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The Planet Hosting Had a Fire; Excellent Communications Throughout
Major Web hosting company The Planet is currently down and experiencing an outage due to a fire in their Houston data center. Craig has provided the following summary of the events:
- Electrical transformer explosion at ThePlanet’s Houston datacenter.
- 3 walls knocked down – but servers are ok
- Backup generators cannot be started due to fire safety concerns
- 9000 servers affected - over 7,500 customers.
- Countless third party services affected by outage
The latest update on their customer forums shows that they are in the process of turning the power back on and expect some pieces to be online within 3 hours of now (so by 10am Eastern). They are also working to get replacement equipment with their suppliers.
Hats off to the team at The Planet for keeping the forum thread regarding the fire and downtime current. One of the hardest things as a customer is to sit and wait for an update when a current incident exists. The Planet has been continuously updating the thread with information (even if it’s that there is no new information).
I’ve said for a long time that startups need status pages and The Planet shows you just how to communicate properly with your customers.
Update: 12:45am Eastern: The CEO update
Update: 11:30pm Eastern: No updates for approximately 3 hours. I am now receiving emails from very unhappy customers.
Update 9:00pm Eastern: They have some servers online (mostly backend) and are continuing to work to restore power. There are over 2,000 people at this moment browsing the thread on the forum. While some of it is due to a slashdot, you can see just how large this outage is.
Update 7:50pm Eastern: No real update as of yet, they have moved some DNS servers so propagation can take place quicker and they are working to restore power. Another update in hour we are told.
Update 6:00pm Eastern: Their test has begun and their forums are currently getting pounded as they are listed on Slashdot.
Update 2:00pm Eastern: Looks like sites are still down (e.g. Entrecard) – also note that in the comments, people are suggesting that the support at The Planet isn’t as good as it might look on the surface. The Planet says that at 5pm Central they will begin to turn power back on and check systems from there. It’s actually quite shocking that this story hasn’t made the news on more blogs – we will continue to monitor the situation.
Absolutely unforgiveable. As of this moment, H1 has been down for 26.5 hours. They couldn’t run their backup generators because the “fire department” forbade them from doing so. Have you wondered why? Sounds like the Planet had a flawed backup plan by placing their backup generators too close to the damaged area.
We are cancelling all our business at the Planet as soon as possible. We can’t trust this management and their practices.
I am Tom Psillas, CEO of Tamion Corp., parent company of 24 websites hosted at the Planet’s H1 facility.
All our websites have been down for over 24 hours, due to the PLanet fire.
Our largest website, LinkToMeet.com, which recently went live, has over 1.4 million members.
Needless to say, we are losing thousands of dollars, plus worse, the goodwill of our customers.
How do you replace that?
Not very easily!
Most people understand issues out of a company’s control, like tornados, hurricanes, etc., but fires caused by negligence are grossly inexcusable.
We will be relocating our servers very soon.
Excellent communications throughout??
We are just one of what must be tens of thousands of downline customers who have a tiny slice of server space with a reseller who buys time from a wholesaler who deals with a server owner. Just try and imagine how many people are really being afected by this? Our VoIP business has been nonexistent while we are consoled with these “feel good” buzz words that don;t actually tell us anything concrete.
My personal view is this should not have happened. It was due to neglect of testing standards and ageing equipment. And, for a technical support person to describe a major fire as a “facility issue” is just what is wrong with this industry. It seems there is a corporate culture of secrecy and instead of keeping clients informed with meaningful information they can plan they businesses on, they get clever language. Looking at these blogs I see company officials have talked with such guarded language that they did not actually say anything.
I would say excellent use of language to make customers feel better is not excellent communications throughout. Throughout what? It is not over till the fat lady sings. And all I am hearing is corporate, carefully worded releases, thin on information and thick on spin.
We do not even deal with ThePlanet.com but of course someone higher up the food chain that we deal with, does. And our VoIP has been down since. So guess how many clients down the line are affected? Who knows!
And all we can do is wait.
If you need a replacement Host try Kiosk.
These are a great bunch of guys they know what they are doing and the prices are great.
The understand the Internet Marketing community and don’t restrict you like other hosts. And they work on a ask questions first policy as opposed to shutting you down and never ask questions.
Check them out they also offer a great first time offer. And they have a great conference tool as well.
I been using them now for a couple month and no complaints.
Check them out here:
http://compufinance.mykioskhosting.com
Hi,
I have been with The Planet within the last 2 months for around 1 year now but after this inccident i have decided to move to a new hosting company which offer a better plan with a better disaster recovery. I am also here to recommended anyone to go with LargeServer – http://www.largeserver.net
Their price seems like expensive but they have a good management system and usually i email them to get some discount :). Good luck .
Cheers,
I’m sorry about this issue that the Planet has caused you. I would recommend that if you ready to go ahead and switch to a differnt hosting provider that you look into Hosting.com. Not only do they provide a great product and use the latest technology but they also have an awesome group of innovative team members who pride themselves on their business with you. I’m sure they would be happy to help you relocate right away. I’ve been very happy with Hosting.com, which I can rarely say about anything in the tech business. Give them a try and good luck!
Hey Tom,
I’m right with you there. I would relocate to Hosting.com. They have a great service as well as a great foundation of people. I’ve been very happy with them, which I can rarely say very often when it comes to hosting. Good Luck!
I’m sorry about this issue that the Planet has caused you. I would recommend that if you ready to go ahead and switch to a differnt hosting provider that you look into Hosting.com. Not only do they provide a great product and use the latest technology but they also have an awesome group of innovative team members who pride themselves on their business with you. I’m sure they would be happy to help you relocate right away. I’ve been very happy with Hosting.com, which I can rarely say about anything in the tech business. Give them a try and good luck!
You get what you pay for:
http://www.equinix.com/prod_serv/ibx/ibx_environment.php
i am a longtime customer of the planet/ev1 and have always had my server at h1. i called the planet today to inquire about having my server moved to another facility. they could not move it to the other facility in houston because it was “running at maximum capacity” according to the salesman. (there was no room there.) it got me thinking, so i asked what the capacity was like at h1. he said h1 was also “running at maximum capacity” prior to the fire. so i looked at weather.com, and it was nearly 100 degrees in houston yesterday, meaning the planet’s h1 air conditioning systems would have been running on overdrive. and on a saturday, there was probably insufficient staff their to monitor things.
does anybody else think the idiot managers at the planet were simply consuming too much electricity, making this “short fuse” on decrepit equipment resulting in an explosion an inevitability? that has to be the case…… the planet is run by a bunch of incompetents with little regard for industry standards and best practices….. and now we have proof of it.
i remember a few months ago, the planet had a staff meeting in las vegas. (yeah, right before all the “double down” on your RAM offers started to come almost daily through the email…..) i called tech support one of those nights due to some issue. the tech support guy told me that because so many staff were away in las vegas, there was only one person running the h1 facility. granted it was late at night, but still, one person? apparently, that guy was running around like a mad man…. i’d really like to know how many people they had working on saturday at 5pm when the explosion occurred. it should have been detected earlier.
the problem with the planet is that they dont think stategically about information systems. they think tactically, putting out fires all the time. now, not ironically, they’re literally putting out fires. the planet needs to get ahead of the game and treat their customers right. unfortunately, i can’t wait around for them to wake up. there are too many other companies out there that actually get it….
Sorry to hear that so many people are getting hosed by EV1. If you’ve got a site with a million-plus users, then you should have a redundant host or co-location on a different network. DRP seems to be a lost art with startups. Sure, Twitter had problems, but their disaster was self-inflected.
Well Tom, as the CEO of Tamion Corp, your butt should be in the sling for this one as well. Just as H1 had poor Emergency Disaster Planning you weren’t to bright as a CEO. Who would host a site with 1.4 Million customers and not have your own Emergency Disaster Plan in place. With that much traffic hitting a site, load balancing and redundancy should have been your biggest concern. The reasons why Data Centers have multiple carriers for service is the same reason you should have multiple carriers. How can pass the blame on H1, which I do agree they don;t know what they are doing either, when your own policy and practices are not in place.
1. Any “Mission Critical” website or business has loss of business insurance.
2. Talk about negligence to your customers. You put them in a “All the eggs in one basket situation”
3. If traffic is that heavy, why are they not in a Tier 1 Data Center? When you have a site that big, what would possess you to take shortcuts? Must be trying to maximize your profits. “Live by price, die by price.”
4. Goodwill of your customers! The best thing you can do is admit you F@$#%d Up and find a good network engineer to sort out your own issues.
1.4 Million subscribers on a site, you drop them in 1 data center then have the balls to whine like a little bitch that it is all their fault. That is “grossly inexcusable,” to not take responsibility where it is due. Hope you don’t have Board Members and Share Holders to explain too, otherwise the data center may not be the only thing getting replaced.
Google data centers use fire gas supression systems as do most data centers these days. With such systems, a transformer fire (not totally uncommon) can at least be isolated and backup power systems can quickly be switched in. Why on earth are The Planet not using such fire supression systems?
Excellent communications?!?! If you call cheerleading and mis-representing to customers what happened “excellent”, perhaps.
Unfortunately, they’re holding a lot of us hostage by not powering back up our machines.
Is it possible they had more damage than they admit to?
I don’t know what to believe from these people.
I’m sorry about this issue that the Planet has caused you. I would recommend that if you ready to go ahead and switch to a differnt hosting provider that you look into Hosting.com. Not only do they provide a great product and use the latest technology but they also have an awesome group of innovative team members who pride themselves on their business with you. I’m sure they would be happy to help you relocate right away. I’ve been very happy with Hosting.com, which I can rarely say about anything in the tech business. Give them a try and good luck!
Fortunately, it looks like Entrecard is back up and functioning pretty well now, so it seems that the outage has simply given us a one-day vacation from our dropping routines. For me this was a welcome break because I managed to log in shortly after the site came back online and was able to scoop up some relatively inexpensive advertising deals.
It’s 4 days now, we are still offline. We have multiple servers in H1, phase 1. If anyone is starting a class action, please contact me lihsu11 at hotmail dot com. We lost tens of thousands dollars and more than 50% of our users. It’s going to take lots of $$$ and many months to build it up. Once you get some lawyers on the case doing discovery, I am sure they will find negligence and we can recover more than the negligible SLA credit they will hand out.
Yet another incident and people still don’t get it. You get what you pay for! There is a reason why their servers are so cheap and its not because they are investing the savings in competent customer care staff. Thankfully, when I tried to sign up, the sales staff was so bad that I never bothered to pursue the relationship further. A great decision it would appear.
Lunarpages has three brand new data centers and we would be more lhan happy to assist anyone in getting thheir web sites back on line
Another textbook example of gross mismanagement!
Hey Tom.
Get in touch with me at Lunarpages and I’ll be happy to help you
Stephen
Excellent communications by the Planet??? Come on! Are you serious? They completely ignored the escalation procedures, have no real ETA (and did not have any news for 6+ hours after incident. They moved key customers servers to live datacenters shortly after and ignored the rest of us. We are actively seeking a class action lawsuit, it was NOT handled well despite your blog posting.
I aske dthem about removing my servers from their data center and this is the crap I get.
Customer: I need to know about who to contact so I can remove my servers from
Customer: the center
Adron Wilson: there is no one you can directly contact
Adron Wilson: we are currently not moving servers
They are vague and not doing anything to offer remedies or solutions. I contacted hostdime.com out of Florida and they are jumping through hoops to move us over. That is what service should be. They will be working through the night to help take our offiste backups and recover on their servers until we can get access to our own. I see major lawsuits coming down the pike. So much for backup servers when they are in the same center. Who would of thought they didn’t know what a data center means.
Our company’s website and entire email have been down over 24 hours. This is unbelievable! Between the apparent incompetence that created this messed up situation, the fact that 24 hours later there is still no resolution in sight, and always consistently unhelpful customer service, I’ve had enough…I’m switching tomorrow! I don’t want to deal with a company like this anymore.
With so many customers affected, resulting in businesses affected financially, coupled with the gross negligence creating this “explosion”, not to mention the ineptness of management to resolve it or even have some sort of plan, and censoring the forums from negative comments…what about liability? sounds to me like the grounds for a class action suit.
http://www.syndicatedelitist.com/2008/06/theplanet-outage-update.html
http://www.syndicatedelitist.com/2008/06/theplanets-h1-datacenter-encounters.html
Both have photos and information directly provided by ThePlanet staff
“It’s actually quite shocking that this story hasn’t made the news on more blogs ” —- probably because a lot of blogs are hosted by them, and that, lots of blogs are down now, including mine.. :(
you know that’s funny, but yet I can’t laugh :(
The planet SUCKS !!!
East or West, Planet is the Best
East or West, Planet is the Best !!!!
HAHAHAHAHAHA
We moved to Planet.com very recently. Probably a month ago. And in this past month, we have had several downtimes, twice needed OS reloads because of issues at their end, and now that there was finally some peace, they catch fire! I mean for crying out loud!
Sure their support is constantly online, but none of them is giving me any useful information or help. So what’s the point really??
Overall, I’m extremely disappointed by my experience with the Planet.
You know this post reminds me… one time they said I needed to buy a KVM to figure out why my server was not on the network. They rebooted it several times and recommended I pay for a priority restore.
With the KVM I determined that their patch cable from the server to the switch had gone bad, and over 24 hours later it was back up again.
I can honestly say that the servers I have at this data center are backed up here, not offsite. I hadn’t implemented offsite backups until recently. Just this morning 1 of my servers came up, and I’m still waiting on the other. You bet your butt I’m sync’ing my data somewhere else. Especially after stumbling on a thread earlier about this exact same thing happening back in 2003.
We have been given an example of how greed can takeover a business plan. While obviously in search of a more business the planet obviously could not take care of what they had under the roof.
It’s like an armor truck company assuring banks that their money is safe but never disclosing that they had bald tires and it was just a matter of time before the show came to a halt.
Sometimes money is not all that dictates business actions unless there is something backing it up called SERVICE. Let us all learn from their actions!
Been with ThePlanet since the early RackShack days; that’s alot of years and alot of servers.
This was my first serious outage. Fortunately, my servers are on the 2nd floor if HC1 since I migrated to news servers last month.
I am very pleased with the manner in which this accident was handled. For me, I was lucky it happened on the weekend.
ThePlanet is for people who know what they are doing. If your web applications are mission critical, then you obviously need to setup a fault tolerant system for yourself. Don’t blame your losses on ThePlanet if you had a single point of failure.
There are much more expensive full service hosting companies out there for those who need everything done for them.
I do miss the senior management personalities we had in the RackShack days, but I understand the realities of growth, etc. I am still a loyal fan of ThePlanet.
We have two servers, one is on line but the other one is having problems. This is the 3rd Datacenter we use in the last 10 years. It’s been 3 years with them and is the first outage. We had changed for outages and poor support. Happu to had it on saturday also. Have been a little affected. Will keep servers with them. Just have to look for another backup server at another datacenter in case we have to switch dns and services.
As you say they did well because of the price. In fact I haven’t seen such a frequently updated info about the maintenance. I preffer all their available hands working on servers that writing mails to complain.
It’s our business to have things planned for every posible incident.
then what’s the point of paying them to host my data, and wont even send me a notification when the entire server is down for > 12 hours. your point of blaming on our-end makes no sense to me at all.
then what’s the point of paying them to host my data, and wont even send me a notification when the entire server is down for > 12 hours. your point of blaming on our-end makes no sense to me at all.
I have been following the Planet Servers problem since Saturday afternoon, More than 24 hrs, as I have a lot riding on this problem, both time and money. At first quite a few customers were posting their concern and distrust on the Planet forums pages. THEN the Planet began to Moderate the pages to prevent negative postings. THEN suspicious One Hour old Newbie Accounts started springing up posting unbelievable PRAISE for the service. OBVIOUSLY Employees and Family of the company. THEN the Planet started to sanitize the previous negative postings.
The first postings by the One in Charge at first said it will be resolved in 2 hours, Then another 3 hours, Then by Sunday Morning, Then by 10:00am Sunday, then by 4:00pm for certain THEN they promised to power up at 5:00pm on Sunday and report status, NOTHING Reported until 7:30 THEN they say WELL Monday During the day everything should be up and running again Monday night for certain. LIES LIES LIES.
They claim that only one of 4 data centers is affected HOWEVER, the forums server is running VERY SLOWLY to the point it takes pages several minutes to load. GEE they couldn’t send out an RSS feed from one of the other four Locations so we could get updates? How HELPLESS ARE THESE MONKEYS? Do you know the error page that comes up on an Error Page that says they have dispatched the army of Wrench Toting Monkeys? This is where the Monkeys get their training!!!
They couldn’t get a FREE GOOGLE BLOGGER ACCOUNT and create a feed with FEEDBURNER like any twelve year old could do in 5 minutes to give us real time updates?? Or move the forum to a server better than an IMB 286 PC level of Service? Oh No, SOME great Customer Service!! It’s Sunday at 10:00pm go to the Forums and the few hundred people online have bogged down the system to 1992 Dial-up Speeds.
WHAT”S UP WITH THAT? No Real Updates, Lame Excuses, Cutting off Communication, Deleting Concerned Messages. NOW go to the web pages that are actually SELLING the services of “The Planet” They load like Lighting. Read the Description about just how FIREPROOF their system is.
One of their own FORUM MODERATORS said it best. “Well Even I have a backup for my website outside the company. You really need to contract with another vendor for a backup in case something happens like this”. You shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. But their own website PRAISES how they are your PERFECT choice for primary AND backup service.
They might be SANITIZING their own forums of comments, but they will have all these postings to live with forever. THIS is the SECOND transformer Fire! They learned NOTHING from the first?
I think I solved this Perplexing riddle. Read this article from and online trade publication;
http://www.thehostingnews.com/news-dedicated-server-firm-the-planet-data-center-manager-garners-award-4306.html
It claims “Mr. Lowenberg conducted a six-month trial to reduce power consumption and increase data center operating efficiency. Initial results demonstrate that while critical server loads increased by 5 percent, power used for cooling decreased by 31 percent. Overall, the company experienced power reductions of up to 13.5 percent through a broad range of improvements. The new green initiatives were conducted across its six world-class data centers.” and also The Planet operates more than 150 30-ton computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units across its six data centers. In one data center alone, the company was able to turn off four of the units. The cooling requirement on two of the units was reduced to 50 percent of capacity, while another nine now operate at 25 percent of capacity. The company also extended the return air plenums on all of its down-flow CRAC units to optimize efficiency. ”
Lets See, Turn Down or Off Air Conditioners and claim you’re doing it to “Go Green” not save BOATLOADS of Cash.HUMMMMmmmmm.
Sherlock
I agree with you – my thought was that while the issue is horrible – they are doing a good job of keeping everyone updated on what is going on.
I don’t think you can say ‘Excellent Communications Throughout’ until the event is over.
17 hours downtime. DNS issues. This is NOT good! Thousands of businesses must be being affected by this… Many of those servers will be owned by resellers with hundreds of their own customers.
I’ve had 1 email and I can’t access that forum thread most of the time.
Why can’t they switch on the backup generators they mentioned in the first email? Are the fire department still restricting them? They seem now to be installing new equipment. Does this mean the backup system was not working?
Is disappointing that this happened as new customer of a week. The irony of the situation is that we moved from our last host because of power outages and then this one which was worse than the other host. Credting customer accounts is nice but that doesn’t do much for the work for ranking, page views, traffic ranking, profit and other things that you loose as a business during this extended down time. I hope the planet takes every step to update the H1 data center to standards that I’m sure the Dallas centers are.
And the guy who suggested layertech is not a better solution IMO. There setup fees are ridiculous and you will loose network perfomance because they only provide 10mps Uplink vs 100mps at the planet. Trust me it makes a difference on site perfomance.
Anyway, I hope this never happens again because TOO many customers and people depend on them and have affected millions of internet site users.
We recently moved all of our services away from The Planet, and it appears that it was just in time. Their support was my biggest complaint.
maybe they communicate in this (big) issue, but i cannot say too much positive about theplanet/ev1 either. their customer service has always been quite bulky, from phone calls, chats or trouble tickets. it’s never been a pleasure to resolve issues with them.
Depends on your budget, look into layertech, or servercentral.
Hosting.com is a favorite, not only have they been successful in their nearly 10 years of uptime but the staff is dedicated and definately shines in support!
An electrical fault in a large duct bank is not something you can really plan or test for. In the midst of a major city with large substations and thick wires running nearby, the fault that triggered this event may have sunk 10,000 amps or more. That kind of current can superheat a wire in a fraction of a second and vaporize an entire section of said wire, creating a plasma ball that strips the insulation off the other wires and ripples the fault across the rest of the wiring. All this is rare but can occur in a fraction of a second, creating an enormous explosion well before any fuse, circuit breaker, or other protective device on the system can possibly trip.
It’s a rare event under modern western electrical standards, but it still happens even with the best-designed modern equipment. There’s no good way to protect against it, except to put the high voltage stuff in a sturdy room (which was done) and hope nobody is nearby when something like this happens. When it does happen, all you can do is run like mad and wait for the utility company and fire department to give you clearance for re-entry. If the damage to the electrical system is extensive enough, then it may not be safe or even possible to use backup generation until a contractor has spent a day cleaning out the worst of the char and installing temporary patches.
Based on what Loyal Customer of the Planet just said, I plan to get a new host once I can get back online to download my MySQL backups.
I agree – ThePlanet is to blame for this. They obviously did not properly test the equipment. If they did, this would never have happened.
Anyone got any good suggestions for another dedicated host? This really pisses me off.
This information is completely false. The Planet is headquartered in Houston. All upper managment is in Houston. The root cause of the short is yet to be detemined. As far as anyone knows yet the equipment that shorted was the power company’s conduit underground. good game.
Interesting. A series of upgrades for all datacenters was recently put into place, management is actually located in a new facility since the beginning of the year in downtown Houston (along with network operations for both cities, the call center, and all the nifty showcase meeting rooms) and both Houston datacenters were having network retrofits to ensure a common management infrastructure was in place so all datacenters looked the same from the internal systems.
You sure that you are talking about the same Planet?
I could not agree more with H1 being “the ugly step child of The Planet”, as H1 is riddled with older servers and sprawling wiring. It was just a matter of time for H1 to go down in flames (no pun intended). Since EV1 and The Planet merged, the Houston H1 facility has been increasingly neglected by The Planet’s management, which is located in Dallas, 250 miles away. Out of site, out of mind, as the old saying goes…. And no where is that saying more true than at The Planet. I am sure the servers, equipment, and power generators are running in tip-top condition in Dallas, since the management is located there, which keeps staff motivated. The reason for this explosion HAD to have been ultimately caused by neglect of the equipment’s upkeep. The Houston staff and Dallas management have really let us down. Inexcusable.
As a customer for several years of The Planet (formerly EV1), I can’t be nearly as positive as you are about The Planet regarding this fire and its “magnanimous” efforts to keep us, its loyal customers, updated. Now that it is approaching the 17th hour of downtime, the promised hourly updates have not been consistently posted. Moreover, I can’t help but to think about the prospect that poor management, neglect, a failure to modernize or properly inspect ageing power equipment, an overload of the power generators due to overly aggressive and poorly considered provisioning of discount servers, led to the vulnerability resulting in this fire. As loyal customers of The Planet, we have a right to be severely upset about what has happened. And the timing of this downtime could not have come at a worse time. Major search engines, such as Google, tend to do their “deep crawls” on or about the 1st day of the month, which is today. So many webmasters who have worked hard for years to achieve a meaningful Page Rank may soon find their web sites bumped down in the Page Rank or not turning as high in search results. Hopefully, the search engines won’t be so harsh, but only time will tell. In addition, according to The Planet, several of the DNSs have been moved from H1 to another facility, and propagation has now begun. The decision to move the DNS servers will ensure continued service interruption for at least another 24-48 hours from now, as DNS routing will be affected. Finally, if you read The Planet’s status update page, you will see a very disproportionate amount of discussion about “ServerCommand” and restoring ServerCommand back online. ServerCommand is all but an obsolete technical support/administrative system that is redundant because the Planet already has another parallel support/administrative system called Orbit that has 100% of the functionality as ServerCommand. The Planet staff even discourages customers from using ServerCommand and suggests customers instead use the more modern Orbit system. I cannot for the life of me, therefore, figure out why The Planet has given so much priority to keeping us informed about the restoration of ServerCommand and its relocation to another facility.
So, I understand the knee jerk reaction to want to praise The Planet for keeping all 7,500 of us updated, but remember, The Planet’s management’s level of culpability regarding the power failure is still very much unclear, and we will need to demand candor in their disclosure of the facts at an appropriate time. I am sure The Planet will want to have us believe that fires are simply acts of God, and that they can’t possibly be held accountable for an act of God, but H1 has long been the ugly stepchild of The Planet ever since EV1 merged with The Planet years ago, and this neglect has finally started to show its ugly face with the burning of ageing and neglected equipment and overloaded power equipment.
the latest is that their support forums have now crashed !
Just a poor domain customer myself, however this is the final straw. Incompetence, convoluted, confusing internal chains of command, absolute indifference by so called customer service staff. You don’t wish bad on people but ev1/planet have been getting away with nominal level of service for years and growing and making money. I’m out.
I happened to be monitoring my servers when they all went down.
I called into support and was told what was going on. This was about 18:00 EST when I lost connectivity. I was told they had facilities issue. I then went to the forum and say the posts about the issue and Theplanet staff jumped in soon after with prompt updates until very late into the evening.
Updates can be found here :
http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=90185
Are you normal what update nice here, people suffer with out their website for business
Nice to see that they keep people updated, on this issue.
Bbut keep in mind – this is a major issue where they can’t BS one customer because there are 7500 affected. The Planet has a track record of f-ups ;). How they just not get back to trouble tickets in time, or where they find outrageous (or maybe hilarious) excuses for downtime (”reboot technicians” etc.) or come up with stories you just wouldn’t believe.
They were for the first 12 hours (15 minute – 1 hour intervals of updates). The last few updates have contained lots of words but little information.
WTF!! My site is down on the Planet. I called the Planet, gave them my password and name and they tell me they can’t help me. The Planet is saying someone owns the rights to my account. What the hell is going on?????? I have the proof I paid for it. I have all this ticket history with them too. They said the zone file was deleted in our hosting environment and is now apparently owned by another account within the Planet. WTF????? They won’t tell me anything about this new account name!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I feel like I am in the twilight zone. How can it be under someone else’s name. What the hell is going on. Here is what we just mailed to their legal department.
Hello,
My name is _________
I am the designer and administrative contact for the domain name
_____________.COM.
Our site went down last night (02-26-09). We have learned that the zone file
in your hosting environment has recently been deleted. When we attempted to
rebuild the zone file via tech support, they informed us we are not the
account holders for hosting ———.COM. This is simply not correct.
We have been hosting with your company and had a functional website since
late August of 2008, but something has drastically changed on ThePlanet’s
end. We suspect this is due to an error on ThePlanet’s end. We have verified
this with MediaTemple.com
Please respond to this matter as soon as possible, as our this site being
down is costing us business.
If we do not receive a timely enough reply, we will be forced to host with
another company, unfortunately.
Best regards,
—–
Adminstrative and technical contact,
————-.COM
_________
This is insane. Can someone offer any comments?