Hostgator makes a HUGE mistake

Hostgator makes HUGE mistake

Sunday, September 6th, 2009 Blog, Website Design by admin

After having a host gator account for a little more than an year I go to load up my website www.o5media.com as I always do to gaze at it’s beauty.

To my surprise the site did not load, I got an error saying “Connection could not be establish”, the usual error you get when your internet isn’t connected, so I loaded up trusty ‘ol google.com and it worked fine so I popped open terminal and pinged my server and it was no where to be found.

I figured Hostgator was cashing in on the .01% of my 99.99% up time guarantee. I was wrong.

I went to their site and loaded up the live chat so I could get some answers. Talked to a support rep who looked at the server and informed me that all the server needed is a reboot, no big deal. So he gave me a url to go to and fill out a server reboot form. I thanked him and went on my way.

About 15 minutes later I got a response from Advanced Technical Support:

Hello,
Please refer to: CBB-*********(removed) Due to your failure to respond to the last two requests, this server is now being suspended.
Please update us with a response as soon as possible in your security ticket: CBB-*********(removed).We have left you a voice mail concerning this issue.
If you have any other questions, please let us know.

I was very confused, I had not received ONE email or ONE call/voice mail from them so I called up the 1866 support so I could get a real person on the phone.

After a 12 min hold time (at 11pm at night) I got a hold of someone. I explained him the situation and gave him the ticket number that the email had referred me to. We went back and fourth for quite a while going over incorrect contact information and then realized the problem. The support ticket wasn’t issued to my account. Meaning in the email I posted above, that ticket number wasn’t for me.

So, we ended up hanging up the phone, after a total of 40 minutes) and he was going to escalate the issue and get back to me via email (all the while my server is STILL OFFLINE).

20 minutes after we hung up I received the following email:

Hello,
I’m sorry for the confusion and inconvenience it appears there was a mistake in hardware ids when suspending a separate server. This issue was cause in part due to a misidentified server ip to hardware id pairing. At this time I have returned the server to active the new root password for the server is ********************(removed)
The server it self has been down since roughly 2009-09-05 20:21:35 centeral standard time
Once again I am sorry for this mix up as well as the inconvenience. If there are any further issues please let us know.

Yep, that’s right. Hostgator suspended my server on accident. Unbelievable.