| well folks, we've been getting kicked around here in bipolar and x:13 land, but we can happily report that things are slowly working their way back to normalcy. our hosting provider shut us down on July 26th, and the friendly folks at Wraith Computer Systems have been struggling to set up a new server for us so we can continue posting our inane commentary on the web for all to see.
i realize this is a little long, but hopefully it will help explain our recent absence. |
| the story thus far... |
| it actually began a few months ago... |
From: Matthew Rasnake To: Eric Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 6:53 PM Subject: Re: x13design.com Eric, i am really becoming increasingly frustrated with the performace (or lack of, to be more accurate) of your hosting service. i expect our account charges to be pro-rated to account for all the downtime and slowdowns we are experiencing. i appreciate that it can be difficult to run and maintain a server farm, but this is truly getting ridiculous. i would also appreciate it if, in the future, you could communicate with us about system problems, their cause, and when they are expected to be resolved. i feel that i have been extrememly patient and understanding about all these problems, but you must understand that both patience and understanding have their limits. thanks for your time, i look forward to hearing from you. m@ |
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| as you can see, i was "becoming increasingly frustrated" which is a state that is not normal for me. i had tried to be patient and understanding, but after so long (you regular bipolar readers will remember the months of slow service...) i had to finally attempt to find the cause and possible solution to the problem. after that message, we were told the following... |
From: Eric To: Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 7:44 PM Subject: Re: x13design.com Mathew, (sic) We have had some trouble with the server your site is on -- on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning due to a Denial of Service Attack and couple of previous times due to someone hacking the server - we think it was actually a client who was hosting on that machine. Unfortuantely when you leave the server open to running cgi scrips and such you are leaving yourself somewhat open to this kind of stuff. Believe it or not this is the only server we have had trouble with. I would be happy to give you a month free for your trouble and give you the option of moving your site to another server. Eric |
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| so, they'd been having server problems. apparently the cause of x13design and bipolar's slow load times was a Denial of Service attack. but Eric's reply helped bring things into focus a bit for us, and i accepted his offers... |
From: Matthew Rasnake To: Eric Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2001 2:24 PM Subject: Re: x13design.com Eric, the free month would be acceptable, and we would also appreciate it if you could go ahead and move our account, files and settings over to one of your more stable servers. thanks for your prompt reply. m@ |
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| at which point i thought certainly things were concluded and our service would soon be up to its previous level of quality. unfortunately, by the 18th, Eric had not yet replied to my message... |
From: Matthew Rasnake To: Eric Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2001 11:42 AM Subject: Re: x13design.com Eric, I sent my last email on July 5th, it is now the 18th, and i have neither heard from you, nor noticed any appreciable change in the speed of our site. not knowing exactly what's going on over there, i'd apprecaite some feedback as to what steps have been taken or are planned. also, i've noticed that regular HTML pages load fairly quickly, and it seems to be the PHP content that is experiencing the interminable slowdowns. if there is a fault in our PHP scripting that is causing errors or slowdowns, please let me know, we're seeing no errors on our end. as i mentioned before (previous email included below) a free month would be acceptable, though considering the nearly two weeks with no response or resolution i would also appreciate having this month's fees pro-rated. i would also appreciate it if you could, as you suggested, move our account to one of your more stable servers. thanks for your time. m@ |
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| as you can see, i was trying to be polite, even going so far as to offer up my php code as another possible explanation for our site's slowdown. later that day, i received an answer from a different person at dbwired, one with whom i had had no previous dealings... |
From: Justin To: Matthew Rasnake Subject: x13design.com Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 17:12:02 -0400 Matthew, While in the process of moving your site and troubleshooting it, I found a very significant problem that probably is the reason for the problems with the server. I have put the amount of transfer your site x13design.com has been doing. We really need to rectify this matter or we're gonna have to turn the site off. If you have any ideas or a solution please let me know ASAP. Thank you, Justin Traffic limit: 5120.000 MB Real traffic: 8096603999183.844 MB |
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| according to Justin, our site was doing 8,096,603,999,183.844 MegaBytes of traffic per month. ladies and gentlemen, that is 9 digits above GigaBytes. we're talking PetaBytes here, a figure that, before this incident, i didn't even know the term for. apparently, thanks to all of you, x13design.com and bipolar are the single most popular site on the internet. this is, of course, despite the fact that the combined totals as recorded by our weblog analyzer for the past 5 months was only 1.8 GigaBytes (or 1,838 MB +/-). add to that the 1.3 GigaByte extreme maximum for downloading our http log files 8 times per day, the 1.3 GigaByte extreme maximum for both our webcam images if they were updated every 30 seconds of every day for a month without fail, and you've got 4.4 GigaBytes... still well under (or at least 600MB under) our 5 GigaByte transfer limit. throw on a whopping 100 GigaBytes of transfers just for the heck of it, and guess what? yep, we're still nowhere near the 8 PetaByte mark. as you can imagine, i responded... |
From: Matthew Rasnake To: Justin Subject: Re: x13design.com Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 13:49:33 -0400 Justin, thanks for your reply. >matter or we're gonna have to turn the site off. If you have any >ideas or a solution please let me know ASAP. > >Thank you, >Justin > >Traffic limit: 5120.000 MB > >Real traffic: 8096603999183.844 MB wow. that is a completely inconceivable number. according to my server stats, we only get around and average of 120 visits per day. And, again according to my stats, we've done a maximum of 98MB over the past nine days. i don't see how this can tranlate into that impossibly large number. Eric indicated that the server we were hosted on was experiencing Denial of Service attacks. I would tend to think that that might be the ultimate cause of this outrageous number. If you can point out exactly what's being downloaded from our site that is causing this unbelieveable amount of transfers, please let me know, otherwise, don't try shifting blame for your inability to control malicious users from hacking your servers. thanks for your time, and i look forward to your reply. m@ |
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| since i hadn't yet received a response, and the site was down entirely, i wrote another email... |
| From: Matthew Rasnake To: Eric Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2001 6:48 PM Subject: x13design.com: unable to access Eric, i am currently unable to access email, ftp, http, or plesk for my account. i'm assuming this is a result of the move to a new server. please contact me ASAP with new login information for the plesk account and/or ensure all existing data and settings are moved from the old server to the new one. thanks for your time. m@ |
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| i then received a response from yet another dbwired representative... |
| From: Martha To: matt@coffeemonk.com Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2001 7:08 PM Subject: billing. Matthew, Yesterday I tried to bill the credit card I have on file for your monthly hosting fees and it declined. please forward to my attention corrected billing info so I update my files and clear this outstanding charge. we also need to discuss a change to your hosting fees to reflect your traffic limits which currently exceed your hosting plan. Martha |
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| i tried to explain my position... |
| From: Matthew Rasnake To: Martha Casavant Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2001 8:21 PM Subject: Re: billing. Martha, my apologies, i was right at the end of a pay period when you attempted to charge my card, so the funds weren't there. the info for the card has not changed. however, the account rep i've been working with (Eric) had agreed to give me a free month in recompense for the poor performance of the servers and the unnacceptable amount of downtime we've experienced in the past several months. so i expect not to be charged for (at least) this past month. also, i've recently exchanged emails with another one of your representatives (Justin) who quoted some astronomical and technologically impossible amount of "traffic" from our site. ( i believe the figure he quoted was around 80 Petabytes--80 trillion MegaBytes) as i mentioned to him, i would like to see some hard data supporting the claims that our site has surpassed the 5Gig transfer limit. as Eric had informed me before, the server our site was on has apparently been the victim of DoS attacks, and my feeling is that this absolutely unabashedly insane figure is a result of serious system problems related to these attacks. as i said though, if you can produce hard data showing that our site (apparently the single most popular site in the world...) has drawn this much traffic, i will gladly discuss the possibility of an account upgrade. so, to sum up: i expect to not be charged for the month's "service," and if you want to discuss account upgrade, please provide more concrete and realistic information about the amount of traffic. thanks for your time, m@ -- Matthew Rasnake x13design.com p.s. sorry to have to drag you into all this, but since I was under the impression that Eric would handle the free month, i just didn't want to have to go through the whole thing again if the charge were to show up on my bill. |
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| and forwarded the previous email i'd written (to Eric) to Justin, also mentioning the new information presented by Martha. he replied... |
| From: justin To: Matthew Rasnake Cc: Main Identity ; Martha Sent: Friday, July 27, 2001 12:32 AM Subject: Re: x13design.com: unable to access Matthew, Our newly formed policy since the advent of new investors is to terminate service in the event of a credit card decline and not continue service until the account is paid up to date. I have evaluated our professional relationship, and do not see continuing as a mutually beneficial option. We wish you luck with the future of your site, but you will need to remove my email address from your forum when you get your site back up and running with your future hosting provider. Thank You, Justin |
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| so, if i read that correctly, and keeping in mind the flow of information, their new policy (of which i was not informed) is to immediately, and without any kind of notification, terminate service in the event of a credit card decline, despite the fact that (to the best of my knowledge, anyway) there has never been a similar payment problem since early December of last year (where my records for the account start). i wrote an email to justin, suggesting that, in light of their termination of our service, he reimburse me for two months of the service payment and reinstate our FTP server long enough for us to retrieve our files... unfortunately, i neglected to save that particular email. but, i had given them until Monday to respond, and when i had not received that response by Tuesday (graciously giving them an extra day), i wrote the following... |
| From: Matthew Rasnake To: Justin Subject: x13design.com: final notice Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2001 11:57:54 -0400 Justin, Eric, and other concerned parties, I have now given you the time i offered for you to make contact and attempt to rectify the situation you have placed us in. Since you have made no effort regarding the expectations i laid out for the severance of our business relationship, i am writing in a spirit of friendship and understanding to allow you a final opportunity to prove your commitment to fair business practices and your concern for those customers who put their trust--and money--in your business. I have been waiting for confirmation from you, that you have initiated reimbursement of the past two paid months of service (due to the service provided not being of an acceptable quality) and that you have reactivated temporary access to our data--restoring that data from your most recent backups if necessary. If i do not hear from you regarding these requests, i will use any and all channels available to me to ensure that your unethical business practices are made known. In closing, i will reiterate my expectations: 1. Reimbursement for two months of service -- $21.90 2. Temporary reinstatement of FTP account to allow access to our data. You have until 9:00am EST on Wednesday, August 1st, 2001, to reply to this email with confirmation that you will meet my requests. After that point, a complaint will be filed first with the Connecticut Better Business Bureau, then through all other channels--official, or unofficial--to which we have access. It will be in your best interests to respond to this email before that time. Sincerely, Matthew Rasnake |
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| i finally received a response late the next evening... |
| From: justin To: Matthew Rasnake CC: Eric, Martha Subject: Re: x13design.com: final notice Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 18:06:39 -0400 Matthew, After going over your ultimatums, I will be happy to come to a compromise. Our policy to retrieve data from an account that has been canceled for any reason, is to receive a 25 dollar service charge before allowing access. Instead of charging that charge and crediting you 2 months service, we'll let them cancel each other out and let me know when to open ftp access. With this agreement you will also not slander our name or services, and cease to post my email address. Regards, Justin |
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| after debating for a while, i decided to accept their compromise offer. access to the files on the FTP server could potentially save me quite a bit of re-work on bipolar to get it back up and running once we've established ourselves on the new server. plus, really, the money was never that big a deal, i felt it was a matter of justice to receive the money more than anything else. so, lest the whole ordeal get drug out because i refused to accept their offer on principle, i agreed.
of course the thing that gave me the most trouble, was his statment about slander. as you can see, i've no trouble refraining from posting his email address, but if i receive service from someone that i do not feel is recommendable, i want to warn people of the potential pitfalls. plus, this is experience in my life, which i inherently have the right to talk about. so, this "slander" statement did make it difficult to decide what to do. but in the end, we all know what slander means, right? Function: noun Etymology: Middle English sclaundre, slaundre, from Old French esclandre, from Late Latin scandalum stumbling block, offense Date: 14th century 1 : the utterance of false charges or misrepresentations which defame and damage another's reputation 2 : a false and defamatory oral statement about a person |
