I am posting this for the benefit of drupal users who may be thinking of moving to Site 5. Of late, services appear to have deteriorated. In the six months I have been with them on a reseller account, I have had unannounced outages on 5 occasions (including twice today), each extending from a minimum of 30 minutes to about an hour. One of these outages happened the day before the softlaunch of a site, so you can imagine the stress.
Despite these glitches, I have tended to give Site5 the benefit of the doubt and have in fact posted enthusiastically in the drupal forums, encouraging people to sign up with them. I am not sure I am going to do that anymore.
Site 5 forums were famous as a great source of support outside their customer service. They still continue to be, but during a recent reorganisation of the forums, certain decisions seem to have been taken to protect Site 5 from negative publicity from customers for lowered quality levels. You can no longer make a post on *any* Site5 forum asking why a server is down or expressing your dissatisfaction about the level of service. I had three posts removed today because I had apparently violated these guidelines. Sure, this is what the forum guidelines say, but the reason I posted them was because the forum was customer-to-customer support for Resellers and there was no where else I could share my concerns with other customers about this. I would be happy to stand corrected if I am wrong.
I then received a private message from the forum moderator telling me the posts had been removed and that my posting privileges were being held back. I was asked to contact customer service and then management if that failed. I have and haven't received a reply for nearly 45 minutes now. SSH has been down for nearly an hour, although mail seems to work.
On the whole, it appears to me that Site 5 management have decided to take a high-handed approach to managing negative customer feedback. To me the proof is in the fact that the moderator didn't choose to *move* my post to the appropriate forum, but deleted it. Sure, they can shut people up on their own forums, but if they thought they can gag people on the Internet, they are mistaken.
I am hoping this is an aberration and sanity will return, but if it doesn't I will have to look elsewhere.
Comments
I'm getting there as well
Sorry to say it but,
My experience is much like yours.
Too bad.
I don't particularly want to give good publicity to a company which is getting too "fat" to care.
Gunnar Langemark
http://www.langemark.com
Glad to know I am not alone.
Glad to know I am not alone.
To be fair to Site 5, the moderator sent me a few urls where I could check the status of the servers. Very helpful, except that none of them, including my own webserver's url, work. As I write this, the url that graphically represents the status of different services on different servers has been loading for the last 10 minutes. Only a quarter of the page is done. The only url that worked was an external server monitoring service, but that gave just the HTTP server details, not mail or SSH.
The best part is that customer service just sent me a cheerful reply that SSH was working beautifully at their end. I continue to twiddle my thumbs here, staring at 'network error' message in PuTTY. All other web sites work fine from here.
Hmmm.
I've had some similar experiences on the demodicus server over the last month or so. It's gotten better lately, but it was distressing.
For me, the multihosting packages are the best bang-for-the-buck on my personal and side project sites. I can host a dozen small drupal sites for $20 a month. If I were setting up a site for a client, though, I'd take some serious time to consider other providers.
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Eaton's blog | VotingAPI discussion
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Eaton — Partner at Autogram
bait and switch
Ramdak, thanks for posting this. May cancel new one-year contract with site5.
see node 44173 for more complaints about bait and switch.
have any of you experienced short (once a week) 30 second (not minute) downtimes with site5?
if you were to switch, where would you go?
Drupal ecommerce, at http://www.drupalecommerce.com
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/troubleshooting
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/modulegroupings
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/47vs46
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/compared
I honestly don't know where
I honestly don't know where to go. Just like bonobo, I have been too busy with work to look for an alternative. I wish I had stayed with Pair Networks (had been with them for 3 years) where I never had such troubles, although they were slightly expensive and charged for subdomains.
I might take Eaton's advice and move all client accounts to a more reliable provider.
Site5 Grades: reseller = D- / multi-site = B / support = C+
My comments below pertain to Site5 reseller accounts only.
I've become very disappointed with Site5 in the last few months. It seems like the same problems on their end are not getting resolved in a proactive manner. They're constantly fighting fires, and I've had to report on the same problem time and again. The server I'm on (reseller account) is fouling my sites with dns errors, server busy errors, blank pages in Drupal, or very slow response. They address it, then the problem is back within hours or days. This is bad news for Site5.
Not all their servers have these problems, but they don't seem to care anymore about their reseller clients. As I understand it, in the past they've moved accounts around between servers to balance things out. Now they refuse to do this.
Their support was excellent, but has gone down to average recently. It is still quick, but depending on the technician, it is now common to get incoherent gibberish, sentence fragments and incomplete information. They need to look at the recent staff additions and weed out the bad apples before they ruin the rest of Site5.
They are overselling their reseller servers and unwilling to take proactive steps to correct the situation. Their draconian steps to muzzle their clients may backfire eventually. I can't say I blame them for not wanting bad press coming from their forums, but I wish they'd put half as much effort into stabilizing their reseller servers as they put into keeping their image squeaky-clean. Shame on you, Site5.
My current recommendation is to avoid Site5 reseller accounts until they address these issues.
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Their multi-site accounts, on the other hand, seem to run much better. Site5 seems to do a better job of controlling the number of sites on each server under their multi-site plans.
I'm still generally positive on Site5 multi-site accounts, but I am keeping an eye out to see if Site5 starts slipping here as well.
Anyone else have a similar experience?
I'm right there with you
The only reason I'm still with Site5 is that I've been too busy with other work to research a good alternative.
I have a multisite account, and I've found the service in recent months to be mediocre at best.
Cheers,
Bill
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
I agree also. Site 5 isn't
I agree also. Site 5 isn't the worst, but seems like now it's not the best. I also had site down (@ gigantes server) several times. And, I didn't have fast responces.
Familiar
Huh, sounds familiar. I believe we talked about this before ;-)
I simply refuse to honor their forums with my posts until I see that particular moderator disappear (won't happen anyways).
As for hosting: I have a multisite account with them. Problems so far:
-they installed a new gzip that logs files to /tmp through httpd. /tmp ran full, mysql put out error messages. It took 4 complaints until they finally found the problem. Some took over 5 hours. Not really downtime but error messages on your website don't look professional.
-couple of downtimes
-dns errors making my site disappear
-recently access to lynx and wget is blocked. I have requested numerous times to be put into the trusted usergroup. They do it and half a day later I get cron errors again
Most problems took numerous complaints to resolve.
BUT:
I have been with powweb before and believe me when I say that S5 is far better than them. All they ever did was blame things on me, while S5 takes over responsibility and fixes things (even though I have to complain several times).
I don't think you can find any better service at this price. All shared hosts will have these kind of problems:
RECOMMENDATION:
I am going to stay there. If I have a problem, I write customer service but I avoid posting on their forums like hell. After all, why should I be punished and badmouthed by a snotty admin for adding content to their forum.
I discuss technical issues in other forums and Site5 issues per email with customer service.
Response is pretty good (compared to the 24hrs by PW).
Andre
No ideas on it
Recently I hosted a news site with site5 2 months, i havent found any downtime so far, I need to keep an eye on it.
Thanks for teh info.
Sunny
www.gleez.com | www.sandeepone.com
Well - my site is down right
Well - my site is down right now! See the sig =(
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It's alongtail.com
works
works now.
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It's alongtail.com
Man, this is so depressing.
Man, this is so depressing. I was on a bit of a high today - looking forward to moving over to site5 from hostinginsiders. hostinginsiders seem to have given up on trying to respond to any customer questions - they just dont respond. But damn were they cheap!
so it seems from the three threads that I have been reading on this, that most hosts have problems. I am very pleased that I have not signed up for site5 - sounds like it could be on a downhill slide. So the question remains, what is a good cost-effective option for hosting multiiple domains running drupal?
DWHS seem to be coming out of this on top, but I am really wondering which way to go on all this.
Anyone actually happy with their host?
BTW I think threads like this are great - the publicity (bad or good) that hosts stand to gain might help to improve their support for the needs of drupal users - it would seem that a lot of users of these forums would flock to a reliable, reasonably priced host.
A lot of people have been
A lot of people have been suggesting bluehost.com. They have just one basic plan (as far as I know) and you can host upto 6 domains on each account.
Disclaimer: I am not their customer or affiliate partner. Just spent a fair bit of time studying their services.
Well, I have taken the
Well, I have taken the plunge with bluehost, based on a bit of searching on the web and the fact that they offer a full (pro-rata) refund if you pull out of hosting plan. I guess you can't go to wrong with that. Will report back with my experience.
So far my
So far my experience:
So I am happy with everything in general, and willing to accept the server crash as being unfortunate, but it is concerning. I don't know how long the total outage was, as I needed sleep.
Updates
I've received notice that the server I'm on (that was experiencing so much spotty trouble last month) is being split to reduce the load. Performance has been very good so far.
If things continue as they have been for the past month or so, I'm more than happy to chalk the spate of issues up to growing pains as Site5 expanded, and embarked on a number of internal development projects.
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Eaton's blog | VotingAPI discussion
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Eaton — Partner at Autogram
Yup
Seems like S5 is working the issues out. I haven't had any trouble during the last month or so either.
Things are running smooth again.
I run cron once an hour though (through lynx) and have the errors emailed to me. About every other day I get a message that it couldn't access my site. Haven't quite figured out what the cause is, but it could be issues with the server.
Andre
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Hmmm.., I had another outage
Hmmm.., I had another outage yesterday, for about 15 minutes but otherwise things have been okay, although it takes a fair bit of time to write changes to the drupal database. I haven't received any notice about the issue with my server, so I am wondering if they treat their resellers differently from their multisite accounts.
I run cron once every 4 hours, but I have had plenty of cron errors ever since I started using it. Haven't really bothered with it much.
So, I guess it is wait and see about Site5. Anyway, thanks everyone for sharing these updates as it reassures me that Site5 are actually *doing* something to address customer service issues.
Cron
I am not sure we are talking about the same thing. I wasn't refering to the watchdog log. I set cron up via the control panel. There you can also specify an email where the error messages will be sent to.
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Actually, we are:-)
I also set up cron via the cp, but chose not to send the error messages to an email id, so they show up instead on the admin log.
I received the same notice
I received the same notice as Eaton, and, since the server shift (maybe a week now?) things have been uneventful. However, I have received spotty service from their customer support, something that can't be alleviated through more servers -- I'm looking for better hosting, but Site5 is just good enough, for now, for me to have my hosting search as one of my lower priorities.
Cheers,
Bill
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Just thought that I'd pipe up...
Here's my simple opinion (as a Site5 user):
Do they have outages: yes
Are there issues: yes
Are better that 90% of shared hosts out there: most likely
There may be better deals out there, but Site5 is large, helpful and innovative. Often times, too much so (see flashback). Overall, I think they are a great shared host and I am confident that the owners and engineers are working hard to solve many of the typical problems of shared hosting. That's a lot more than I can say for a lot of other cheap hosts.
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Rick Vugteveen |rickvug.com @rickvug on Twitter
My 2 Cents
I moved to Site5 when I decided to move to a Linux environment from Windows. I also signed up for a reseller account with them.
During my first Month I experienced horrible outages for no reason serveral times. At the end of May I actually wrote in and requested that they honor their hosting guarantee which would have given me a 10% refund. The customer service person was great. They gave me a $10 credit and apologized for the problems. They said that the server that I was on was way overloaded and they were moving accounts off of that machine. I've only seen 1 outage so far in June, don't know if there were others, but clearly better.
So my fingers are crossed that they're on the road to recovery. Clearly my clients are paying for a web site, not a "page not found" error.
These are older comments.
These are older comments. I've got six sites running on Site5 and I've had very good luck with them. They currrently have email set up so that the contact form does not work without downloading a the SMTP module. But otherwise they are good.