2006 / May 29^th/ Server Seed is a bad host

If you’ve noticed, Warpspire suddenly dissapeared off the map sometime last night and was replaced with a “this account is suspended” message. Before today, Warpspire had been living over at Server Seed (no link justified). I was going to move it to Dream Host, but I just didn’t have the time. In addition to the main domain, I also have a beta subdomain, my Hemingway support forum and my friend’s site. Basically, it was going to take a long time – a lot of time I just didn’t have.

Then Server Seed suspended my account without reason at all. My content is 100% legal, and I do nothing to subvert the law. I was only at about 1/3 of my bandwidth limit when I went to bed; chances of me exeeding this limit in under 12 hours are almost impossible. My disk space was also only about 50% used. So why was I suspended? Hell if I know. Tyler Lott has yet to respond to my emails, and I havne’t heard why my account was suspended, nor have I been able to access all of my data.

As of now, I have yesterday’s backup of warpspire.com (thank you WP-DB-Backup). Unfortunately, I don’t have any recent backups for the forums or my friend’s site. I’m still hoping that I’ll at least get a mysql dump of what I had on there.

In any case, I am writing this host mostly to warn future customers that Server Seed is a terrible host and should be avoided at all costs. I have other reasons beyond the suspension, but this is pretty much the main reason.

Lesson learned: Move your crap to Dream Host when you mean to. Not when you have to.

1. 

   josue salazar

   May 29^th | #

   Another lesson would be to make regular backups of everything in your hosting account, not just WP.

   Anyhow, glad to see the site back again, I was missing it.

2. 

   Naina Redhu

   May 29^th | #

   Glad to have you back.
   And glad that you’re on DreamHost [ like me :) ].
   I’ve NEVER had any issues with DreamHost – they are the best I’ve come across so far – fantastic support team too.

3. 

   Kyle

   May 29^th | #

   yeah, no kidding Josue. Ah well, lesson learned. At least I had some backups :)

   Naina: Yeah, I’ve been using them for about 4 months now (for other sites + svn) and I’ve had a great time so far. I always kept meaning to move Warpspire over, but eh – you know how it goes :)

4. 

   Andy

   May 29^th | #

   And what about Hemingway, is he (she) safe. There seems to be a single jpeg in the server folder, and it looks updated, and nicely updated might I add!

5. 

   Kyle

   May 30^th | #

   Whops :) Nope, I just had uploaded an old folder (that jpg was back from October) of mine that was sitting on my hard drive.

6. 

   doug

   May 30^th | #

   I just found your site and was disappointed that I couldn’t download and play with Hemingway for Wordpress.

   Then I noticed this post. Sorry to hear about your troubles with the web host. Those suck.

7. 

   Kyle

   May 30^th | #

   alright…hopefually all Hemingway files are back up :)

8. 

   Dan

   May 31^st | #

   Bluehost has been incredible for the 3 years I have been with them. They were recommended to me by a friend, and I know about 20 people using them, and all of them love it. They are the best one I’ve found for the money. I know this sounds like Spam or something, but it’s not. I just like your site and thought i’d recommend them to you.

   We actually have a bunch of geeks that use them and have some scripts that monitor the servers and report to us (we work in a tier-1 systems team). Geeks with resources.

   Cheers.

9. 

   Mike Lacy

   May 31^st | #

   This really scares me. I am build a new site to get my current offering off blogger and I dont know anything about back up my site. I guess better late than never.

10. 

    aj

    June 2^nd | #

    You prob. hit some sort of daily limit for traffic…My experiences with Globat concerned that “feature”. Total 300GB of traffic, but for one day the limit was 10GB!

11. 

    Kyle

    June 2^nd | #

    Maybe aj, but it’s been over a week now and I still don’t even have access to my data, or a response from my emails / support requests.

12. 

    Christian

    June 5^th | #

    Is it just me or did you restore an old version of Hemingway?
    On your site, you state that the latest version would be “Hemingway 0.19 (March 06, 2006)”, yet in the functions.php file that comes with the theme, you’ve got $hemingway->version = "0.17";.
    Oh, and to add my two cents: Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to first slam (is that the right word?) your host and then ask them for a backup… ;)
    Anyways, I hope your site (including the discussion board) will be fully restored soon… :)
    (And that your old host comes to terms with damage control and at least declares itselve and cooperates by returning your data. Because just doing nothing seems a little unprofessional, doesn’t it?)

13. 

    Kyle

    June 5^th | #

    Christian: It may very well be. In any case, the latest version of hemingway can be found at http://kneath.dreamhosters.com/hemingway (svn required).

    And, to be fair – I gave ServerSeed almost two whole days to respond to my email before posting this. Not to mention, I paid for a service – which I have subsequently been denied.

14. 

    JC

    June 16^th | #

    I can’t really argue about Server Seed (while I’ve personally never had any major problems with them, I know many who have, and sometimes it has taken Tyler ages to respond to support tickets)–but DreamHost isn’t much better. DH is really slow, imposes a lot of artificial limits, and pages go missing all the time.

    Switch your stuff to ASmallOrange.com … they’re EXCELLENT. Site5 is also good.

    (For refence, I have two sites hosting on ServerSeed, two on ASmallOrange, one on DreamHost, and six on Site5.)

15. 

    Kyle

    June 16^th | #

    JC: You know, I wanted to try asmallorange, but I’ve attempted to sign up for their service three times over the past two years and have been unable. If you won’t accept my money, not much I can do about it :)

    Keep in mind, I’ve been with DH for going on 5 months now, and things have gone perfectly. So, hopefully I’m good…

    I do need to update this entry though as I (finally) got a dump of my files.

16. 

    Joe

    July 20 | #

    I’ve used Server Seed with no problems. But maybe you should pay your bill and your account wouldn’t be suspended. (I had to find out what the problem was….) Getting 6 months free service, you should be so lucky, although it was a glitch in the accounting software. You should really remove this blog, since you got free service AND got your data too!!!

17. 

    Kyle

    July 20 | #

    Actually Joe, Tyler fully admitted fault. They were experiencing growing pains; as such their system misbehaved, and they were drowned in tickets that they weren’t answering. My account was in good standing at the time it was suspended. The end result was completely abandoning their customer (me) for over a week after a wrongful suspension. Also, a refund of services not rendered is not the same as 6 months of free service.

    Try not to make too much of a fool out of yourself in the future.

18. 

    Joe

    July 21^st | #

    I only base it on facts. Unless you have paid invoices, I tend to not believe your opinion. He only admitted his accounting software faulted in not billing you, and you recieved your data…yes or no??

    Next time, stick to facts and evidence and you won’t look so foolish yourself.

    Joe

    p.s. I am not going to keep going back and forth….some people it’s pointless.

19. 

    Kyle

    July 21^st | #

    Joe, do you read my comments? My account was in good standing. Since you are apparently unable to comprehend reality, here is a reciept from February in which I paid for 6 months of hosting (3 months before suspending me).

    Dear Kyle Neath,

    This is a confirmation that your invoice has been processed by Server Seed.

    Status: Approved
    Invoice Amount: $xxx
    Invoice Number: 5074
    Date Paid: 02/07/2006
    Trans ID: 4MB956078W374584H

    Outstanding Balance: none

20. 

    Janet Angelo

    August 7^th | #

    HELP!!! I am trying to make a change to an A record for a domain name registered with Server Seed. I cannot figure out where to do it or Server Seed has to do it for me. They will not respond to numerous emails and time is critical. Can you help me?!? Thanks!! Janet

21. 

    Pramod Kiron

    October 18^th | #

    While most are unhappy with hosting service providers, I am extremely happy with Host Department. 24 hour chat support which is pretty good. Also the support team is always eager to please. Really good service at such low rates. The databases are fast too. I saw remarkable speed increase after shifting http://www.exclventures.com to Host Department

22. 

    Connor Wilson

    January 8^th | #

    Hey, I don’t know how old this article is, but I have to say I had the exact problem, and my solution was the same :P The only difference, was that I wasn’t even spared the dignity of a Suspended page, but what I though was just your typical… 300 hour downtime cough turned out was them giving me and many others the boot. Doesn’t help that all my support emails were never answered.

    I’ve since been on DreamHost for a couple of months, and its been 99% great so far! (They don’t allow fopen() in PHP very easily).

    Here’s to a good, stable host! ;)

Name

Email (will not be published)

Website (optional)