andrew knows his **** about servers for sure. They have phpsuexec on which also prompted a move of my clients and some talk of safe mode turning on made me for sure move them.
I think for the money, dathorn cant be beat really when you look at Andrews uptime most part and stabilty.
Maybe not the best in customer service, but for the price why should it, its for a experinced user and I learned a great deal figuring out things myself.
I once had an account terminated without my knowledge once, which i understand Dathorn position on.. but the thing is, without me knowing the customer could have done a chargeback on me through paysystems, and since I barely use them one chatgeback would be enough for me to go over my limit on chargebacks and have my account pulled. I luckily got a refund in before the client knew his site was offline, so it didnt happen.
So even though Dathorn might have the right to pull accounts at any time, they need to realize that doing so might ruin the reseller more in other ways like mentioned above.
Again I still use them, but for personal or non business reasons.. its nice for storage and backup for me.
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| Posted by Dathorn-Andrew, 02-10-2004, 10:55 AM |
| I know for a fact that the majority of the 5 sites that I told this user to deactivate immediatley upon his account being re-instated were using some very intense Perl scripts. The system resource usage was just out of control and we were getting many complaints from other customers on the server. Lo and behold, every domain that was causing problems was under this one reseller account. We do not have time to let you move the accounts in the 48+ hours that it may take. We needed a solution immediatley.
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| Posted by eliquid, 02-10-2004, 11:04 AM |
| Andrew, isnt there a way to just suspend the accounts and then reopen just one at a time to let him download the files at least?
I agree action must be taken, but maybe you could have zipped up (or tar) the 5 accounts up and placed the tar file in one of his folders so he could get the files he needed? this way you can terminate the accounts and he still gets his files. Or at least open one at a time so he can download them.
i never understood why people would just "kill" your accounts and not tell you about it. Of course the main provider will know before anyone will how many cpu resources are being used up so why not at least let people get their files to give to their customers before you terminate an account so quickly?
couldnt take more than a minute and half of work to tar up and send email to customer
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| Posted by Dathorn-Andrew, 02-10-2004, 11:14 AM |
| The accounts were NOT terminated. He can still retrieve the content and likely already did. I don't see why this is an issue. An account getting terminated has only happened once and unfortunately it was with you.
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| Posted by eliquid, 02-10-2004, 11:21 AM |
| ok i didnt understand, I thought they were terminated.
Anyways, what do you mean
"An account getting terminated has only happened once and unfortunately it was with you"
Your telling me Dathorn has only terminated one account in its history and it was only with me..
HAHA.. that looks foolish on your part if so
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| Posted by simcoweb, 02-10-2004, 11:22 AM |
| Lots of good points have been posted while I slept. Thanks everyone.
Here's some simple facts and observations:
1) I've been with them for several months
2) The sites in question have also been there for several months
3) Two of the sites in question have less than 50 visitors per day
4) Those two sites have a CGI script on the home page that cycles through a banner each time the home page reloads
5) Several of these sites were on shared hosting previously and without incident
Some simple questions:
1) If they were hogging resources then why wasn't that discovered and addressed several months ago?
2) Why do they have to disable the entire reseller account for 1 or 2 sites under that account?
3) If they could take the time to email that they HAVE suspended my account then why couldn't they email me before hand to TELL me they would suspend the account?
The point is, I can write anything I want into the AUP. But this business isn't about machines...it's about the people. You know. The customer? Now all they've done is piss off 30 site owners who didn't have a clue. And, they lose my business AND my future business AND my referrals to their business. One simple email would've resolved it.
Let's turn the tables for a sec. Ok, i'm the consumer. I have their service that states 99.7% up time. But, they drop to 95% uptime due to some outage or server miscue. Now...I stop paying them cuz they can't keep their system up as guaranteed. How do you think that would fly? Would I wake up to find an apologetic note and a credit for the time missed? Ummm....probably not. Most likely they'd TURN OFF MY SERVICE FOR NON-PAYMENT! Even though THEY were in violation of their agreement.
To arbitarily turn off an entire reseller account when a handful of the actual sites under that account were suspect in causing CPU abuse was wrong. What should have happened is an email stating 'These sites A, B C D E are abusing resources. Please disable them until you can rectify the issues. Here's the logs showing the abusing programs. Thank you for your cooperation'.
That's all. Nothing special..no sponge bath ... no candy or flowers. Afterall, isn't hosting a service business?? At least it's supposed to be the last time I checked. Instead they might as well insulted my wife and called me their biatch boy.
Sure, they know about servers. Not a problem there. Yes, they have quick response on their trouble tickets. Not a problem there. But i'll bet that the cop that's beating you senseless for jaywalking is probably a nice guy in real life too and knows something about something. But, did they use excessive force for a petty crime? Hmmm...it's up to interpretation.
Point is, I wake up Monday to a rude email, 30 pissed off customers, and threats from them that my entire account will be disabled indefinitely if I don't take down 5 of our sites within the next couple of hours. IMHO that's lousy customer relations, my friends.
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| Posted by eliquid, 02-10-2004, 11:26 AM |
| I should recommend you to these people..
bluewho.com
simpli.biz
citadelhost.com
unitedhosting.co.uk
httpme.com
i have more if you need more resellers...
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| Posted by eliquid, 02-10-2004, 11:28 AM |
| to look at it from a server admin side:
4) Those two sites have a CGI script on the home page that cycles through a banner each time the home page reloads
sometimes with cgi you can get very highloads due to the fact a cgi script normally calls the entire script to prcess just one action. I would recommend going to php if you can just to help you out
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| Posted by simcoweb, 02-10-2004, 11:28 AM |
| Hello Andrew. Yes, you did reinstate them for us so we could retrieve data which was greatly appreciated. Then you made us disable 5 of them within 'the next couple of hours or we will'. Which we did under great protest and after having to call our clients and explain to them that their sites will be down until we can relocate them which was a lot of fun. Oh yeah...let me do that every day.
It was handled poorly, Andrew. We're not cattle. Anyway, the sites are disabled and we're in the process of moving them as requested.
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| Posted by coight, 02-10-2004, 11:31 AM |
| The way we do it is if it poses a large enough problem is suspend the account or account(s) then email the reseller. Sometimes emailing then getting them to act is sufficient also.
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| Posted by simcoweb, 02-10-2004, 11:32 AM |
| eliquid, if a server can't handle a banner rotator with 50 or less visitors per day then there's a serious problem with the server, not the site. My Commodore 64 could handle a banner script. I fail to see how any resource abuse could take place. Even if it was 50 visits times 3 banners on the page...if a server can't spit out 150 banners in a 24 hour period then i'd replace the dang thing
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| Posted by eliquid, 02-10-2004, 11:40 AM |
| i understand, but when you place perl next to php, perl will always lose on the issue... I wasnt tieing in the number of people using your script.. just the comparisions on the two langs.
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| Posted by coight, 02-10-2004, 11:42 AM |
| Unfortunately not all problems will start from the time you place a site on a server. We have had many accounts using very little traffic that get slashdotted and the server was reaching loads of 5+ which affected the performance of the server. However with the tools we have in place anything that was running at that time (backups and logs) were put on hold with the software we run until the loads dropped back to acceptable levels.
Well obviously that is not the correct procedure for most hosts. Maybe you could have asked him before signing up about this? Why anyone would suspend all accounts is beyond me.
Again, if the load is such an issue that it's impacting other sites a suspension is quicker than contacting the client and awaiting a response. If you were overloading our servers without any prior history and it was impacting the operations of the server we would suspend then contact.
Any reputable host will live up to their SLA. If your not getting what you paid for ask for a credit.
I agree to some point. Again, I must point out a reseller account does not give resellers the right to run cpu intensive scripts as they please. If it's impacting other resellers or their clients then the host has a clause to act. You could be on holidays or something similar should Dathorn or any other host wait for you to get back while the server is being overloaded?
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| Posted by coight, 02-10-2004, 11:43 AM |
| If the banner script is poorly written one visitor to it can cause a server to overload. It's common with alot of third party scripts that they loop or some other problems.
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| Posted by simcoweb, 02-10-2004, 11:48 AM |
| Good points, Robert. And always good to see both sides. I agree with those for the most part especially the last one. But I guess where i'm a little fuzzy on is why I still have not been informed exactly what script(s) are the abusers. So, to this moment I still haven't a clue what to fix. All I got was a threat to disable them or lose your whole account. Now, what am I supposed to do with that?
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| Posted by simcoweb, 02-10-2004, 11:53 AM |
| Ok, for 3 years I used the same banner rotator on 2 other hosts and never had an issue. So sorry, Robert, that's not gonna fly on this one but I understand your point. This certain site runs a shopping cart and a banner rotator. That's it. There's no looping, no massive traffic load, and they make about 2 sales a week. She's had 370 visitors so far this month. Last month she didn't use 700 mbs of transfer. It doesn't add up to abuse. Sorry.
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| Posted by coight, 02-10-2004, 11:55 AM |
| Yes and this is not good business sense. If they had bothered to contact you with specifics I'm sure this post would not be here . All I can suggest is quickly signup with a new host ask them allot of questions (IE what would they do in a similar scenario) and ask dathorn to provide you with tar versions of your site.
Then get your new host to extract them on your server. Be sure to ask whoever you go with if they are willing to do that. Some hosts charge fees for that service.
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| Posted by coight, 02-10-2004, 11:57 AM |
| Sorry, I didn't know the specifics of your account but yes the most likely cause of cpu intensive sites is not due to large number of hits but poorly written code. You see this allot with code hacks for phpbb/phpnuke
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| Posted by simcoweb, 02-10-2004, 12:04 PM |
| I just want to reiterate that we're not saying that there wasn't some sort of abuse possibly. But we've never been informed as to what it is. Just that there was abuse. So it's no help to us in that respect. We'd gladly fix it if we knew what to fix. I have my suspicions on one of the accounts but the others i've no clue. They're just running a shopping cart and banner rotator on 2 of them, one is just a shopping cart, and one is just the Invisionboard forum that comes with the hosting package.
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| Posted by Esr Tek, 02-10-2004, 12:31 PM |
| Not giving you proper info and proof of what the problem is, is unacceptable for any host.
However with Dathorn's logic and policy to 'not hand hold'. They may feel that you can get the site logs yourself and look at them. They are in every accounts cPanel.
(not saying thats what they do, or that is right thing to do. Just a guess on why they didn't provide proof).
However this may be far stretch, as most of us know those logs won't give you everything needed and may show you 0 of actual issue.
For the sites that have the 'unknown issue' I'd look into what cart they are using. You keep saying 'it's only a cart' but missing Roberts point, that the cart can be poorly written and cause the issue w even 1 user on it.
As for IB forums, we have a user pumping 4500+ users and 80GB a month using IB forums (no hacks). That site (w/o any hacks added) just recently got to point we had to move it off server for intense resource usage.
Prior to that the user had around 100 users and did 20GB month and used same resources he does now, but that was with a ton of hacks added on and the portal system. As soon as those where gone we could let him stay on and build to current point.
Point there is: just because it's a IB forums (that came in control panel to install) doesn't mean it can't be using tons of resources, it all depends on whats been done/added to it.
If I where you I'd definitely look into each site hard before just putting on another providers servers. Chances are the same thing will happen (well not exact same, but same end result. The sites either get suspended or forced to be terminated for resource usage.
Edit: typos
Last edited by Esr Tek; 02-10-2004 at 12:38 PM.
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| Posted by simcoweb, 02-10-2004, 12:43 PM |
| Thanks Esr Tek. Once again we like to hear from different points of view. The IB version is straight out of the box with not one hack. Last month the entire site used less than 10GB of transfer. I would assume that we would all agree that IB is one of the better written programs available and that it was written with minimal server load in mind as part of its appeal. However, i'm not a programmer so I can't argue those points. All I know is that it's well marketed, well supported, and widely used. Plus, by a host offering it to their customer it serves as a sort of 'endorsement' for that product. Then, penalizing them for using it is an odd twist I would think. Personally I don't feel that the amount of usage that the board is experiencing is at a level of abuse. But, then again i'm not a server admin so I don't know. But those figures for data transfer and visitor count seem awful low for abuse to be taking place. It's about 10,000 posts per month from 265 members.
I guess another angle on this is that if you're a host and you know that particular scripts can become a resource problem then 1) it shouldn't be offered as part of the package, and 2) it should be stated in the TOS and AUP that you can't install them. To give them to you then turn your site off for using it is rather hypocritical.
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| Posted by eliquid, 02-10-2004, 12:53 PM |
| maybe it was a combination of scripts running, not just IB alone?
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| Posted by simcoweb, 02-10-2004, 12:56 PM |
| Oh yeah...I forgot. There's a photo gallery also with 9 pics in it. Whoopee.
On another note, one of the sites does have some scripts on it that could definitely be resource issues. One was a hit counter service, then a guestbook and links page server as well as a message board server. I disabled those as i'm particular that was the problem on the one account. But the others are still a mystery. They have nothing like that at all.
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| Posted by net-trend, 02-10-2004, 12:59 PM |
| Simcoweb,
I guess it's time to move on. Like suggested earlier, make sure you email the prospective host and ask them how they would handle a similiar situation and make sure you are happy with that.
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| Posted by simcoweb, 02-10-2004, 01:06 PM |
| Yep...that's what we're doing...movin on. I came here originally to find a reseller host based upon everyone's input and experience. That's why I came back this time as well. I think we're going with a dedicated server setup. Seems to make sense over shared hosting so we don't bump into this issue again.
Thanks for your input!
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| Posted by Dathorn-Andrew, 02-10-2004, 02:49 PM |
| We've never before suspended an entire reseller's account for such issues. This was an abnormal case where there were many domains on this account causing issues at random intervals. Since this user's account has been re-activated server loads are back up to 20. That is absurd to think that we should let this continue while it is resolved. It is not our responsibility to debug your scripts/issues for you, I replied to your ticket a bit ago with two specific CGI/Perl scripts that continually run using a bunch of system resources.
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| Posted by simcoweb, 02-10-2004, 03:38 PM |
| Andrew, I don't see how a shopping cart can continually run. I'm sorry...but it just doesn't happen. Someone has to click on a link to activate the script to display a page. It can't do it by itself.
Personally I think the servers are way oversold or misconfigured. That shopping cart is used on literally 1000's of sites and after speaking with servermatrix.com techies (at The Planet) they are familiar with the cart and say they have no issues with it. The problem lies in the shared hosting, not the script. We've run this exact cart at Powweb, iPowerweb, and Valueweb as well as many others and never had an issue.
I received your response and appreciate your reply. We are working diligently to move the accounts and hope to have this all resolved within a few days max.
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