I have a few domains running on a ZZ Hosting account. Until now it’s been a pretty good hosting service for low traffic domains.
But my Web sites vanished over the weekend, and apparently other people’s sites vanished at the same time. One guy tweeted that after waiting 48 hours he had decided to move his sites to Bluehost. As a precaution I opened an account at Bluehost and set up one of my lost domains there.
I uploaded the files to Bluehost and changed the nameserver to point to Bluehost. Within a few hours my site was back online.
Naturally, I tried to log in to my ZZ Hosting account to see what was going on. I could not log in. I filed a trouble ticket. Within a few hours I received a reply saying I would be informed of progress.
So the next day I filed a reply to ZZ Hosting Support’s reply, asking what happened. I received another reply saying they were working on the problem.
Okay, but I don’t know what the problem is.
When I tried to log in to my domain registration account (which is separate from my Web hosting account) to point another domain to Bluehost, I found I could not log in. Nor could I load various help documents.
So I fired up another support form on their site and asked them to publish a notice explaining what is going on.
I received a reply that said essentially “Nothing is going on. Your Web site is up and active. Please be specific”.
You know, maybe I’m just getting too old for this nonsense, because normally I would be specific right up where the sun don’t shine. Instead I recapped what I knew of the situation and told them I’ll be advising a few thousand people to be wary of ZZ Hosting (for now, at least).
If I go to the domain name they referred to, I see a Cpanel page — not the files that have been there for a couple of years. I cannot log in to the system. My account is current.
So what is going on with ZZ Hosting? I tried calling customer service this morning but the estimated wait time was 8 minutes. As I write this the estimated wait time is down to about 5 minutes.
I don’t see hordes of people posting about ZZ Hosting on their blogs yet — oh, wait. What if their blogs are hosted on ZZ Hosting?
I don’t tweet so I see no point in asking if anyone is having problems (besides, I hear Twitter is having problems, too — along with Gmail).
Maybe there is an evil dark conspiracy that is trying to take down all the Web sites that are important to people like you and me. I don’t know.
All I know is that I cannot get into my ZZ Hosting Web hosting account, ZZ Hosting won’t acknowledge the problem, and I’m probably going to move the rest of my inventory to Bluehost for now.
Although Bluehost uses “Addon Domains” which I’m not very familiar with. If I could find a competitive service that allows me to do all the neat little stuff I like to do without “addon domains”, I would probably try it out.
Oh, and I didn’t like the fact that Bluehost neglected to mention in advance that it would bill my credit card for an entire year (about $80). At least ZZ Hosting would let me pay on a monthly basis.
If you’re using ZZ Hosting, check your sites. Check your ability to log in. If you are not having any trouble, stay cool. But keep an eye on things. Clearly, I am not the only person being affected by whatever is “not” happening at ZZ Hosting.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Bennie 09.02.09 at 3:15 pm
It’s about 6PM CST. My ZZhosting sites were down all weekend. On Friday, when it all started, I opened a support ticket. Many hours later I received a reply saying that they were aware of the problem and that I should “hold on”. I held on all weekend and finally closed the support ticket yesterday since they apparently were not going to get back to me.
Yesterday I received an email from their domain registrar informing me that the changes I made to my nameservers (for my domain name) should take effect within 24 hours. I DIDN’T MAKE ANY CHANGES TO MY NAMESERVERS! So I replied to the email and asked them just WHO authorized any change to my nameservers? Eight hours later I got a response email explaining how to go about making changes to my nameservers. DUH!
I also sent the same email to ZZHosting support asking them just who made changes to my nameservers – no response from ZZHosting.
I tried to log in to my account a few minutes ago and could not get in.
I did move one of my domains (BBMIRadio.org) to another hosting service this morning. I have two others still on ZZHosting, but I’m getting a little concerned about having to go ahead and move them to another host. My other two domains on ZZHosting have been operational since yesterday. But there have been a few times when they took a long time to load.
In the past ZZHosting has been very good to me. I don’t understand why they don’t update their status page and let everyone know what is going on – or at least mass email all their clients and update us.
Michael Martinez 09.02.09 at 3:25 pm
I have seen some odd rumors that I don’t want to repeat here. I cannot confirm anything at this point, except that I’m still not seeing what I should be seeing.
As far as I know, ZZ Hosting has always had a good reputation and I’ve used them for at least two years without any real issues.
But the way they are handling the current situation is not satisfactory to me.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
lacisoft 09.02.09 at 9:13 pm
I don’t understand why would anyone with your expertise level use hosting providers like ZZ Hosting and Bluehost. There are some enterprise level hosting companies out there (more expensive indeed) that never had such issues and even if they had, i think they would handle it more professionaly. Response times beyond 30 minutes, (let’s say 1 hour) for web based tickets are completely ridiculous and something that i personally don’t accept.
breadman 09.02.09 at 10:19 pm
I have several sites on zzhosting and all of them are down. All of them. I feel stuck. I don’t know what to do. I don’t have any backups. Bummer
I just want them to be frank with me. If they don’t give a crap to fix, i want them to let me know so i can find another host.
Michael Martinez 09.03.09 at 8:58 am
lacisoft: “I don’t understand why would anyone with your expertise level use hosting providers like ZZ Hosting and Bluehost. ”
Michael: Your curiosity is understandable. However, the sites I host with these services are personal sites that I have never discussed publicly. For my larger brand sites, like Xenite.Org and SF-Fandom, I use dedicated server hosting — but I can share plenty of painful horror stories about all levels of dedicated hosting.
I feel it’s good to know how all levels of the market work as much as possible. Many people start out their Web experience with small hosting accounts like those you can get from ZZ Hosting and Bluehost.
JJDavis 09.03.09 at 9:31 am
I have two accounts with ZZ Hosting, and all the sites on one are working fine, and all the sites on the other are down for the count.
The only thing I’ve received in reply to my help tickets is this cryptic message: “We need to file-check against every account manually before restoring it. This is the reason for the delay. It will be completed within 5-6 hours. I hope you understand the hard-time.”
That 5-6 hours was up days ago, and still nothing. Today I gave up and began the process of moving the affected sites over to HostGator. This is a shame because I have been quite happy with ZZ Hosting, having used them for four years now with only minor problems, and they’ve always responded almost instantly to any support requests.
I’m wondering if they’re going belly-up…?
Michael Martinez 09.03.09 at 11:13 am
I don’t know what to say. The most credible rumor I saw was pretty vicious but I don’t want to engage in rumor-mongering. I’m not ready cancel my account but I’ve moved all but one of my active domains from ZZ Hosting to Bluehost.
The one remaining domain is online. They brought it back about 36 hours ago, give or take.
I’m sure their tech staff is working hard, but this issue is really immense and I just feel they need to be more open with the customers about whatever happened.
chrisc 09.09.09 at 9:08 am
The past couple of weeks have been an absolute NIGHTMARE for me with zzhosting.
My domain– where I’d kept a wordpress blog for FOUR years (thousands of posts)– went down at about the same time as yours, and I kept landing on that cpanel/apache page that I assume others got.
I wrote them asking them what was up, and I got an email back explaining that a RAID array went down and they were working with Dell to fix the problem (within 48 hours– HA!).
Well, a week after that, lo and behold ELEVEN files appeared, listed in the new index page. They were weird, random files from like 2005– a random picture of my friend, a random html file from a previous website, an empty folder, WEIRD stuff.
However, one of those files was this weird file named info.txt, that I had never seen before– I opened it up, and all the file contains is a list that contains
1) some domain I’ve never seen before– something like chris.WorldWideReads.com
2) a user name this is my common username for things (not chrisc)
3) (this is the big one) A PASSWORD that I commonly use for log ins.
So anyone visiting my site could click on this file (that i’ve never seen and that I didnt’ put there) and see my most common login name and password!
I can’t log in to delete the file (and have since had to go and change any service where I might have used that password, there are certainly dozens of others that I’ve forgotten about).
Anyway, so I wrote zzhosting AGAIN, this time telling them about the mysterious info.txt file and asking them to delete it immediately for me.
About 2 days later, I finally get a response– a form email explaining that they’re making progress and all my files should be up in 48 hours… they hadn’t even read the bigger complaint: that they’re giving away my username and password.
I wrote them again, with the subject “PLEASE ACTUALLY READ THIS– YOU’RE GIVING AWAY MY PASSWORD” and explained again the problem with this weird info.txt file.
I got a reply 24 hours later that said “We’ll remove the file and advise when it is completed”. That was about 4 days ago.
Today, I went to my domain– the file was still there– and in my inbox was a new email from support at zzhosting. The new email says that since they haven’t heard back from me, they’re assuming the problem is fixed and they’re closing the support ticket.
GACKASDFKAJSh!
I’m so angry right now– not only am I pretty sure that I’ve lost four years worth of blogging and comments– but as of now there’s still a little file on my domain giving away my username and password. I’ve been promised that both the domain would be restored and that they’d delete one little file for me and they have done NOTHING about either of these issues.
Someone mentioned something about suing these guys earlier. Anyone know if there’s grounds to sue over this? Could a class-action suit work? I don’t know much about legal stuff, but I’d say that their guarantee of 99.9% uptime was not fulfilled and because of that, I’ve lost hundreds of hours worth of work. Also, I was not hired for a job when they couldn’t get to my online resume and portfolio that was hosted at zzhosting. Those are starting to sound like real monetary losses to me.
–Chris
Michael Martinez 09.10.09 at 10:31 am
I don’t know about suing them. I would say that’s probably not an option for most of us. I have continued to move sites off my ZZ Hosting account. I was hoping to leave one behind to see when the service comes back, as I think I like their interface better than Bluehost’s.
The best way to express your dissatisfaction with a service provider, in my opinion, is to take your money elsewhere. I have not yet cancelled my ZZ Hosting account (it only costs me $8.50 a month). I’m willing to go one more month to see if they can fix their problem.
But that’s necessarily good advice for everyone. We each need to make our own decisions. If you feel like you cannot afford to be patient, don’t be. Just find a new hosting provider.
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