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Yay! A whole free month of crappy Simple Helix Hosting!

I posted yesterday about how bad Simple Helix sucks. In short, my (10) sites were down from Monday night till this afternoon. Several of my clients ended up being pissed because they had lost untold amounts of money from their sites being down and I wasn’t very happy either.

To redeem themselves, SH just sent me this email:

Dear Jeremy Blake,

We at SimpleHelix recognize that the recent downtime you experienced was highly unacceptable, and for this we offer our most sincere apologies. Our SLA agreement (http://simplehelix.com/company#uptime), states that we will compensate you one day of hosting per hour of downtime experienced. We acknowledge that the amount of downtime experienced was excessive, and as such have compensated you a full month’s hosting services.

We also realize that offering compensation is merely the first step towards earning back your confidence in our hosting services. This recent outage has offered our company a unique opportunity to acknowledge areas that require improvement and form more agressive preparedness strategies. For instance, we are continuing to work with R1Soft (our back up solution vendor) to improve the efficiency at which we can restore your data and get it back into production. We are also purchasing additional hardware, allowing us to have a "hot spare" available at all times to increase the efficiency of our bare metal restores. The combination of these two factors alone will significantly decrease the amount of downtime incurred in the unlikely event that we should experience hardware failure in future. In addition to this, we are conducting monthly tests to ensure our readiness should such an event recur.

In light of various feedback received from our clients we are also implementing a forum publicly accessible from our website. This will improve communications between our clients and our technicians, particularly in instances where downtime is being experienced. 

We thank you for your patience during this process, and please let us know if you have any other questions regarding this matter. Thanks, Jeremy Blake.

Sincerely,

The SimpleHelix Team

Thank goodness I got this email! I was worried they wouldn’t redeem themselves. haha. What is up with them? I don’t want another free month of crappy hosting. Who would? I love how they even tiptoe around the issue that their hosting has sucked it up for the last year and beyond that.

Simple Helix has provided zero explanation for any of the other down time my sites have suffered throughout the year, and I can provide all sorts of dodgy support email responses if anybody wants to hear how full of BS these guys are.

I almost feel bad for Simple Helix. I personally think they expanded too fast for their own good (like many small businesses) and couldn’t quite keep up. That’s giving them the benefit of the doubt, though. I wish them luck, but for now, I’m researching how I’m going to transfer 10 magento sites over to another hosting company. I have one scoped out, but I’ll let you guys know who I end up going with once I choose someone.

By on May 13, 2009 4 Comments Filed Under: Insight, Info, & Opinion

Simple Helix Fails. Hardcore.

I have 10 ecommerce sites hosted on my simple helix account and half of them are clients that make a living off of their websites. Should I feel good about Simple Helix when I get an email that says this:?

Hello Jeremy,

We are sorry, but the server you are on has suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure. Despite having Raid-10, despite extra monitoring, and despite all our best efforts, this server still managed to suffer a hard drive failure and corruption that requires we restore the whole server from our back-ups. These back-ups are from 2pm yesterday, and at the rate the restore is going, it may take more than 24hrs. At this point there is two options,

1) Hang tight and wait for the restore of the whole server to complete, or
2) Submit a ticket letting us know you would like a fresh login and you can restore your site from your own back-ups.

Once again we are very sorry for this issue and we can assure you that this is our top priority. Thank you for your patience.

Regards
Kenneth Green
SimpleHelix.com – Support Team

Just like that…

He forgot to say that despite all of the claims on the SH home page, they are all full of crap and you can count on your site being down 90% of the time because they really don’t have the equipment they claim to have.

Do not host your site on Simple Helix…This is a response to only one of the emails out of like 50 this month that I have sent them regarding my site and my clients sites being down.

Hey Simple Helix! You suck! Stop it!

Update:

Hello Jeremy,

We tried to recover the data from the degraded RAID array, but unfortunately this data is unusable. We will now have to restore the data from the full system backup taken by our CDP software from 2 PM yesterday.

It turns out that the CDP software we use for disaster scenarios like this has a bug to where it will not successfully restore a volume that exceeds a 100,000 files. We are working with the software manufacturer to work around this problem right now.

This is our current plan for getting the server restored:

1)Rebuild the entire RAID array to a blank volume using all new hard drives

2)Boot from a special CD provided by the manufacturer of the CDP backup software which will resolve the bug encountered earlier

3)Restore the backup from the backup server to the newly rebuilt RAID array using the software on the bootable CD (This process will probably run overnight and we hope to have it completed by morning)

Step 3 assumes that the CDP software on the bootable CD will work properly in restoring the data. Based on our previous experience with CDP and its manufacturer, we also know that this bootable CD workaround may not restore the volume as planned. We are already making preparations for this scenario which will require using a third server as a staging area for restoration and then copying these files over to the rebuilt server. This second option is undesirable because based on our throughput tests, the restore would take around 24 hours. This is why we are going to try the bootable CD option first, as the software manufacturer claims that this is a quicker and simpler restoration option.

I understand the extremely difficult situation we have put you in by our server going down for such an extended amount of time I assure you that we have our entire staff working to resolve this problem. Thank you for your patience.

Regards
Kenneth Green
SimpleHelix.com – Support Team

Another Update: What a freaking joke.

We were able to load the CDP software provided on a bootable CD and are now restoring from our latest backup, which is from 5/12/2009 around 2 PM. I assure you that we did exhaust every method possible in order to get a more up to date backup restored, be we were unsuccessful in our attempts.

The restore now stands at 5% and will likely be running for the next several hours. If everything goes as planned, the server will come back up after rebooting when the restore is complete. If we experience any further problems with this we will let you know. However, we believe we are in the final stages of this restoration.

Thank you for your continued patience.

Paul Clark
SimpleHelix.com – Support Team

And a day after:

Hello Jeremy,

The restoration of files is still in progress. I will keep you posted.

Regards,

David Hill
SimpleHelix.com – Support Team

Update:
To rectify the solution, the people at Simple Helix provided everyone a whole free month of more crappy hosting! My sites ended up being down from last Monday night till this Wednesday afternoon. Simply unacceptable.

By on May 12, 2009 13 Comments Filed Under: Insight, Info, & Opinion

Is It My Internet, Or Is That Just Dreamhost Sucking It Up Again?

….I’m going to have to blame it on Dreamhost.  My last post was mainly complaining about Dreamhost. Ironically, this website (EliteEternity) is hosted on Dreamhost itself and when I submitted my last post, Dreamhost stalled so bad that I almost thought my precious words would be lost into cyberspace forever! 10 minutes later (exaggeration) it kicked back into gear and my post was submitted successfully. In all seriousness though, if you need a good web host, go with SimpleHelix. They will save you time and brain tumors.

By on November 19, 2008 Leave a Comment Filed Under: My Advice to You

Another Reason Why Dreamhost Sucks And SimpleHelix Rocks!

As I stated in my last post, I signed up for the PPC-Coach in hopes of drastically improving my PPC Marketing skills. Sidenote: It’s 50 bucks a month, but it’s already worth it and I’m only on my third day of the subscription. Sidenote#2: You can cancel at any time during your membership. That’s a question I had before signing up. Anywho, PPC-Coach has several cool software tools that you download and use for your first lesson. I downloaded these tools and was attempting to install them on one of my many dreamhost servers and lo and behold – I was getting tons of errors. I had had problems with Dreamhost before (speed/error issues) so I had a pretty good idea that the errors I was getting were Dreamhost related. Big surprise.

So I contacted Dreamhost customer support via email and they had a timely response (as usual. props to them) but they said the the error was a problem with the third-party software’s problem. Of course it was! Who wants to take blame, right?

Last night I realized that I have quite a bit of hosting space over at SimpleHelix that I’m paying for, but not using. I figured I would purchase a new website on their site (only $7.95) or something and use try to install the PPC-Coach software there. I purchased the domain last night and got everything set up today. Needless to say, the errors simply didn’t exist when I installed the PPC-Coach tools on my SimpleHelix server. Although the SimpleHelix admin interface leaves much to be desired when copmared to Dreamhost’s, I must give props to SimpleHelix for having solid hosting and super-quick email/phone support (both free). You can sign up for SimpleHelix here.

What problems have you had with Dreamhost? Do you agree with me when I say that Dreamhost sucks? I’ve been with them for quite a while (a couple of years), so my opionon isn’t just based on one bad experience.

By on November 19, 2008 6 Comments Filed Under: My Advice to You

The Bad About Simple Helix Web Hosting. Simple Helix VS Dreamhost

Put your boxing gloves on. This isn’t going to be pretty.

When I say this isn’t going to be pretty, I’m merely referring to the crappy user control panel of Simple Helix VS the excellent Dreamhost control Panel. In this post I’ll detail some of the problems I’ve faced with SimpleHelix as well as the good I’ve encountered. There is more good, than bad.

The only two problems that I’ve really had with Simple Helix Web Hosting thus far:

  • The Price
  • The User Interface

The Price:

I guess you can’t expect “cheap” when you’re paying for the No.1 Rated Fastest PHP 5 Web Hosting in the USA. Their claim, not mine. But it is fast. About a bagillion times faster than Dreamhost, especially when hosting the new and beautiful E-Commerce Solution – Magento. I’m currently paying about $250.00 annually for their hosting services. The plan I’m on – The Standard Plan – Allows 10 domains. The domains cost $7.95 each annually, but that’s cheaper than Dreamhost’s $9.95 annual fee.

The User Interface:

Booooo! No, not the “I just scared the hell out of you” kind of boo. The kind of boo that you hear at a stadium of pissed off Utah Jazz Fans after they just lost the Super Bowl….err, I mean the National Championship (can you tell I don’t get out much?). Joking aside, SimpleHelix’s user interface leaves much to be desired.

I can deal with the home page:

Simple Helix Home Page

But to be honest. I’m having a REALLY hard time getting over the Client Panel (control panel):

You probably don’t think it’s really a big deal, just looking at the images. So to help my case.
I’ve created a short video to vent my frustrations: (click in the box to play)

Did ya catch it? That scroll downwards? That’s my complaint. Is it honestly necessary to have that big blue bar above the client control panel in every single window? Come on Simple Helix! I don’t want to scroll down any time I want to do anything in my control panel.

Now in contrast, check out the nice, all-in-one Dreamhost interface: (Click in the box to play)

There is an obvious difference.
Can I get a witness?

By on August 26, 2008 15 Comments Filed Under: Insight, Info, & Opinion

And again, don’t install Magento on Dreamhost – not even 1.1.3

Dreamhost Doesn’t Play Well with Magento (Even Version 1.1.3) You Would think that maybe I learned something when I posted the first time about this. Well, I thought I would try again. Since my last post, Magento had a series of updates. The current version being V 1.1.3. I figured that maybe there were some [...]

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Simple Helix Rocks!

Just an update: I said I would let you know how Simple Helix web Hosting handles Magento E-Commerce. It’s lightening fast! I was worried ($100 bucks isn’t just something you want to throw away), but it completely meets, and exceeds my expectations. I’m planning on upgrading from the personal account to the Enterprise Account. The [...]

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