So, as many of you may have noticed a couple of days ago, we had some server downtime, and I was LIVID because the responses to my support tickets were less than satisfactory.  Apparently, the server has been up this whole time, but myself and my brother kept getting blacklisted by their firewall!

This was due to mod_security in their Apache installation was treating Wordpress Update Post when there is an image in the post as a “SQL Injection Attack.” I got on the phone with them because I was sick and tired of not getting good responses to my support tickets, and they finally fixed the issue. I’ve decided to give them one more chance, but it’s contingent upon them making it right with me in terms of the hosting plan billing, so I will update later on the results. Read more for the whole story and sequence of events. This will be a HUGE post. UPDATED 1/31/2009 10:37 Central

I decided for this post, that yes, I will break my own rules. I am posting the entire conversation from the tickets back and forth between me and SuperNova Networks as well as my previous blog posts, as a single post… Here we go!

01/27/2010 19:22 – (Summarized) Server went down and I submitted the first ticket. I asked if this was something I could fix on my end.

01/27/2010 19:55 RESPONSE - Thank you for your email. We are currently experiencing network server issues on the server in which your account is hosted. We expect to have this resolved later this evening.

01/28/2010 21:06 - Still not working… What happened to the 99% uptime guarantee on the website…

01/28/2010 21:44 RESPONSE - Thank you for your email on this matter. We are sorry to hear of your troubles, but it would appear that the domain name is loading at this time.  Is there something specific on your website that isn’t loading that we may be over looking Casey? We checked over our firewall configuration to ensure that you were not blocked and it doesn’t seem that you are.

01/28/2010 22:01 - That is wierd. At the time I submitted the ticket, there was definitely an issue.

01/28/2010 22:11 RESPONSE - Thanks for your reply. We have been slowly restoring some of our clients data, and your account was likely among the latter ones that were delayed which is why things are just now coming online for you

01/28/2010 22:28 - Ok, so it looks like our site went back in time by several days…. Is there any chance you can get me a copy of my wrdp5 db from BEFORE the site went down?? We lost a lot of stuff because of that, and it looks like an upgrade you did… No notice of scheduled maintenance came across…. If not, how do I pursue you on the 99% uptime guarantee, because we had some downtime that exceeded that.

01/28/2010 22:40 RESPONSE – Thanks for your email on this matter. We checked our backups and we noted the following backup available: -rw-r–r– 1 root root 4.4M Jan 26 07:37 digimant_wrdp5.sql
This looks like what is already available to you via your MySQL within cPanel, is this not in tact enough for you? We also have a backup of the same db that is .4 MB less in size from the 21st of January.

01/28/2010 22:43 - That’ll work. Can you email or message it to me or drop it in a folder somewhere? I can pluck it out of the SQL file manually and re-append it.

01/28/2010 23:33 RESPONSE - Thanks for your reply. I have restored a copy of the database to your home directory in a folder titled dbbackupJan21.

01/28/2010 23:39 - Question… what happened to the Jan 26 one?

01/29/2010 01:00 RESPONSE - Thank you again for your time. The backup for the 26th is now also in your files. Initially, it was believed that you wanted the one from the 21st, so that’s what we placed.

01/29/2010 22:23 - (Site down again, issues with 500-Internal Server Error, Sent them the display and URL) Having server troubles AGAIN? Our site is down, once again without warning. This is getting despicable.

01/30/2010 01:27 RESPONSE - We are able to see and use your site without issue. I’ve tested it over the last couple of hours, however if you have a broken link we can use as an example it would be beneficial.

01/30/2010 09:03 – So uh, its back up now, because you waited so long to answer. What happened to the 99% uptime guarantee? What does it take for you to address this question? Am I going to have to switch hosts?
If you can’t honor your guarantees, and you can’t respond with a real answer to my questions, I will move my site to another company, and will make SURE that everyone I know is aware that Supernova.net does not provide the service that its customers pay for.
Now, since I have experienced a lot of downtime, I am requesting a credit or refund of this month’s fee from you.

01/30/2010 09:21 RESPONSE – Thank you for your email on this matter. We do apologize for the troubles that you have been facing on this matter.
Our Uptime Guarantee is very simple. We guarantee that your web site will experience 99% or better uptime during the course of any calendar month. If we do not provide 99% uptime, we will provide a pro-rated refund of your hosting fees for the month affected.

01/30/2010 09:28 - Since you have repeatedly ducked the matter, and said that I would only receive a pro-rated amount, in the light of your lack of reply to me/ignoring me on this question up until now when I practically scream about it, I have signed up with a uptime monitoring service.

01/30/2010 09:39 RESPONSE – We didn’t wish to address the uptime issue until we got all of your technical issues dealt with first. We are 100% committed to providing the best support possible for our clients and I am afraid that if we addressed the uptime issue the ticket would have gone in a different direction as it would have had to go to our billing team, which would have delayed things even further for you.
We worked very diligently to retrieve all the data you certainly had on your website that was lost due to our faulty hard drive, and we certainly do apologize for any lost data that you may have encountered. I will now forward this matter along to our billing team to have them process things from their side.

01/30/2010 09:46 – Alright, now I have even more reason to change hosts. If you guys stand firm on the principle of “prorated amount,” I will indeed change hosts.
The latest response was that you didn’t want to address the downtime issues until the technical issue was resolved, because the ticket would have went to a different group… Really? Haven’t you ever heard of having two tickets? Ever heard of INFORMING the customer of this issue when asked, instead of ignoring it?
As for the data loss that we had, they blame it on a “faulty hard drive,” but what is an amazing coincidence is that this all started when they upgraded the CPanel application.

01/30/2010 14:32 RESPONSE – Thank you for your reply. We do admit that the ticket could have been handled a little better from the word go, and yes a second ticket would have a good idea, but a second ticket was not placed with us for that, because we did not advise you to.
The cPanel upgrade came as a result of the faulty hard drive. When we installed the new hard drive, and it came time to install cPanel, the latest version was installed as its best to install the latest STABLE release of any software package, especially when our clients websites backends are driven by it.
With regards to the pro-rated this isn’t set it stone as of yet. It is up to our accounts team to determine what will take place. I will let you know that our accounts team do not work weekends by default so it may be Monday before everything has been fully determined.

01/30/2010 15:28 – (Down AGAIN, due to their firewall I found out… Sent them my TraceRoute test results, since others I spoke to can get to it) – Issue’s still not resolved. It just went down again. Are you guys screwing with me?

01/30/2010 15:49 RESPONSE - Your website is coming up from here without any difficulties. The traceroute also states that it is reaching the NOC (where your account is located).
Please visit http://whatismyip.com and provide the IP address listed. I’ll ensure it’s whitelisted on the server so that any log in failures do not cause the firewall to block you.

01/30/2010 16:10 – (Provided my IP and my brother’s IP) Something else… My brother, 600 miles away also cannot get to it…

01/30/2010 16:11 – (NOC was on a 209.X.X.X network…) 72.52.254.109 is the web server’s IP by the way, so uh…. that IP isn’t even listed. Based on what you are saying, the NOC is on a different network subnet.

01/30/2010 16:22 – (New issue related to this) - I now cannot access the control panel at: [URL Redacted for Security]

01/30/2010 16:36 RESPONSE - I have located both your IP address as well as your brothers in our firewall block list due to too many log in failure attempts. I have removed the IP addresses from the firewall and restarted it accordingly. Also just to note, we are not located internally on the NOC, all our testing is done using an external connection/network.

01/30/2010 16:46 – (Internal Server Errors Again…)

01/30/2010 17:02 – (Brother Firewall blocked again…) Once again, my brother now cannot access the site… This apparently is happening thanks to a nice 500-Internal Server Error when editing posts that contain images…This issue did not exist before, and I expect Supernova.net to fix this problem.

01/30/2010 17:28 - I got fed up, so I decided to call at this time. I spoke to Melissa, who fixed the issue with mod_security that kept blacklisting IPs of those who post image posts in Wordpress. They fixed the issue for the server-wide issue, as it would have affected EVERYONE using WordPress on their service…. They also said that they’ll get the issue with my billing fixed to match the 3.95 plan, which they admitted was old, but left the page online, as well as the downtime refund/credit. At this point, my decision to leave them has been turned around due to good service on the telephone, however me staying is contingent upon them doing what they said they would do on the billing on Monday.

01/30/2010 17:50 - (This is my closing remarks on the ticket, because I like to make a point.) @SuperNova Networks: In the future, I will just call, rather than use the ticket system, since calling got a much quicker resolution. I will await contact back from the account guys on the other issue.
@Melissa, I thought I had the link to the 2006 thing I mentioned on the phone, but can’t find it. It probably doesn’t matter anymore now, because now it doesn’t show in Google web search anymore. Thank you for helping me to get the mod_security thing fixed.

01/30/2010 18:11 - OMG WTF 666 PAGE VIEWS!!! SOMEONE PLEASE VIEW IT AGAIN NAO!!! Push it to 667!!!! O____O

01/30/2010 18:21 - Looks like KD0JEJ is blocked…again…. Brother can see it but I cant… Calling…

01/30/2010 16:40 “please hold while your call is transferred 3 times, then hung up… Wonder if they wanna hear from me?!

01/30/2010 18:50 – (On the phone with them) – They whitelisted the IP, but it doesn’t fix the larger problem. What if a contributor other than me gets blocked??? We tried to replicate the issue with my brother, but it couldn’t be replicated..

01/31/2010 10:43 – Got up this morning, got on the phone again because I once again cannot get to the site.They blamed it on my ISP… Last four times, it was Supernova blocking me… Guy was ridiculously dumb, saying it’s a DNS issue that affected both my ISP and a guy in UK’s ISP, because his Ireland server pings through… Never ever go with this company… The guy’s name is Adam that I spoke to.

01/31/2010 11:00 - Got my MediaCom ISP on the phone. They tested it with my DNS, and reached the website. They re-issued me the same IP and DNS and it worked just fine. This goes to show how stubborn and closed minded Adam was and the likelihood that it’s still a SuperNova issue. I’m calling Supernova back to inform on what happened now.

01/31/2010 11:04 - Got Supernova on the phone, told them it wasn’t a DNS issue – including what MediaCom did, and that I need my new IP whitelisted. The guy had no apologies or comment on the matter.  Still has his head up his own ass. I’m calling back Monday for a supervisor EVEN IF IT’S FIXED because of what I was just put through.

01/31/2010 11:32 - On the phone for the Internal Server Error again…. On hold… Nevermind, the call dropped after being on hold 15 minutes… (Apparently they do not have a QA department.) Apparently, they disabled mod_security according to a ticket reply… I’ll call back Monday. Probably with problems again. Can’t they do ANYTHING right???

To be continued… If billing issue is resolved properly, I will move this from the “Dissatisfaction” category to “DigiMantis Updates.” I have decided, in the light of today’s interaction, to leave this in the “Dissatisfaction” category.

5 Responses to “SuperNova Networks Host Issue Resolved…Sorta”