Globat Support Department Transcripts General Info Chat start time Feb 21, 2008 6:54:14 PM EST Chat end time Feb 21, 2008 6:57:18 PM EST Duration (actual chatting time) 00:03:03 Operator Melo Chat Transcript info: Thank you for contacting Globat Support. A support agent will assist you shortly. You are number 2 in the queue. Your wait time will be approximately 1 minute(s) and 10 seconds info: Thank you for contacting Globat Chat Support. You are now chatting with Technical Specialist 'Melo' Melo: Hi and thank you for contacting Globat Signature Support! We have received your question (s) from the pre-chat survey and will answer you momentarily. Thank you for your patience. Melo: Hi Me. First of all we apologize greatly and we understand that this is completely unacceptable. We will learn from this experience and we have already begun work on new emergency procedures. We will communicate directly with all customers in the future as our plans unfold and get implemented. Me: When will my site be up??? Melo: We had a complete failure of our Cisco 6509 switch which controls the traffic in and out of our data center. This device has built-in redundancy plus we had spare parts. However, the failure was complete and the device had to be replaced. We lost time trying to get the existing 6509 back online and we had to wait several hours for delivery of the new device before we could start brining the systems back online. Our technicians worked throughout the night to minimize the impact and get the systems back online. Melo: Current ETA for fix is 1 hour. Me: bye
It's back down again... my three sites and theirs. I was able to backup the sites while the few minutes they were back online, and process one of my customers orders as well... now the search for a new host starts. Good luck guys.
Ok all my sites are working now..On hold with glob@t support hopefully I can get my sites transferred to another host without any issues.
As a network engineer having a single point of failure is a very amateur thing to have happen. As much as they advertise all these high speed equipment it foolish. They need to outsource for some real network help. There are plenty of folks who can fix this issue once and for all. The other two engineers in the office had a plenty good laugh. Guess uptime doesn't matter when your paid upfront.
My site worked for five minutes, now its down again. Of course, I'm not really expecting anything better from Globat anymore, but I do wonder how many people have business/sales websites through them who lost a day's pay today because of Globat's incompetence. At this point I can't wait to switch to a new provider.
Yawwn, I've been with Glob@t for over 4 years, there are better hosts out there with MORE features, reliability and speed. FYI, my other sites are hosted on another host that costs me $10 a month for 1,500GB transfer, 30000 MB Storage, unlimited domain/subdomains & tons of features; (Fantistico deluxe, FFmpeg and the ability to run cron jobs to name a few). The cpanel is 10 times more advanaced as well with way more features. They have plans that start at $2.99 BTW with tons more features than Glob@t. It's also WAY faster; my first globat account I got a little over 4 years ago is pretty fast, the 2 accounts I got since then are on different servers and PAINFULLY slow. So far I've been with this other host for a year and a 1/2 & haven't had the server go down on me once! The payments are also very straight forward and they accept paypal, (no BS billing practices). edit: I didn't add the PHP Maximum Upload Size, and MySQL Packet Size differences..Important if you run any type of community CMS or forum. Globat PHP max. upload size - 32mb My Host - 250mb Globat MySQL packet size - 2mb My host - 16mb Just a heads up, I didn't post the link to which host I use because I don't want people to think I'm spamming. Just shop around before you get lured in by the 1000gb for $6.95 a month deal Globat is offering. That doesn't mean you're getting more for your money vs other hosts.
I lost over $200, one of my sites had $70pps today. Another one of my sites isn't listed in googles search engine anymore after today.
Thank you for contacting Globat Support. A support agent will assist you shortly. You are number 4 in the queue. Your wait time will be approximately 5 minute(s) and 9 seconds Thank you for contacting Globat Chat Support. You are now chatting with Technical Specialist 'Jay' Brian: is anybody there? Jay: Hi and thank you for contacting Globat Signature Support! We have received your question (s) from the pre-chat survey and will answer you momentarily. Thank you for your patience. Jay: Do you have a specific question I can assit you with? Jay: hi Brian Brian: I want to unlock my domain so i can transfer it Jay: let me check that Jay: may i know the last 4 digits of your credit card for verification Brian: 8503 Jay: One moment please, I will get back to you shortly. Jay: ok done Brian: ok, what do i need to do? do i need some sort of code? Jay: ok where do you want your authcode to be sent? Brian: bbartos@merchantsolutionsllc.com Brian: thank you Jay: ok wait Brian: ok Jay: ok done Brian: thank you - if i cancel my globat, do i need to let you guys know? or do i just stop paying? Jay: We have established a dedicated cancellation line to handle account closures. This is the only effective way to cancel your account. Please call toll-free at 1-800-915-4090, between 9am and 5pm Pacific Standard Time, Monday through Friday. Also, to better help you, please make sure you have your domain name, username and password, and the last 4 digits of the credit card used to open the account. If you are calling from outside the United States, please dial International Customers # +1-323-230-7442 instead.
Hi all, Can I just add my two-penneth worth? I have been using Globat for 6+ years now. Their service has remained, in particular, excellent in my view. For the money we pay them... well, it's what is expected, no? This company clearly knows how to handle their infrastructure. So, I shall preclaim that Globat has successfully maintained the data I host with them for the public - with very little disturbances until this one minescule occassion. I am a UK (that's England) resident, and chose Globat after much research and quality feedback. They have never ever failed their promise once in my awareness. Americans, take notes: You have some great managers and entrepreneurs which are second-to-none -- especially in the IT field! I must admit that their MySQL servers are a little slow at times... but hey, that is understandable, isn't it? These beasts-of-servers take some serious hammerings at times - ashamefully more so by those who are exploiting the service of this host. So Globat, in my view, are an excellent company and run by one of the finest of mind-sets that should ever hope to manage any company great or small. (Great in Globats' case) I have several websites hosted with Globat. Proudly, some are of great importance to certain people and companies, such as Baby Charles an up-coming funk/soul band: http://www.babycharles.co.uk As I have much experience with many web-hosting firms the world over, I can safely say that Globat has remained on top, with it's proud statements and a comforting up-time of 99.2%. God bless all who 'sail-in-her' [Globat] . We should herald this great service which they continue to provide for a decent and fair sum of hard earned money. I speak as a neutral and unbiased UK (United Kingdom) citizen and a comrade supporting USA companies far and wide; Representing other people, such as: Lee Nicklen www.kayotix.com www.babycharles.co.uk www.alexkirkwood.net www.nicklenhill.co.uk www.sugarbox.com www.blipblop.com www.taylorwellsinternational.com
^^ Are you kidding me? My day job company serves just a few thousand online users and we have just one network engineer and we have better redundancy than that. These clowns just pissed off their ENTIRE clientele because they didn't have a backup router that retails for $12k. If they did have a backup router it would have failed over seemlessly and you would have never known about it. I suppose you don't mind giving up a day of income (so far I might add) because some cheap nitwits can't figure out how to design a network properly. BUT I DO. I'm sure this thing is on backorder because surely these people could have figured out how to configure the router by now if they have it in hand. I'm sure they could get consultation on configuring it too by the way if they weren't so cheap. Going on 21 hours...
Still down here as well (2 websites). It went down last night while I was updating one of my sites. I also got here via Google...
Make sure to keep current backups of your sites locally (not on globat). I saw a similar response about a year ago after they lost their martinique server. It was 4 days before they finally admitted they could not restore my site since they didn't have backups of user data. Unfortunately for me I do keep backups but had just done a major update the week before it went down and hadn't backed it up. A lesson learned on my part and have learned from that. My frustration and disappointment at the time was that their tech support implied the data was backed up and would be recovered. I have 3 sites and have been with them since 2001 and this is the third serious outage for their webhosting. I have noted at least a couple of serious mailserver issues a year. Overall for the price that isn't to bad. You get what you pay for. I rate Globat's overall service a C+ (A for price, B for Tech Support, B for Service a D for billing issues and a D for customer relations and communications). I'm a realist though and if you want better service you need to go elsewhere and pay for it. None of my sites generate revenue, just share information and if I counted on globat's service to pay my bills I'd hire another host that doesn't put all of their eggs in one basket and has a tested contingency plan. I've been in networking and telecommunications 35 years and Globat doesn't appear to have a COOP or contingency plans that would satisfy any serious business need nor comply with SOX standards. If your site isn't critical to putting bread on the table then Globat is a good comprimise for the price. Just know that you must fend for yourself and create your own disaster recovery plan and know what to do/go if the downtime was more excessive.
Direct from CEO's blog at Globat. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - February 21, 2008 Network Outage Today was a NIGHTMARE-DAY! Globat.com just emerged from a major outage - the worst in company history and everybody - customers and staff alike - still feel extremely beaten up. Here's what happened: At approximately 5:00am Pacific Time on Thursday, February 21, 2008 we suffered a major network outage, which effected nearly all Globat.com customers, our own Web sites and service infrastructure as well as our phone systems. Our primary network switch in our main datacenter in downtown Los Angeles failed completely and despite tremendous efforts by our technical emergency response team could not be brought back online. This switch is a major brand name piece of equipment and as such it contains internal redundancy. We were able to switch over to the back up circuitry and begin bringing the system back online at which time, for yet unknown reasons, the entire devise, including backup system, failed completely. After a short deliberation we decided to rush a new switch from our vendor's nearest warehouse to our data center. While waiting for the replacement we initiated a work around to at least get email service re-established. After several attempts all email systems finally went live and back to normal at approximately 10:00am Pacific Time. When the new switch arrived we went through the installation and testing process and as a result were able to bring all our services back online, but not before we had suffered a 5-hour outage for e-mail services and an 8-hour outage for Web related services. In Globat's entire 6 year history, we have never experienced anything even remotely like this! The outage was so severe that it affected our own Web sites and all but one of our telephone lines so we were unable to communicate with our customers to update anybody about the status of the incident. We decided to ask some of our staff members to post updates on well known Internet forums, which helped a little in disseminating the information. Now that everything is pretty much back to normal I would like to tell you that we ABSOLUTELY KNOW you count on Globat.com to maintain a high degree of uptime to host your Web sites and that we take this trust very seriously. Today, however, my team and I let you down and we all feel terrible because of that. This has never happened before and we will do whatever it takes to never let it happen again! I deeply and sincerely apologize for this outage and the inconvenience and problems it may have caused. We promise to learn from the events of this dreadful day (today was also my wife's birthday, on top of everything). We are now taking the following steps to prevent a recurrence of this type of failure. This switch is the only piece of equipment at Globat.com that could possibly be a single point of failure. This equipment is usually highly stable and has built-in redundancy. In addition it is being vendor monitored 24/7. We will now keep a second switch, with its own built-in redundancy, in our data center to prevent a prolonged outage in the unlikely event of another switch failure. In addition, we are working with our phone vendor to create an automated failover system so calls will be routed directly to remote support sites in the case of a failure of our primary phone system. While nobody can completely prevent any form of failures in the future, with these changes we can certainly minimize the effects of such failures and reduce the impact on you, our valued customers. Globat.com's Director of Customer Service, Tom Cox, stands by to provide even more information, in case you would like to discuss this event further or are still experiencing any problems. You can reach Tom at . At the time of me writing this message all of our systems appear to be back up and running and I can assure you that our network operations team will continue to investigate this unfortunate event. In closing I would like to thank the entire Globat.com team (especially Chris, Lou, Tim, Don and Rene) for working nonstop, without sleep or interruption to resolve this issue and, of course, our customers for their many encouraging comments and especially their incredible patience. You are certainly very much appreciated! Ben R. Neumann Chief Executive Officer
^^ Even in his attempt to come clean, he's still full of it. His 8 hours of down time appeared to last 22 hours by my clock. Futher, the site was down Friday evening as well so it would be nice to know what they were actually doing at the time.
so last night i was able to view my sites, after an entire day of not... i just read the post from the "CEO" and also think it's somewhat crap since obviously sites are still not reliably up. It worked for a few hours and now it's not there anymore. I'm trying to load globat's site and it took nearly 2 minutes to load. i tried loading one of my sites again and nada - it takes me to a page with other suggestions as my site 'can't be found'. oohhhh ill be mighty mad if it got deleted in all this. well, im gonna try their live help chat and see what happens. how is everyones other experiences?
I wish I lived in the same Hollywood Technology world that many of the people who have posted to this thread do. But since I only design network infrastructures for a Big Ten University, and have been working in technology since 1981, and I have worked on and maintained hardware in 6 different countries over my career; I have to work and live in the real world. What I have found in the real world is technology fails. And when it does there are always people out there willing to provide solutions using the wonderful 20/20 hindsight view. For Globat here is my two cents: If you are running a professional internet based web company website on a Globat server, you seriously need to rethink your business model. Invest in a business DSL or T1 connection and buy your own server. Then if something goes wrong on the hardware that you are maintaining you then know who to blame. *laughter* But seriously. Globat is not for everyone. And for Globat users who are reading this and getting worried about their account. Stop it. Keep in mind a few of the people who put posts on forums like this have never actually had a Globat account. It is no different than any other opinion boards out there. People sometimes like to post garbage for no other reason than to sell their own product... or inject noise into a discussion... It's kind of like graffiti. Kenn Wislander