How Aletia can help me.

[basilr]

#1 Keep your servers up for more than a few weeks at a time.

#2 When my server is down at least keep your email server up so I can email you a support ticket.

#3 Let us know what is going on when a server is down.

The above items are not hard to do for many of the other hosting companies we use. Why is it so hard for Aletia?

I find it really strange that the server that is running the aletia.com site never seems to go down, but the customers server all seems to have problems. But I guess if the aletia.com server went down then you would not be able to sign up more people for your terrible service huh?

Sorry for the attitude, I'm just tired of the terrible service and customer support here. If I treated my customers the way you treat yours, I would be out of business in a month. But I guess that's one of the reasons why I am curreently looking for a different host.

[clio]

#1 Your tone seems to imply that Aletia shuts the servers down on purpose. If they need to reboot the server every once in a while, that's fine with me. If the server crashes beccause of some user, that is not entirely within their control.

#2 If the entire sever is dead or offline, then obviously email is offline as well. You cannot control what goes down and what does not. Also, users should have a secondary email account NOT at Aletia for support purposes. Using an Aletia account for support can causse problems. For example, one user used a autoresponder which actually disrupted support for a long period of time. Have a secondary email account for Aletia support. Get one at yahoo if you need to.

The only way to avoid this is to have an independent email server like they do at Interland. Personally, I find their system ugly and difficult to use. I prefer what Aletia has.

#3 They try. They're getting better. I've seen worse.

I find it really strange that the server that is running the aletia.com site never seems to go down, but the customers server all seems to have problems. But I guess if the aletia.com server went down then you would not be able to sign up more people for your terrible service huh?

NO ONE but Aletia uses that one server. However, SEVERAL HUNDRED people use the other serves. This is a shared hosting environment. The chances of the servers that the users are on of failing are much greater. Machines can also ail with use. That is common. If you want near 100% downtime and don't like sharing, then get a dedicated server.

[basilr]

Originally posted by clio
#1 Your tone seems to imply that Aletia shuts the servers down on purpose. If they need to reboot the server every once in a while, that's fine with me. If the server crashes beccause of some user, that is not entirely within their control.

I would say if this was a "once in a blue moon" thing with the servers going down then that would be fine. But how many chances does Aletia support get before we throw in the towel and go somewhere else where the tech people can keep the servers running for more than a few weeks at a time?

And there is NO reason for them to have to reboot the server once in a while. If they do that's just poor setup and administration on their part. I currently run a dedicated server with over 12 million page views a month. Take a look at it's uptime.

My Server is www.sportbikeworld.com Server Current Uptime is 79 days 14 hours 30 minutes http://www.sportbikeworld.com/status

And the only reason it was rebooted 79 days ago was for a Linux kernal upgrade, and I had a total down time of less that 2 minutes. Uptime before that was over 150 days!

#2 If the entire sever is dead or offline, then obviously email is offline as well. You cannot control what goes down and what does not. Also, users should have a secondary email account NOT at Aletia for support purposes. Using an Aletia account for support can causse problems. For example, one user used a autoresponder which actually disrupted support for a long period of time. Have a secondary email account for Aletia support. Get one at yahoo if you need to.

I was talking about the Aletia support mail bouncing, not my email. I do have a secondary account and use it to email support@aletia.com

The only way to avoid this is to have an independent email server like they do at Interland. Personally, I find their system ugly and difficult to use. I prefer what Aletia has.

#3 They try. They're getting better. I've seen worse.



NO ONE but Aletia uses that one server. However, SEVERAL HUNDRED people use the other serves. This is a shared hosting environment. The chances of the servers that the users are on of failing are much greater. Machines can also ail with use. That is common. If you want near 100% downtime and don't like sharing, then get a dedicated server.

I have a dedicate server:

http://www.sportbikeworld.com/status

I just wanted to keep my business seperate from my community site for tax purposes, but after the terrible support here I have moved my business site ( http://www.basilsoftware.com ) over to my community server.

And I don't expect 100% uptime out of Aletia, but I would like to have at least 90% uptime (of ALL of the services ie FTP, Email, HTTPD) but that just does not seem possible with Aletia. That is why I have left and will never recommend them to anyone and will tell every other professional webmaster that I know to stay away from them.

Believe it or not, some of us here run our own servers and are also professional webmasters (I am the Internet Systems Manager for a 28 School, School District with over 20,000 computers, 75 servers and an OC3 with T1's running inbetween each school. So we know that the service (and excuses) from Aletia are examples of some of the worst tech support and server administration in the industry.

Thank God I don't have to deal with Aletia for anything anymore.

[Nothlit]

Just so you know, e-mailing support@aletia.com is not really a desirable way of opening a support ticket. It is much better to visit https://secure.aletia.com/support/ and open the ticket there. This allows the support team to better categorize and assign your request to a tech much more quickly.

[lookout]

Basilr,

Most of what you say in your initial post sounds fairly reasonable to me. Especially the communication stuff.

I do take issue with the comparison of a dedicated hosting environment and a shared one, however. It's MUCH easier to keep a server running smoothly in a dedicated environment. You probably only have yourself and a maybe a few skilled techs to do much damage in a fairly controlled environment of your own making.

In a shared environment like Aletia's, you probably have hundreds of accounts per server who all have access to cgi scripting, databases, cron jobs, FTP accounts, discussion boards, etc. Many are not your typical users. It's hardly surprising that a rogue script or application misbehaves on occasion and either hogs all the system resources or messes up some critical service. A reboot may not always be necessary, but it may clear the problem quicker than other types of troubleshooting.

Both environments are subject to hardware failures from time to time, as I'm sure you must know as an IT staffer. Reboots with these are inevitable, although higher end servers usually do have a certain amount of reduncancy to reduce that.

Servers, like any type of computer, are subject to the problems introduced by the seemingly endless software upgrades, patches, and updates. That latter is probably worse in a shared hosting environment, since your users are using (and demanding) so many different things.

As for downtime at Aletia, I think you exaggerating the amount considerably. May not seem that way if you were unfortunate enough to get placed on one of the funkier servers. I've generally suspected that the fault there often lay with one my neighboring users abusing Aletia's permissive policies (though perhaps without realizing it). It is certainly not always the fault of the hosting service.

I would not recommend Aletia if you were looking for a rock-solid server for a commercial site. From my own experience, this is pretty tough to find in the inexpensive, shared hosting market.

For a personal or other site where some occasional downtime is OK (on rare occasions lasting a couple of days, but usually not more than a few hours), it's fine. Aletia give you quite a bit for a low price. Communication could be a lot better, but then again, one must be realistic at these prices. I've certainly seen much worse than Aletia. If I'd seen better, I may not be here.

Hard to analyze the quality of a host until you make the switch and hang around a new host yourself for awhile. Things can go swimmingly with them at first, and then go to hell in a handbasket on the first bump. After a few bumps at Aletia, I have seen improvements during my stay, which is more than can say of some other popular hosts. I haven't found their response time to any of my ticket queries bad at all, so I'm sticking around for now. I realize others here have not all been so fortunate, and your view of things is always colored by how your assigned server is performing at the time. I'm always on the lookout for something better myself. I figure it doesn't hurt to keep one's options open....

[basilr]

lookout,

Thank you for the great reply!

[lookout]

My pleasure, Basilr.

[clio]

My mistake in regards to the email question. However, has lookout pointed out, emailing Aletia support is not the best idea. Using the ticket system is always best. Therefore, the lack of support you recieved on your end may be the result of your usage of the email rather than the ticket system directly.

Since you are the administrator of a network, I would think you would know how difficult it is to manage a shared user environment, especially since you manage a school systems! You should see what the students at my school do with the servers, hehe.

My Uptime with Aletia has been fine. When it has been down, it hasn't been terribly noticeable. Yes, support is lacking, but I hardly ever need support. That's why I tell users, if you're a newbie, you might want to find a more supportive host until Aletia gets her act together.

Have fun with your dedicated server.

[lookout]

Hey Clio,

Actually, that was Nothlit who pointed out emailing support not the best means of reaching them. Thanks for the credit though.

My own preference depends on the question. Sometimes I can find my answers here without ever sending in anything. If the question warrants contacting support, I'll try the ticket system first. Sometimes I'll update it from time to time if no reply. Most times that has worked for me. If it's really urgent and the ticket system is for some reason not working, I'll try email. When all else fails, I go back to the forums and post something, or send a pm if I have security concerns.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the lost communication around here revolves around users not providing Aletia with either the proper account info, or a working Non-Aletia email address that they check regularly.

[basilr]

Originally posted by clio
Since you are the administrator of a network, I would think you would know how difficult it is to manage a shared user environment, especially since you manage a school systems! You should see what the students at my school do with the servers, hehe.

I understand it is very difficult to manage a shared user environment, but it's not impossible. MANY other companies do it with MUCH better results that Aletia and that's my complaint. Until Aletia can figure out how to properly manage it's systems it should stop signing up new customers and work on what's broken or hire some admins who have the ability to do the job correctly.

I agree the students are ALWAYS trying to get around our security, but that's what makes the job interesting.

[dynamoeffects.com]

When I first got an account here, I emailed support@aletia.com and I ALWAYS got a response from Laura within an hour or two. I couldn't see why people complained about support since I thought it was fantastic.

I've been happy with their uptime and the amount of services I get for this cheap price. I was also a sysadmin managing mail and web servers, but it was a dedicated environment and much easier to maintain. Just had to watch out for the rouge MySQL processes that would slow the server down to a crawl. Six month uptimes were not uncommon.

If they could respond to support requests within a day, I would be more than happy. I know from personal experience that supporting users can be a very difficult task, but it's nothing that a full time person doing support can't handle, especially since they don't have to take phone calls. It's been a week since I opened my ticket and it's still not resolved yet. I got a response from the Triage Team, but they sent me back to Laura who hasn't responded at all. Support is the only lacking feature with Aletia. I'm satisfied with everything else.