If you happened to send me an email yesterday between 2 p.m. and midnight, chances are I did not get it. Of course, the chances are slim that anyone who actually sent me an email during those 10 hours is actually reading this, unless spammers read my blog…
So what happened? My server was over quota. I have shared hosting through LiquidWeb, and while I’ve been pretty happy with them (BIT-101 has been there since its beginning in 2001), I’m not too happy with the way this was handled.
First off I definitely am to blame for the server being WAY overloaded. My account has a 1500 MB limit and I was over 2700 MBs! I had used it to temporarily back up a whole bunch of stuff at one point, and forgot to delete it, and then used it to transfer a whole bunch of stuff from my wife’s old pc and never took that off there, and I had a whole bunch of pictures that have since been moved to flickr, and beyond that just a whole bunch of stuff that I stuffed in there and forgot about. After I cleaned up everything, it’s down to something like 200 MB. That’s right, I had 2 1/2 gigs worth of crap in there.
The thing that bugs me is that it’s been more than a gig over quota for months and months. And suddenly, without warning, mail just stops. Note, it wasn’t my mailboxes that were full, so there were no bounces sent out. The mail just never arrived. Where was the warning notice, “Mr. Peters, we notice that your account is grossly over quota, young man. Clean it up or we’re going to cut off your mail priviledges…” ? I gladly would have cleaned it up. I’m not in the habit of checking my server disk usage on a regular basis. I still have no idea what caused the sudden shut down. It wasn’t like I put anything big up there in the last week or even month. Did some email come in that just pushed it one byte over some mysterious limit? The Viagra ad that broke the camel’s back? Or did someone decide to go in and clean house and say, “Whoa, this guy’s account is wicked full, dude. Shut it down!”
This reminds me a bit of Aral’s issue with Liquidweb, where they just shut down OSFlash with no warning or notice due to some big load that the site was putting on the server.
Again, I’ve been with LiquidWeb for five years and have been very happy. Service is generally good and when I do contact them with an issue, tech support responds quickly and fixes it quickly. It seems like they are just missing something in the proactive department. Anyway, I’m not in the mood to go through switching providers right now, so I’ll play it by ear.
Hey Keith,
I’m tight with the head of marketing at Liquid Web and just let him know about your issue–I imagine he’ll jump on the problem quickly.
Brooks
Well, despite “not being in the mood”, I did start looking around at other plans. Media Temple’s grid server looks pretty sweet. 100 gigs storage, and they have an svn server too. All for same price I’m paying. Switching over would be a pain, but it’s looking nice.
LOL i can’t believe this is Liquid Web again!!
Keith,
I am very sorry that you had problems. We value your business and I am investigating this issue as I write this. I will be right with you.
Travis Stoliker
Director of Marketing
Hello Keith,
I have investigated this issue with our techs and discovered the problem. The quota system was broken on the machine that you were using. So when your mistakenly went over your disk space a few months back, the notification was not sent. After a few months, a tech discovered this problem and corrected it on the box. When this correction happened, it inadvertently cut off your server because of the disk space overage.
I am very sorry that this has happened to your site and I would be happy to provide you an SLA credit for this outage. If you will continue to be a Liquid Web customer I will give you a 3 month credit.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention Keith and Brooks.
Travis Stoliker
Director of Marketing
Liquid Web Inc.
800-580-4985
tstoliker@liquidweb.com
That sounds about right. I am pretty sure that my control panel said 5000 MB available earlier, which is why I never really worried about the space I was using. Now it says 1500 MB, which is in line with what is advertised for my plan.
However, I still didn’t receive any notification of being over quota. I just noticed after several hours that no mail was coming in. I assumed the mail server was just down for a bit and waited, but it never came back on. It took a support request on my behalf to find out what was going on. And as part of that request I was told that there are no over-quota notifications. When you go over quota, things just pretty much shut down. If that’s the case, it’s a major flaw in the system, in my opinion. Ideally there should be a warning when you get close to quota, and some other method of handling an overage. Either a grace period with a strong warning or some kind of “overdraft protection”. Even if you were to charge for the extra space used, it would be better than simply shutting things down with no notice.
Keith,
“I was told that there are no over-quota notifications. ” I’m sorry Keith, that information was incorrect. We do have a quota notification through our control panel system, however, it looks like that was not setup on your server. Since you’ve been with us so long, its hard to know exactly when this happened.
I think that your points are very valid and I am sorry that you had any downtime. If you would like me to go ahead and apply your credits, please email me so that I can verify your hostname, email and password?
Thank you Keith. Have a great day.
Travis Stoliker
Liquid Web