I've been an HMS customer for nearly 3 years now, having had a great run with them before this year. They were top notch in offerings and even better at support than anything else I have ever encountered online. I've recommended them to everyone I knew in the business and then some. Lately, however, it seems that they have turned into something not worth mentioning, even through a whisper.

Downtime on the .NET Professional High Availability Hosting package has been unacceptable. Naturally there are excuses available for each new episode but enough is enough. Fix it!

I recently moved a large SQL-powered site over to the "High Availability Hosting" package, with the promise of "100% Network Uptime Guarantee", this back in May 2009. Since then, I've had nothing but issues with episode after episode of downtime, each occurrence taking at least 1 hour or more to rectify - that's one hour or more of downtime each time, and that's only when I've known about the downtime. Every second my sites are down directly costs me and my clients money (not to mention online credibility), money that HMS is not at all interested in crediting to my account (those requests are emails that go unanswered by HMS by the way).

Perhaps if HMS took down their own website when ours were down, they would feel our plight.

But this latest episode, occurring on 7/27/2009 at 3:15PM CT and lasting until 4:15pm has moved me in the direction of finding a new, more stable and responsive hosting provider for my valuable web properties.

There is simply no excuse anymore. The fabulous world that was HMS is no more. Somewhere along the road of the last three years, HMS died.

CommandDork,
I feel your pain. I have been with HMS since early 2004 Started with some shared Windows Accounts that evolved into needing a VPS, Now I have over 20 shared accounts along with 4 VPS boxes, and 1 .NET Professional.

The VPS go down a couple times a month ( just requires a reboot, nothing too bad ). However when the .NET pro goes down it goes down hard, for like 6 hours.

My Theory is the new management has been leaning out HMS, to maximize profits. Reducing the number of people on staff, overloading the servers with too many sites. Some of my clients have been complaining about slow load times. FTP transfers are a joke. Not sure if its because I am in Houston and they are in Delaware, but I know when I FTP with my Godaddy clients, speed is never an issue. By the way all my new clients are now godaddy clients. The HMS ASP.NET hosting plan at $24 / month is highly overpriced.

I put the blame on upper management. They are making some Stupid decisions in the pricing structure.

I have lost all faith in any sort of VPS / fancy load balanced plan ( including cloud ). Dedicated is the only way to go. I am sick of fighting wtih my neighbors for kernel memory on the 32 bit VPS boxes.

I don't blame the support techs or Jamie in sales, as they are doing the best they can. They are the only thing left of what was once a great company.

I got that email from the CEO explaining what went wrong.
Interesting first line.
"As CEO of Hosting.com|HostMySite it is my responsibility to provide our clients with important information regarding company successes and failures."

Art, your job goes way beyond making some political statements. when **** goes wrong. Your responsibility is to provide competitively priced hosting services for your customers, and ensure the company's long term growth. The price increases on shared hosting is forcing your customers to no longer consider HMS an option. Less shared clients means less future dedicated clients. Yes Shared clients cost more to support, but that is the price you pay to grow them into dedicated clients. HMS was profitable before the buy out. Nothing needed to be leaned out or tweaked.

As it is I am a week away from two new dedicated servers with godaddy, and shutting down three VPS accounts on HMS.
Nothing will change my decision.
.....
Except maybe if Jamie was promoted to CEO.
Then my faith in the HostMySite's leadership would be restored.

Well put whitesites, glad I'm not alone. I felt like there just weren't enough people voicing their issues on these boards to make a difference and force HMS to listen. At least we can go on knowing that we will all be here long after HMS has gone the way of the dodo.

There will be another HMS (pre-buyout) somewhere out there someday again.

Hey Guys,

My Supervisors have been notified of this post. There should be an update shortly.

I can say, with out a doubt, that we are still committed to providing the best customer service in the industry. Unfortunately hardware failures do happen from time to time, and can only be addressed as they occur.

I'll let management handle the rest.

I still have faith in the support guys like yourself. However Upper Management needs to get a clue.

In the past I've thought of HMS as a kind of "silent partner" that is helping us to succeed. However, I must agree with the gist of this thread. Our "silent partner" has been turning into a business handicap.

It would be interesting to see the aggregate results of the support surveys (that seemingly we have to fill out at least once a week when we have an outage). For us, the score for the question "Would you recommend HMS to..." has been steadily decreasing over the past 6 months.

Regards,
cah

I am with you Cah,
I liked that the company was started by developers, who understood what it meant to work at 3AM to meet a deadline. It was a company by developers for developers. Its a sad day when I feel I am better off with godaddy than HMS. Obviously the new Management doesn't realize who the foundation of the HMS customers are.

Whitesites thanks as always for vote of confidence in the Support and Sales Staff, and also for pushing me for the CEO position. Unfortunately tenure doesn't grant automatic ownership of the company, so for now I will only be operating as a Senior Account Executive.

Having said that, I'd like to directly address some points you made in your posting.



- No reductions in HMS Support Staff have been made since the acquisition. The few employees that left us to pursue other interests were replaced as SOP, and I believe we must have hired on additional staff since then too though I am not privy to exact numbers.

- Server loads have not significantly changed in the last year. I.E. if we were putting 150 sites on a .Net server last year (just a guess) then we are still doing it this year.

- Your speed issue is strange though - we can ping Cali in less than 10 ms and have great bandwidth, so I'm unsure what would cause that.



- Pricing on shared hosting plans is one of the few things I can't comment on one way or another, unfortunately, since my province is restricted to VPS and up.



- Though the cloud hosting was affected by the SAN outages as well as the HA .Net Pro plan, I would still have to say that is a much more stable environment provided the SAN backend issues are resolved. To this effect we are terminating our use of the Pillar Axiom SAN and moving towards the EMC CLARiiON system, and you should expect to see that change within the next week or two at most. We quite literally have technicians working around the clock to address this issue, and it is considered the #1 priority in the entire company at this time.

Regarding "Standard" VPS Stability, I would say that as a company we have not been happy with the Virtuozzo VPS accounts due to the shared kernal memory and general stability issues. We released the cloud service earlier this year and it has performed AMAZINGLY and I am personally VERY happy with it. I have a good idea that the standard VPS accounts will be deprecated within a year and cloud versions will appear. I don't have specs or pricing obviously, just a feeling that is where we are heading (and my premonitions are generally pretty spot-on).



Again, thanks for your support. It's good to know that our efforts are appreciated, and you should know that the same team is here and we are constantly putting in extra hours, blood, sweat, and often tears to make this a better company than it was yesterday. And we do that every day of the week.

Also, I forgot to mention this. On the topic of the HA Hosting plan, I would honestly say that I'm not a big fan of that platform. I know the architecture behind it as well as the Cloud offering that we recently rolled out, and the Cloud is a MUCH better put together version. Not that the HA plan is bad, I just don't think it's really the best solution for the majority of clients that are needing a redundant environment.

I've had a couple of clients with issues in that environment and I can understand their pain. The marketing behind it I think overstates the solution a little, and leads you to believe that you can host Enterprise-level solutions for cheap. Seriously, this goes back to the 'you get what you pay for' philosophy. It's a bit of a role-reversal in that we have often been called overpriced, however if you look at what the HA hosting plan offers and consider the cost it's insanely underpriced. If you call up ANY other hosting company and asked for load balanced front-end webservers for what is essentially a shared hosting account they will laugh you off the phone. It's simply not done in the hosting industry today to my knowledge.

In short, I would urge clients considering High Availability to avoid being swayed by the inexpensive plans - they aren't going to cut it in the same way a true cloud environment will. If you want something were 100% uptime is at least remotely feasible, then expect to pay more than $200/mth for it or you're shopping in the wrong mall.

Thanks for the followup Jamie,
By the way CEO doesn't mean ownership, just means you run the company. Warren Buffet owns hundreds of companies, and almost always leaves the current CEO in charge.

The once-a-month apologies are all fine and dandy and the hugs sure do help but it does nothing for us online businesses that LOSE money for every second they're down. HMS is not in the business of crediting accounts though their own products break consistently and repeatedly. Perhaps if a little of the cost were "given back" to us customers in the form of account credits, these down times wouldn't be so hard to swallow.

But we receive nothing more than an "I'm sorry" from HMS EACH time...only to see it happen AGAIN!

The "100% Uptime Guarantee" presented on the HMS website is absolute rubbish.

The 100% uptime applies to the network, not the hardware. So basically the data lines going into the building will be up 100% of the time, but don't count on the hardware inside the datacenter being as reliable. I have come to accept this.

I am willing to accept that the SAN went down from a major hardware failure. But I would appreciate an explanation of how the new SAN will not be prone to similar failures. My father used to work in the military with computers. He always talked about how obsessed they were with redundancy. It disturbs me that HMS doesn't feel the same.

Hi,

My name is Vincent Gerbino, I am one of the technical support managers at HostMySite. This forum post was brought to the attention of the management team and I would like to address your concerns as best I can.

First, I would like to clarify the nature of the outage from yesterday. This was, for all intents and purposes, a hardware problem. This being the case, there would have been absolutely no way for us to prevent it from occurring.

Around 3:30pm eastern yesterday afternoon, our storage area network (SAN) rebooted for an unknown reason. Under normal circumstances, even if all is well, a boot of this system takes approximately 1 hour to complete. When it was determined that the system was not going to boot normally, we began taking measures to expedite recovery of the affected systems. The SAN in question is used for backend storage for our .NET High Availability shared hosting accounts, our new Elastic Enterprise Cloud Computing solutions, as well as our Hosted Microsoft Exchange services.

While working with the SAN solution vendor, we discovered the cause of the underlying problem was a failed RAID card. The root cause of the issue resulted from failure of a RAID controller within the system. This in turn caused a software failure across both storage control systems for the SAN. Once discovered, we were able to identify the specific unit causing the problem, disconnected it, and the SAN was able to resume normal operations.

Given that so much data was in play, we did not take any drastic measures as to ensure integrity of the data and prevent any data loss - of which there has been none. Throughout the incident, we made public facing updates to 2 Twitter feeds:

http://twitter.com/HMSCloud
http://twitter.com/HMSExchange

We have made our upper management team available to speak with throughout the day, and addressing credits on a case by case basis.

@CommandDork

We are fixing it. We are replacing our current SAN solution. We've switched to a new provider, we physically have the hardware here at our datacenter. At this time, we are working with the new vendor to get the blessing of their own engineers as to the implementation of the solution. We want to be sure that the implementation we have chosen is in line with best practices and will work as intended at the capacity we need from it. As noted above, the SAN in question is the backend for 3 entire product lines: Elastic Enterprise Cloud Computing, .NET High Availability Hosting, and Hosted Microsoft Exchange


We are always more than happy to credit your account based on services rendered. We are supposed to be providing a stable working hosted environment. Due to issues with our SAN over the course of the past week, we certainly have not been able to do that for you. Feel free to email support, attn: Vincent Gerbino, and it will be directed to my attention. I work Sun-Thurs, 12p-9p eastern if you would like to discuss this further over the phone as well.

@cah


No problem. Here are the survey results from the last 6 months:

In general, I feel HostMySite.com provides excellent support: 4.66
This issue was resolved within an acceptable timeframe: 4.56
I was satisfied with the answer or resolution concerning this issue: 4.62
The Support Technician I dealt with was very professional: 4.73
The Support Technician I dealt with was very knowledgeable: 4.68
How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?: 9
Was your issue resolved?: 94%

If anyone has any further questions or concerns, I'll be keeping an eye on this thread, but please feel free to give us a call or email the support email address.

Just tell me that the new SAN isn't named Titanic, and that it can take multiple raid card failures and not take down the whole SAN when it happends.

Our current SAN should have been able to take a single RAID card failure as well -- unfortunately when this particular card died, it junked up the internal communications within the SAN so the other control units were unable to do what they needed to do.