Email to site5

This is the email I sent to some guy at site5 about them sucking so bad:

Hello this is @amddude from twitter.
The fail that happened was with a favorite site of mine hosted on site5 that i am involved with got turned off for abuse. There are reasons why this should not happen.
1. The resource usage was the same for may and june. (7500 visits/day with an almost all text page)
2. The owner was not going over her bandwidth limit, or storage limit and Site5’s accusation of “abuse” was false (reason was too much resource use) becuase of the previous reason and that the website was only running a standard wordpress blog.
3. Site5 was wrong to disable the site (with a 403 forbidden error) without at least a few days prior notification to the owner that the site was overusing resources. The site was disabled right then and the email sent after it was disabled. Policy FAILURE.
4. The fact that there was no apology whatsoever about the takedown.
5. the email came from abuse@site5.com and not from customer/billing support

Check out this article by a friend of mine, steveh, about what has happened
http://blog.steveh.ca/2009/07/site5com-bait-switch.html

Please put anything you think I left out in the comment section below.

  • I can understand what site5 CEO is saying, but it don't jive in the end, the user Has to pay more, thats BS. I would've had site5 CEO send you Proof of the problem issue with logs or graphs, which along with an Apology, he didn't have. Whatever site5s intentions, seems to be a Fail. And not to mention site5 did not offer help to Fix the issue of Why the website would crash the server. Problem websites can be fixed, site5 showed no interest in possibly finding the solution to cure the site again.
    I'd try hostrocket that's the host I use, and its fast.
  • BenSite5
    Hi guys, as we explained to them the only reason we ever suspend a site is if it is causing problems for the other sites on the server, usually we warn and can give a delay but in this case we had to suspend because of the severity of the problem.

    The site was not going over bandwidth or disk space and that was not the usage, as per our RUP guidelines this is a shared hosting account and thus you have to share the hardware resources (CPU/Mem/Connections) with the community of websites on that server. We don't allow any one site to cause problems for the community or to use too much of those hardware resources. The only other option would be to keep the site up, but then it would crash the server and it would be down along with the other sites on that server which we can't allow.

    Shared hosting is not designed for sites getting 7,500 visitors a day, with that many visitors you need a VPS or dedicated server which we would be happy to help with as we offered.

    I'm sorry to see them go but with their move to Media Temple they moved to a VPS which is what we told them was needed. A VPS has includes dedicated resources as does a dedicated server since they need a lot of resources. We offer dedicated servers and offered them a nice discount and we will soon offer VPS.

    Thanks, Ben
    Site5 CEO
  • You haven"t taken into account that the usage was the same for 3 months, and that your server "monitoring" system failed to detect it IF it was actually noticeably impacting the mercer server, And, you cannot prove that the site could crash the server for getting 7500 hits a day. That's less than 1 hit every 10 seconds, which my own crappy netbook with Apache/php/wordpress could handle even on my home internet connection.

    Your argument is invalid.
  • BenSite5
    Small bit of confusion here, we don't take down sites unless they are causing a problem for everyone else on the server or if they have illegal material. My job at Site5 as well as the job of all our 30+ team is to keep our client's websites up every hour of every day of every year, it is painful to us when a server is down or when we are forced to take down a site due to a severe problem. This is never something we do lightly.

    Your site had caused no problems up until this point but it did this specific time, there are a thousand different factors here and you need to keep that in mind as it could have been any number of things. It could have been a traffic surge that night, it could have been a google/yahoo/microsoft bot getting stuck in a loop along with increase traffic, it could be WP having a bug that hit and caused a memory overload or processes not to shut down, it could be a random surge of your visitors all within the same 20 minutes, it could be any number of things that caused the issue. The point being there was an issue and it was severe enough we had to suspend and notify you.

    Similarly, if another site on that server had a problem like this would you want us to suspend it or would you want us to allow them to crash the entire server?

    This is not an argument, we have been in the hosting business for ten years and have good people on our team, I can only tell you what we saw and that we were forced to do this. I understand your frustration but I would really ask you to take a look at how long you have had the site up with us and look at the great service we have provided during that time, we provide that great service because we respond to problems in order to keep our customers happy. In this case unfortunately your site was the one causing problems for everyone else and we were forced to suspend it.

    We don't go around suspending sites unless it is a problem, as I said my job and everyone's job at Site5 is to keep your sites up,
    Thanks, Ben
    Site5 CEO
    Ben@site5.com
  • "Your site had caused no problems up until this point but it did this specific time, there are a thousand different factors here and you need to keep that in mind as it could have been any number of things. It could have been a traffic surge that night, it could have been a google/yahoo/microsoft bot getting stuck in a loop along with increase traffic, it could be WP having a bug that hit and caused a memory overload or processes not to shut down, it could be a random surge of your visitors all within the same 20 minutes, it could be any number of things that caused the issue. The point being there was an issue and it was severe enough we had to suspend and notify you."

    Just to get this straight... you have no idea what the problem was?
  • BenSite5
    Of course we do, the problem was the site was crashing the server due to more than their fair share of CPU and memory use. What can cause that is what has so so so many variables.

    Thanks, Ben
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