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I signed up with StartLogic in June of 2004. There were problems right off the bat. I paid the 95.00 hosting fee with a credit card, the same card I'd used dozens of times before on the internet without incident. 12 hours after submitting payment I received an email from a D******* H***** at StartLogic informing me of the following: |
Dear Jeff,
There is a discrepancy with your web hosting request with StartLogic. Please reply back with the following information at 1-800-***-**** ext. 211.
Domain Name:
Name:
Mailing address:
Phone number:
Last 4 digits of the credit card: |
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During the course of the next 6 hours I called the number and extension which had been provided to me four different times, each time being informed by recorded message that the party I was trying to reach was not available. I also called their so-called "24/7" support line, only to be informed that this was an issue that needed to be resolved with the billing department - not technical support - and that if I had already been given a number and extension to call, their best advice was to keep calling it until I got through. In the meantime I had emailed D******* H***** with the requested information, only to receive an email back from her several hours later informing me that this information must be taken by telephone, not email.
Apparently she was in the office, just not answering her phone. |
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The problem facing me at this point was that I really didn't have a whole lot of time. Serious CGI failures on my existing web server had basically crippled my website. Traffic, and the revenue that came with it, was down 60% and had been for several days, this in spite of repeated assurances from the host's technical support team that the CGI issue had been identified and would soon be corrected. After 3 days of this I'd decided to cut my losses and find a new host. I went with startlogic.com primarily because they offered a "no questions asked" 30-day money back guarantee and a generous 40G bandwidth allowance. There are literally thousands of webhosts hawking their services on the internet today. New ones seem to pop up virtually overnight. StartLogic was fairly new but from the limited research I was able to do before signing up they seemed to have grown fairly rapidly. I liked the idea of 24/7, toll-free phone support too. It suggested a degree of professionalism not evident in many of the newer, start-up hosting providers. When problems come up it's reassuring to know that help is only a phone call away.
Man, what a joke that would turn out to be. |
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I did eventually get Ms. H***** on the phone the following day and provided her with the information she had requested. After a somewhat shaky start, my account was set up and I was able to upload my site and get its DNS settings pointed at StartLogic nameservers. Propagation through my ISP took approximately 24 hours and then it was simply a matter of fine tuning permissions for a few of my scripts and my site was back online. Within 48 hours traffic levels were back to normal and I could finally breathe a sigh of relief. My website is not big nor hugely popular but after over 5 years of diligently studying the major search engines and different optimization theories and techniques I've been fortunate enough to gain a small foothold with regard to some of the more popular keywords and phrases prominent in my little piece of the internet. It pays the bills anyway. |
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Having set up the StartLogic hosting account and moved my site, the next several months passed without major incident. Ping times were significantly slower than I would have liked to see, but not so slow as to seriously impact my site's performance, and traffic/page views were staying fairly consistent so all in all I was satisfied. I did not intend to renew this account for a second year - primarily because of the slow server speed - but it was an acceptable alternative until I could find better, more reliable hosting services. It gave me a year's worth of breathing room, so to speak.
Or so I thought... |
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Toward the end of November 2004 my site was down for a period of 35 hours. I have no email record of this problem or my attempts to correct it. My communication with StartLogic was via their trouble ticket support system, which is an onsite means of contacting their technical support directly. This is done on their actual website and no email trail, other than the ticket "keys," is generated. |
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Note: Startlogic has purged ALL of my previous trouble ticket support requests from their database. I had intended to take screenshots to illustrate the futility of this exchange but they are not available now. |
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At any rate, during the last week of November my website went offline. A later review of my own traffic tracking script would pinpoint the time at approximately 6:00 a.m., Wednesday, November 24th, 2004 - sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m. anyway. It didn't come to my attention until close to 11:00 that morning, at which point I began monitoring my website continuously, both via browser calls to certain pages and ping requests. Websites go down all the time, sometimes it's for several seconds or several minutes. It's the main reason why no web server can guarantee 100% uptime. It simply isn't possible. Sites go down for any number of reasons. Sometimes it's planned maintenance or a server upgrade. Sometimes it's just a hiccup in the system. If you notice that your website is not online, don't panic immediately but start watching it and keep watching it. If more than an hour passes and it's still not back online, get busy and try to find out why. |
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Which after an hour is what I did. I called their toll-free technical support line and after a 40-minute hold time was finally connected to one of their tech-support personnel. This individuals thick middle eastern accent and poor command of the English language made communication between us virtually impossible. To be perfectly blunt, the only information I gained during the 10 minutes we attempted to speak was, "your website is fine, yes, no problem, I am seeing no problems - you are quite fine. You have other issue to resolve?" After learning there was no one else in the support department I could speak with, I hung up. |
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During the long hold time I had done two things. The first thing was to call two friends, one on the west coast and one near the eastern coast, and ask them if they could see my site. Both could not. The second thing I did was submit a trouble ticket via the StartLogic support ticket system. I designated it to technical support, marked it urgent and crossed my fingers that I would get a quick response. Almost immediately I received a ticket "key" in my inbox. This is the key, or code, which is needed to view the ticket you have submitted and whatever responses have been made to it. Many web hosts utilize this system and when it works it works extremely well. When it doesn't, it's like dealing with a brick wall. I had a website that was offline and returning DNS errors (as in "there is no website at this address"), a fact which I had confirmed not only from my own observation but through two other sources as well, and a host who was telling me basically that I was imagining things and that everything was all right. Something was definitely wrong with this picture. |
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It took 12 hours for my initial trouble ticket to merit any response. In that time I had submitted two more tickets and called the technical support line again. My two other tickets were answered within minutes of the first and simply referred me to the first response, which was that my site was coming up fine for them and that any problems I was having viewing it were undoubtedly on my end and not within their control. I can't recall another time in my life when I've been more frustrated or felt more helpless. The second time I'd called their technical support line I'd reached an individual who I could at least understand, and more importantly, could understand me, but I got no further with him than I had the first. StartLogic's position was that my website was online and viewable internetwide and that any problems I was having seeing it were simply local and should be dealt with accordingly. I was seeing the exact opposite. My website was returning DNS errors from three different geographic locations on a total of seven different computers and had been doing so for 12 hours straight. It was incomprehensible to me that everyone was wrong and StartLogic was right. There was too much evidence against it. |
After approximately 35 hours of sustained downtime my site suddenly popped back online and I immediately checked my traffic logs. Sure enough, my suspicions were confirmed. Sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m. on the morning of 11-24-2004 my website basically disappeared from the internet. It didn't disappear completely, which was curious, but it might as well have. The graph at the right is an actual screenshot of my tracking script for the time period in question. It was necessary to take two screenshots and piece them together because of the size, and I've also cropped it to reduce overall file size of the image, but aside from that it is a true reproduction of the actual graph. This graph shows only the first 17 hours of downtime and unfortunately I don't have a screenshot of the following day, which would have shown more of the same for the first 18 hours. It's obvious that we weren't completely offline because a small number of page views were still being logged. I have no explanation as to why this was or how it could have happened.
StartLogic claims it never happened at all.
All of this took place toward the end of November, 2004. Following this, the next several months passed without incident. I continued to monitor ping times, which were acceptable, but only barely so, and kept my fingers crossed that the worst had passed. An ideal relationship with a web server is to have no relationship at all. I was not a novice at setting up or maintaining websites. I don't require handholding from my host or deluge them with support requests or an endless series of questions about how to do this or how to do that. I already know how to do it. I have worked with probably a dozen hosts in the past eight years and for the most part all I've ever needed was the login/FTP/DNS information which they've provided me in the setup email and I have not needed to contact them again. Sometimes I've needed clarification on a server path or to confirm the location of sendmail or something like that but I basically leave them alone because there's nothing I need from them. It's only when problems have popped up, problems on their end, that I have even contacted them at all. Being in the hosting business on a very small scale myself, I am only too aware of the fact that a customer like me, a customer who basically gets his or her account set up and then disappears into the background, is an ideal customer to have. |
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On February 14, 2005 StartLogic suspended my hosting account. When I tried to login that morning to check my stats I was greeted with the following notice:
I immediately checked my inbox but there was no email from StartLogic. Next, I called the toll-free support number and was told that everything looked fine from a billing perspective. I said, well, yes, I'm sure it does since I already paid you 7 months ago. My account has been suspended though and I need to know why. The woman I was speaking with informed me that she didn't have access to this information and therefore could not tell me. I asked to be connected to someone who did have this information and she told me this would not be possible, that I would need to send an email to abuse@startlogic.com and they would be able to tell me. I was incredulous. I told her it would take days to get a response and that meanwhile my site would still be offline and she said, "Oh no, it won't take that long. I'm sure they'll get back with you sometime today." It's now been two full weeks since I sent that email, as well as two more to follow it up, and I still have not received a response! |
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Hey, don't take my word for it. Read what other people have to say about StartLogic here. |
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