Unsusal support failure?

Just a question to other customers.

Does tech support treat you like crap as a rule, or is something funky at dreamhost just now?

Last Wednesday, they disabled one of my sites without warning because they said it was using too many resources. It took them two days to respond to my emails, and when they did, it was to tell me they would graciously allow my IP to access my own site, and to give me links to instructions to check all the things I had already emailed them about having done.

I haven't gotten a single response since. It's been four full days now, and my site is still completely disabled!

I'd just like to know if this kind of experience is common, or if maybe something unsusal is going on...

Ah, another one-post wonder.

-Scott

Disabling a customer for bringing the server down isn't treating them like crap, but not disabling it would have been treating every other person that SHARES the server like crap.

It's not their job to fix your site, but it sounds like they gave you access to clean it up and pointed you in the right direction to get started.

Did you fix anything? You seem to have jumped from getting access to not getting a response, with no mention of fixing anything in between.

If you're saying you already did some of the things they suggested before getting disabled, then that would indicate there's still a problem you need to get fixed if you want to run it in a shared environment.

Assuming it's a site using some sort of 3rd party blog/forum/etc... a good start is enabling any caching options and disabling plug-ins/mods to see if it gets better. If so, you can re-enable the plug-ins one by one until you hit the one causing a problem. Sometimes, it could even just be a clash between two incompatible plug-ins.

Other than that, you didn't really post enough info for anyone to be able to offer suggestions.

I think the only thing unusual at present is that the support burden is unusually high (primarily due to the influx of new users from the recent "sales"). You didn't indicate in your message what notification you received of the disablement, but that *usually* includes instructions regarding what you have to do before re-enabling it.

If you want, I'll be happy to look into this for you, but I need your domain name to be able to do that. wink

--rlparker
--DreamHost Tech Support

In reply to:
Ah, another one-post wonder.

-Scott

Ah, another sarcastic unhelpful responder.

-Blaise

In reply to:
Disabling a customer for bringing the server down isn't treating them like crap, but not disabling it would have been treating every other person that SHARES the server like crap.

No, the crap part was the lack of response. And I didn't bring the server down, just *apparently* used too high a level of resources...

In reply to:

It's not their job to fix your site, but it sounds like they gave you access to clean it up and pointed you in the right direction to get started.

It not their job to fix my site, but it is their responsibility to give the more to go on than "your site used too high a level of resources", and it's their responsibility to respond more than once every two days, since we're paying for 24/7 tech support.

In reply to:

Did you fix anything? You seem to have jumped from getting access to not getting a response, with no mention of fixing anything in between.

Yes, as I mentioned when I said they sent a message with some helpful hints that I had already looked into.

In reply to:

Other than that, you didn't really post enough info for anyone to be able to offer suggestions.

Wasn't looking for suggestions, just trying to find out if there was a problem in general, or if I was just slipping through the cracks.

In reply to:
I think the only thing unusual at present is that the support burden is unusually high (primarily due to the influx of new users from the recent "sales"). You didn't indicate in your message what notification you received of the disablement, but that *usually* includes instructions regarding what you have to do before re-enabling it.

If you want, I'll be happy to look into this for you, but I need your domain name to be able to do that.

--rlparker

Thanks for the response. As these things always seem to work out, within an hour of this posting, someone had gotten back to me through the normal tech support channels. They re-enabled the site, and I'm monitoring my site resource usage now.

In reply to:
it is their responsibility to give the more to go on than "your site used too high a level of resources"

Well, not really. You are supposed to know what you are doing in this regard, and it is not within the scope of DreamHost support to dig through the code on your site to tell you what is using the resources and so on.

We generally do try to point you in the right direction (error log output, procwatch kills, processes using too much RAM or CPU, too many or unoptimized MySQL queries, etc.). After that it is up to you, or a competent web developer that you procure, to determine what you need to do to bring your resource usage inline with what is acceptable on a shared server. We help you understand the nature of the problem, but we are not your webmaster or your web developer. Many of the users of these forums can also help you with that.

If you really want some help here you can respond with your domain name and I'll see what I can find out about your situation (as I offered before), but there is no point in doing that if you just want to argue with other posters. wink

--rlparker
--DreamHost Tech Support

In reply to:
Thanks for the response. As these things always seem to work out, within an hour of this posting, someone had gotten back to me through the normal tech support channels. They re-enabled the site, and I'm monitoring my site resource usage now.

That's good to hear! I'm glad progress is being made and you have a chance to get things in order! smile

--rlparker
--DreamHost Tech Support

A simple search would reveal trends in support around here. Rather than doing a search to find out, you pop in and post a message. But I don't think you really care what others experience with Support is. Really, if you're troubleshooting, you're going to have to put in more effort. Judging by the resolution, all they did was re-enable your site, yet again, which is no different than the first time around. At least now you're making more of an effort to do something about it.

Now if you actually need help troubleshooting, post something more specific here and you'll get more specific responses.

-Scott

In reply to:
A simple search would reveal trends in support around here. Rather than doing a search to find out, you pop in and post a message.

Actually, there was only one thread regarding support in the last two weeks. One thread does not a trend make. Data from before two weeks, wouldn't really have told me if there was a current issue.

In reply to:
But I don't think you really care what others experience with Support is.

Well then, you would be wrong, wouldn't you?

In reply to:
Really, if you're troubleshooting, you're going to have to put in more effort. Judging by the resolution, all they did was re-enable your site, yet again, which is no different than the first time around.

Did you guys even read my original post? I was attempting to troubleshoot, but needed feedback from support. The reason I was posting was to find out if there was some particular issue just now to explain the long delays in support response. I wasn't really certain if the question belonged in "Troubleshooting" or in "Curious", so I flipped a coin, and ended up here. Admittedly, I used the *like crap* phrase because I was upset at the time, and that might have been uncalled for.

Scott, you seem to have an axe to grind. Are you rude and aggressive toward everyone on this forum, or only those you perceive to have said something bad about dreamhost?

Nope, I just don't like whiners. Especially ones who introduce themselves with a whiny first post. I apologize for immediately coming off harsh. I'll refrain from doing so in the future. My patience has been worn thin by dishonest (not calling you that) folk who jump on here with half the story and blaming DreamHost for their own stupidity. So, yes, I do have an axe to grind, but only with a few.

To answer your original post, rlparker did mention that support is very busy, but in another thread a couple of days ago, I did point out that I got a response from Support in about 12 hours regarding Google Apps and CNAMEs.

-Scott

Do you require some help troubleshooting or not?

How To Install PHP.INI / ionCube on DreamHost

Actually, I would love some suggestions.

Tech support has me back online, but I can't get my site to reproduce the resource issue. I'm running at normal hit/page request levels, but my site's usage is down around 0.017% of server resources. Also, I can find nothing unusual in the server logs for the time before tech support had to disable the site, either in number of hits or request URLs.

Unfortunately, I did not have per-user resource logging enabled before all this, so I don't have records of what processes were at fault, or what they were trying to do at the time. I did fiddle with google and yahoo's bots to drastically reduce the number of index hits they would attempt, but there's no unusual crawler activity in my logs from the time the supposed resource usage was occurring, so I really don't know if that could have been the cause anyway...

Any thoughts on where to poke next?

What is the function of the site? Is it running a particular script or three? Crontabs, etc.?

How To Install PHP.INI / ionCube on DreamHost

Well, it's a PERL-only, flat-file DB CMS called Web-App. There is really only one script that runs, the index.cgi (98.0%), with boatloads of parameters to determine what data gets returned. I don't have any cron jobs at all, and the site is for a ballroom dancing non-profit organization, so it really isn't pulling down a lot of hits. It averages about 1k page requests per day, even with the crawlers hitting at default rates.

Most of the 2% of usage that isn't the main script is the captcha script, which gets hit about 200 times a day by spam-bots, and about 40 times by actual users.

The URL is http://capitalusadance.com, if anyone cares to have a look.

That about sums the whole site up...

Edited by Blaise on 01/26/09 07:14 PM (server time).

First thing I'd do is update it to the latest stable version.

http://www.web-app.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi?action=downloads&cat=curstable

How To Install PHP.INI / ionCube on DreamHost

Yeah, I've been trying that for about a year now. The newer versions can't seem to use my old db formatting, and no one on their forums seems to have any ideas on how to fix the problem. I've managed to hack in most of the security upgrades by hand, though, so at least the site is fairly secure...

Repair your DB and incrementally upgrade the script.

How To Install PHP.INI / ionCube on DreamHost