Website Down OMG!!

I got a call from a client today about their website and email being down. Not a big deal I thought, call the hosting company, yell a little bit and boom up comes the website.

Oh was I wrong.

A little bit of background. The website was hosted at ipower.com until January of 2008 when it was transferred to easycgi.com.  Everything was working fine until a couple weeks ago when the site was ‘migrated’ to new servers. The website mysteriously went down and when chatting with India they said that the client needed to talk to ipower.com since the domain was hosted with them. This problem mysteriously fixed itself and the website was back up and running within a couple hours. Nothing more was thought of this besides some oddball website hosting company craziness.

Now today I call the hosting easycgi.com hosting company and they pull up this old transcript and tell us that the domain name is hosted with ipower.com and can’t be added to our easycgi.com account until it is resolved with ipower.com. Now I know that I may not know everything about web hosting but it is my understanding that you register a domain name and then point it to the hosting company’s name servers and then on the hosting side enter the domain name so that when the domain name is resolved it knows where to go. So why would different companies be a problem? Maybe easycgi.com and ipower.com are related? I ask the support tech, no he says they are not related. OK so I mark this up to oddball occurrence and it is clear from my conversation with easycgi.com that there is nothing else they can do until I call ipower.com and resolve the account issue.

So I call ipower.com and talk to a support technician. Of course I can’t answer the standard security questions since as far as the client and myself are concerned there is no account. They ask for the last 4 digits of the Credit card on the account. Of course we don’t know that either and all the accounts we think it might be are not the correct ones. Additionally the administrator account email address is the same as the domain that is not working so they can’t even send an email to the administrator to provide the correct account information. At this point I am about to climb through the phone and strangle someone since now they are making it impossible to resolve the issue. OK so the last possible way to resolve the account information is to fax a copy of the driver’s license of the account owner along with the billing address. Another call back to the client, he is out at a customer location working on installing another system so he can’t get me the copy until later in the evening. So everything is on hold. I go onto other clients and get back to this in the evening after the client sends me a copy of his driver’s license all the possible billing addresses, any possible credit card last 4 digits and just to be on the safe side he includes his shoe size (turns out to be the one piece of information I didn’t need).

I put all the information together in a word document and using my handy online fax service fax it to the ipower.com fax number and call tech support. After listening to “We are experiencing higher than average call volume, please stay on the line” for about 10 minutes I finally get to talk to a support tech. Just as a quick note when calling Ipower.com you have to press 2 for tech support and then another automated voice tells you to press 2 again to talk to tech support, like the first time they weren’t sure you wanted tech support, I should have been suspicious at this point. So the support tech asks me for the domain name and then as per the script the last 4 digits of the Credit card on file, of course I don’t have them and inform him that I have just faxed the required information to the company. The support tech informs me that “oh that goes to the security department and you will have to wait until they call you back.” Now I about come unglued. I have to wait for them to call me back since due to some problem with their system, all of a sudden, the hosting that had been working previously is now not working. Of course my friendly support techs hands are tied without the proper identification information he can’t give me ANY information about the account. ARGH!!!!

One last idea. Maybe I can get through on the live chat available 24×7. So I start the chat session and of course the same security questions come up. After telling them that they need to look for the fax they ask for what number it was faxed from. Since I used the online fax service I have no idea. I guess a likely number from the fax account but I am wrong. Now I re-fax using my handy all in one printer so I know the number that it is faxing from and after a few minutes my handy live chat person has located my fax without having to go through the security department that is apparently closed. Now we go through asking the security questions again complete with what is the account log-in name. If I knew these things I wouldn’t have had to send the fax! Now the support tech is starting to wise up and ask for some information about the easycgi.com hosting account which I do have. Now I’m starting to get the idea that there must be some relationship between easycgi.com and ipower.com so I asked my chat buddy. Sure enough they are sister companies. So I asked the next question “Are the accounts hosted on the same computers?” since this would start to explain the problem. According to my chat buddy they are not.

Since I have access to the easycgi.com account I can provide the security question answer and the last 4 digits of the credit card on file. This was the final piece that allowed my support tech to transfer the account back to the easycgi.com account. I don’t believe anything now unless I see it for myself so I check the easycgi.com account and sure enough the domain has been transferred back. Now the domain is back where it should be but the DNS information now has to propagate throughout the Internet before the website will become live. I reluctantly close the chat (not before copying the transcript) with support for my long wait for the domain name to propagate.

This has now cost the client over three hours of my support time which will cost more than a full year of hosting with both companies combined to resolve a problem that as my chat support says “Frankly I don’t know what has happened” and as far as I am concerned should have never happened in the first place. Unfortunately I don’t hold my breath for either of the sister companies to make this right and provide free hosting and the cost incurred by me to resolve this problem and frankly since there are several things about this case that can’t be explained as to why this has occurred, it makes me very wary of continuing to use either of these hosting companies.

I generally use another hosting company for all my hosting that I do and have had a few problems along the way but am always asking the question as to what occurred so I can understand if the problem is part of issues of incompetence or the fact that as much as we like to think that computers just always work there are problems that occur.

Update: 12/2/08 - Turns out the migration back to easycgi.com appears to have missed the database so now the shopping cart part of the site is not functional. More details as they develop.