Not 100% satisfied :(

[babrees]

I signed up with EUKHost in December. Whilst I am happy with the speed of my sites (when they are working!) I am not happy (and neither are my customers) with the number of problems I have had since signing up.

For instance, since 3rd March I have had to contact live chat 7 times, mostly with the server being down but a couple of times with mysql down. It has been like this since I signed up.

Today I had to again use live chat. I first spoke to Sam and waited nearly 20 minutes for him to come back, when I tried to send a message asking if it was coffee break time it wouldn't send, so presume I was "cut-off". Got through again to Jeet.N. who stated in a couple of minutes that there was some problem with main node and were rebooting it, again

Now I know there appears to be many people who are 100% satisfied with the service from EUKHost, and maybe I just have a "Friday afternoon" vps, even though it is the second one (having been moved to a new one after problems with the first!), or maybe I'm just jinxed! Either way my clients are starting to notice that their sites and emails are having problems that they never used to have with my previous host and they are getting fidgity.

I have paid for a year, and don't wish to move anyway, but I truely hope that something can be done to improve this situation and to live up to your 100% satisfaction guarantee! Preferably before I start losing clients!

[Ryan]

Hi Jill,

I had a word with our VPS support team in this regard. The node on which your VPS is created was getting DDoS'd earlier today as a result of which it went down temporarily. The volume of the attack made it extremely difficult for our support team to troubleshoot due to which they were forced to take the node offline. They did manage to null-route traffic of VPS responsible for this problem and all services were restored completely after some time.

The volume of the attack was quite massive, so null routing the traffic of the VPS responsible and getting the node back up was the topmost priority for us at that time. All our VPS support team members were involved in this process as a result of which they were not able to update customers regarding this on live chat.

Please accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused due to this.

[babrees]

Thank you for your reply Ryan, but my beef is not with the fact that there was a problem yesterday, it is with the number of problems I have had since signing up in December.

I can understand the odd problem, hey! they happen! But do you think it is reasonable to have server problems 7 times in just 4 weeks? That is a lot more than I had with my previous host in a year and my clients are noticing.

[eUKShane]

Hello,

You are absolutely right Jill, we are already monitoring the hardware node on which your VPS is hosted. We will definitely get this issue resolved permanently within the next 2 days.

We have already terminated the problematic VPS from the hardware node but we would still like to monitor the node for some time and will do all the necessary changes to resolve this issue. We will update you as soon as the issue gets resolved.

[babrees]

Just a quick update on this. It has now been a whole week since my last problem! Long may it continue!

[mediaspace]

Hi babrees,

I too am having problems with my VPS, and they seem to sometimes be mysql related.

Do you think the setup of the servers may be incorrect?

Hugh

[Rock]

Just a quick update on this. It has now been a whole week since my last problem! Long may it continue!

Thank you for your confirmation, Jill.. we're glad that the problems you were facing have been bottle-necked & hope the servers function efficiently in the same mabber We always do our utmost to make available the best of the services we can offer...

Hi babrees,

I too am having problems with my VPS, and they seem to sometimes be mysql related.

Do you think the setup of the servers may be incorrect?

Hugh

Hi Hugh.. Could you please be more precise on the issues you are experiencing with your server.. What exact problems are you facing with your server? Have you opened up a support ticket mentioning the problems? We've 24x7 Live Chat support available, you may approach them & ask for assistance for a quicker solution..

[babrees]

Well, the happy period continued until today. This morning my sites were slow. About 11.30 this morning I contacted live chat as sites were down and couldn't get onto whm. Was told there was a load on the main hardware server and it would be reduced soon. Over 5 hours later my sites and emails were still down and I had a customer complaining and was also awaiting an urgent email concerning a meeting I have tomorrow. Contacted live chat again and he fixed it in a couple of minutes!!!! So why did I have to wait 5 hours?

He then blamed a script on my sites. A script that I have always been running and never caused problems before. A script that hundreds of people use and it doesn't cause problems for them either?

Needless to say once again I am not happy.

Oh, and I still haven't got any emails coming down!

[Rsync]

Hello,

I have gone through your VPS and the script name books.pl and exim running on your VPS have been causing a load as a result of which the performance of the main hardware node is getting affected. We have the logs of our monitoring system available which show a very high amount of load. Below is the screen shot of the top command which clearly shows the books.pl is using very heavy CPU usages. The scripts seems to outdated due to which such problem occurs on your VPS and you were facing the problem, you need to update your scrips and optimize it to use less resources.



Your VPS is up now and one of our admin is constantly monitoring the load on the main hardware node.

[babrees]

Thank you. But you do seem to be missing my point that my gripe is once again how it appears to have been handled. I had been told in the morning that there was a problem with the main hardware server and that it should be fixed soon. My gripe is with the fact that I then had to contact you again about 5 hours later as my sites had been down all that time, and it was restarted immediately, so I guess I was wrong in assuming that engineers had been working on it for 5 hours and in fact there was no need for them to have been down all that time as it could have been restarted on my first contact with you.

Now, this problem. First, thank you for that image which was very helpful, much more so than my live chat, and it enabled me to look into this situation. I would point out that that script is indeed up to date, and runs on the majority of my sites with no problems at all.

My findings were that my sites are apparently being hammered by bots. The two sites that apparently caused the problem are in fact pretty much dormant, having not been worked on and just sitting there at the moment. My stats for them showing just 6 and 0 page views respectively yesterday.

Looking at awstats for those two sites, it appears that yesterday morning at around the same time, 5 bots hammered the script, books.pl, forcing loads of searches and taking up over 2k bandwidth.

Obviously I shall have to try to ban those bots. My problem is that I don't know which bots to ban. I can see one that jumps out immediately at me. But I am sure that I am not the only person who has had this problem. So what robots.txt do people use? Which bots should I ban? Obviously I don't wish to ban "good" robots such as google.

[max_supp0rt]

Hello Jill

You can use following robot.txt in the vps.
=====================
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /_borders/
Disallow: /_derived/
Disallow: /_fpclass/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /_overlay/
Disallow: /_private/
Disallow: /_themes/
Disallow: /_vti_bin/
Disallow: /_vti_cnf/
Disallow: /_vti_log/
Disallow: /_vti_map/
Disallow: /_vti_pvt/
Disallow: /_vti_txt/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /junk/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /

User-agent: Adsbot-Google
Allow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /
=====================

[babrees]

Sorry for the delay - I have been ill so not been able to deal with this til now.

When you say that can be used in the vps - do you mean that there is a way I can have just 1 robots.txt to cover all my sites? Or do I still have to have a robots.txt in each of my accounts?

>>one of our admin is constantly monitoring the load on the main hardware node. <<

What does this actually entail? I had assumed that if my server went down whilst being monitored somebody would notice? However, my vps went down sunday evening and was still down Monday morning. This problem was apparently caused by "the DC engineers applying new electricity boards that's the reason for safety they shut the server for few mins " although my server was down several hours. I also had a problem with the snmpd service, which from 28th to 30th (when I reported it) kept sending me error emails every 15 minutes or so, subject "dedicated server alert"

[vzAddict]

Hello,

When you say that can be used in the vps - do you mean that there is a way I can have just 1 robots.txt to cover all my sites? Or do I still have to have a robots.txt in each of my accounts?

You will have to create a robot.txt file in every domain and will have to insert the rules which were listed by Max.

What does this actually entail? I had assumed that if my server went down whilst being monitored somebody would notice? However, my vps went down sunday evening and was still down Monday morning. This problem was apparently caused by "the DC engineers applying new electricity boards that's the reason for safety they shut the server for few mins " although my server was down several hours. I also had a problem with the snmpd service, which from 28th to 30th (when I reported it) kept sending me error emails every 15 minutes or so, subject "dedicated server alert"

We keep monitoring the Main Hardware Node on which the VPSes are hosted and not the VPSes. As we have more than 8000 VPSes, it's not possible for us to keep monitoring each and every service of all the VPS. Due to this we have introduced a monitoring system which will help our customers get information about any service failure. And then you can contact support for further assistance.

I am still monitoring the Node and your VPS too. Load on your VPS is above normal (10.63).
===
-bash-3.2# w
10:18:58 up 3 days, 1:57, 0 users, load average: 10.63, 9.82, 10.10
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
-bash-3.2#
===
The problem may not be with your website scripts OR any other scripts which you are using but the Virtual Environment is not able to handle such high load and you will have to face this problem again and again (Due to Virtual Environment limits). The only solution which we can provide you is to go for a small dedicated server where you will get Physical Resources like RAM and CPU without any limitations like Virtuozzo. Staying with VPS will not only create problems for you website but also for the other customers which are hosted on the same Server.

I will talk to our sales department to provide you a best deal/quote if you are interested in upgrading to a dedicated server.

[babrees]

You will have to create a robot.txt file in every domain and will have to insert the rules which were listed by Max.

Thanks, that's what I thought

We keep monitoring the Main Hardware Node on which the VPSes are hosted and not the VPSes. As we have more than 8000 VPSes, it's not possible for us to keep monitoring each and every service of all the VPS. Due to this we have introduced a monitoring system which will help our customers get information about any service failure. And then you can contact support for further assistance.

Thank you, I understand now. The only thing I would mention is that I never, and have never, received any information about a service failure. I only find out when either a client tells me or I go on and find out myself.

I am still monitoring the Node and your VPS too. Load on your VPS is above normal (10.63).
===
-bash-3.2# w
10:18:58 up 3 days, 1:57, 0 users, load average: 10.63, 9.82, 10.10
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
-bash-3.2#
===

Unfortunately that does not mean much to me

I did see it go up when a couple of cron jobs were running simultaneously. I will change them to run at different times. However, I find it strange that they have been set for at least a month like that, and only just today caused a problem. The load is jumping up and down like a yoyo this morning I have not been able to log on to ftp to upload any files or do anything. It is just so strange that I have had bliss for the last month, when the system has been running exactly (afaik) the same all the time.

The problem may not be with your website scripts OR any other scripts which you are using but the Virtual Environment is not able to handle such high load and you will have to face this problem again and again (Due to Virtual Environment limits). The only solution which we can provide you is to go for a small dedicated server where you will get Physical Resources like RAM and CPU without any limitations like Virtuozzo. Staying with VPS will not only create problems for you website but also for the other customers which are hosted on the same Server.

I will talk to our sales department to provide you a best deal/quote if you are interested in upgrading to a dedicated server.

THANK YOU! This is the best (and really only) help I have received

[James]

Hi Babrees,

I've sent the server quotation to your registered email address. Please check the quote and do let me know if you need any amendments done.