Friday e-mail server crash! (mailbox2)

[tubby]

Hi all -

I just called the HR support line. The tech support girl began by pretending she knew nothing about it, tried to deflect the problem by asking if I knew how to set up a POP account in Outlook. After insulting my intellegence, she went to "look into my apperent problem", and when she came back on the phone she said, "oh, it seems that there was a bit of a problem with our server on Friday, but they fixed it". Then she preceded to say "oh, i think they put up a note on the website about it". Oh, well, I guess that's okay then...

Well, considering that we lost all our mail, I wouldn't consider it fixed. We had 2 sales guys away all last week. They didn't check their mail since the previous Friday. So any new business messages, client correspondence, etc, are gone. Easy enough to explain to current clients, but we are contected by new people every day. Those new contacts could have super lucrative. Who knows how much $$ this "little problem" is going to cost us.

They also keep saying that this is an isolated problem, and should only affect a few accounts. Well, it affected us, at least 3 of the 12 or so clients we have set up with HR (and maybe a few others), it's affected my personal account, and that's just the people I know...

I asked to be transferred to a sales agent at HR, and she played dumb (of course). She offered me a whole 2 months of free hosting. WOW - what's the value of that? A whole $13?? What a friggin joke!!! Why don't they invest that into a better backup system, or some people who know how to handle important data.

Speaking of handling important data, this is not the first time HR has totally messed me up. Last summer, my site was down. No biggy - I can wait for a bit. But it stayed down for like 2 days. I finally checked inwith HR, and after a bunch of "checking into it", they came out and told me that they DELETED MY ACCOUNT. Just some random mishap. They just deleted it - all my files, databases, mail, settings - gone!! I backup things pretty regularly, but over the course of a few days, a lot of critical (and valuable) data gets accumulated. Then, they told me they wouldn't retrieve my stuff from the backup drive. Why? No real answer, but I suspect they were lazy. Pretty serious allegation? Well, why else not? All they would have to do is put the archive on a spare machine, do an extraction, find my stuff, and dump it back onto another server (once they re-created my account, of course). Instead, they offered me 2 months of hosting... another whole $13 for all my business-critical data.

So, back to the current problem. Although they say the mailserver is working fine again, we're still not really recieving mail. We've had customers calling up saying that they e-mail they are sending is just bouncing back. Sigh.

Anyone totally cheezed??

I think I'm going to post this message to every forum I belong to, and mybe my blog too. I've had it with these guys.

[edstevemiller]

Alot of accusations of a company I've been with for about a year now with 0 ZERO downtime EVER every once and a while an accident can happen. Its called a mistake, it dosnt reflect upon the company as a whole which you seem to be targeting. You should rethink what you are saying and realize the influence you have in this post to possible customers. You run a buisness they run a buisness, would you like it if someone posted a message of this sort on your site de-faming your company? I think not. If you have a problem there is the hotline, email, and the support system. If you are unimpressed with the service there are many webhosts of equal calibur, try one of them and if you are happier there stick with them. Just my two cents becuase I run a company here on hostrocket servers for custom web design if I found a post like yours on my forums I would be furious.

http://www.startlogic.com - A decent webhost with a good history. Check it out.

Now to the Hostrocket team, if you are offended by posting alternative hosting, I appologize. It seemed neccessary.

[rguill]

I understand tubby's anger but, if you are really upset, put your money where your mouth is and leave HR.

I've been with HR for almost 5 years and I've never seen an outage like this. Something this severe does not happen on a regular basis and I'm glad they got it resolved when they did. The way I look at it, it least it didn't happen during the week. I assume that most email traffic happens during the Mon-Fri work week so this could have been much worse.

It's the nature of technology, deal.

</2 cents>

[aov]

Just my two cents becuase I run a company here on hostrocket servers for custom web design if I found a post like yours on my forums I would be furious.

Just quick question, how furious would you be if you someone had lost all your company email? (This is the situation that just happened to me here with HR hosting)

Now they have offered me a 2 month compensation but it would not be even near to value of our losses. So as long HR is running their business like this, I would not mix it to words "professional" or "for business".

[AnneGwish]

I completely understand. While we've been with Host Rocket a few years and recommended them to many of our clients, do you have any idea how much this affected our business, as well as our customers? And two months of free hosting will make up for that? With a company of Host Rocket's size I cannot believe they wouldn't have a better back-up system in place. I know accidents happen but they should have been prepared.

[RammsteinNicCag]

I'm just curious, if these emails are so important to your businesses, wouldn't it have made sense to have your own backups? I worked in an office for awhile and we had copies of documents, companies had copies of documents, and other individuals had copies of documents - it would have been an incredibly bad idea for only one person to have the documents because what if there was a fire or a burglary?

HR has learned from their mistakes with this, hopefully you guys will, too. Create your own backups, just in case!

Jennifer

[Gamerz]

first off you are never goign to be able to run a server at 100% all the time. The second this is if you have a problem with their hosting why don't you get a line and make your own hosting company, because trust me it really isn't easy to keep everything up and running a 100% all the time.

[MarkHutch]

I'm just curious, if these emails are so important to your businesses, wouldn't it have made sense to have your own backups?

Jennifer

and it's easy to do. Just forward a copy of each email to any other email account outside of HR; there are plenty of places where you can set up free email accounts, and leave a copy of the email on the hostrocket server for you to get like normal. Every month or so, archive the forwarded email to a .zip or .gz file and you're set. Nothing could be easier and it's automatic.

[danolie]

I'm on the phone w/Sales right now, because we have also had sigificant problems w/HR lately. I'm a long time customer who has been extremely satisfied w/their services.

We were hit hard by these issues (and are still being affected by the current email delay). I spoke to someone in sales, who gave us what I think is a fair refund, and apologized for the inconvenence.

With the email server crash, the problem we had was that a) there were people who had POP3 accoutns who had not downloaded their email in a while, so all that was lost, and b) any aliases, or forwarded accounts, or lists that had been configured were deleted,a nd we were not informed of this.

HOWEVER, I must say that having spoken w/someone at HR, I feel reassured, and am also satisfied with the way they dealt with the situation.

I would still recommend HR, but might advocate looking into alternative email solutions such as mi8.com or webmail.us (two I'm looking into now). I am going to keep hosting w/HR, but may switch my email to a company that JUST DOES email... we'll see.