Monday, December 07, 2009

peer1/serverbeach severe failure

We've seen a greater than average share of service outages at Serverbeach; incompetent electricians blowing out the battery backup system causing an evening of downtime, network failures taking the server down for hours at a time, other random outages without explanation.

Of course these outages affect large numbers of customers so you get 500 errors when trying to access the customer portal or put on hold for up to an hour waiting to talk to someone only able to enter a ticket into the system on your behalf.

This latest outage tops them all, however. Yesterday afternoon they attempted to merge the Peer1 and Serverbeach customer portals which knocked out DNS for a "large number" of customers. They sent out an email to everyone and I fully expected it to be a short outage.

Last night at around 8pm all of our domains were still down. I attempted to log into the customer portal to find my old password not working, and after a lengthy process to recover it I found myself locked out of it unless I agreed to a lengthy new service agreement which I certainly don't have time to read through in the middle of an outage.

After sitting on hold with customer service a ticket was filed. Which I replied to, and replied to, and have only received blanket emails asking to reply again if we're still out. More than 24 hours later we are still down.

Serverbeach claims they refund customers for outages, but I have yet to receive a dime credited for any past issues and I fully expect them to make getting credit for this difficult as well. At this point I don't think it's fair to myself or the communities which rely on this server to continue hosting with them.

I've found a really decent deal with Hurricane Electric with the added perks of IPV6, more bandwidth, and newer hardware for less than I'm paying now.

1 comment:

Rajan said...

Arc, on behalf of ServerBeach and PEER 1 Hosting, I am truly sorry for our screw up in migrating your DNS records incorrectly during the switch over to the new customer portal. I know by doing so, we have hurt your trust in us and I hope we have a chance to earn it back. This blunder affected you and approximately 400 other customers. Most of the domains are now live, with a handful left to correct. Once we finish this process, we will turn our attention towards crediting you and others for the unexpected downtime. There is no excuse for what happened and we will do whatever we can to make this right for you. Please feel free to contact me at rsodhi@peer1.com at any time.

Sincerely,

Rajan Sodhi
VP, Marketing
ServerBeach and PEER 1