Thread: Securemate.com

This month Securemate.com had a hardware failure. They didn't contact me to tell me what was going on, my site went down and I put in a trouble ticket. The services (web/email/etc) were down for a week. As a reseller, I lost who I had as clients due to this outage. In the trouble ticket, I asked who to contact to discuss this outage in reference to their 99.9% uptime guarantee policy. I sent 2 emails to the 2 addresses provided and never received a reply. I have since cancelled my service and found a new host, but I want everyone to be cautious about Securemate.com.

Also, as a bit of advice for searching for a web host: Find out what country they are physically located in. Securemate is located in Singapore with a colo in Texas. You may want to find hosts that operate completely within your country to make it easier to execute legal matters if needed.

Thanks,
Ryan

I am Peter Chan from Securemate and I would first like to thank all for the opportunity to clarify the issues brought up here.

To get it started, I have included a brief event timeline from day one when the server went down.

8/1/2005
- Harddisk failure detected
- A ticket for the server failure was opened by Ryan and our tech replied on the same day with an ETA of 72 hours for the services to be resumed.
- Diagnosis was run offline at the IDC to determine the nature and extent of the harddisk failure.

8/2/2005
- Filesystem failure was determined to be the probable cause of the harddisk failure.
- Instead of waiting for the full diagnosis and mirroring of the failed harddisk (which would have taken another few days), we decided on provisioning a temporary server so the data files could be transferred on the production server as soon as they were verified and restored.
- DNS Service resumed

8/3/2005
- Email Service resumed

8/4/2005
- Database Service resumed
- Web Service partially resumed

8/5/2005
- Web Service fully resumed
- Control Panel service resumed

8/6/2005
- An issue with regards to the application and custom CP hostname was reported in the original ticket. Both were fixed within 5 minutes.
- Another ticket was submitted for a corrupted file and was fixed shortly.

As a customer and having been through the same experience myself, I can fully understand and relate to the stress and anguish that is felt by Ryan during those times. Everyone inspire to be in a perfect world where we do not have to deal with the possibility of failures. In the real and less than perfect world however, we cannot choose when and what will happen. We can only assure Ryan and all our users we do everything possible to keep the damage or impact of any of such hardware failures to the minimal. While it is not uncommon for data restoration to take days if not weeks for some extreme cases with very large number of files, we have tried to reduce the overall downtime by working concurrently with the backup restoration and service resumption in stages as soon as the data becomes available.

I appreciate the efforts made by Paul and John to contact our support but the subsequent posts appear to show that they have somewhat misinterpreted the situation. It was already stated clearly in the autoresponder that unless you have an existing account with us and the emails were sent from the registered email address of the account with us, you will not be able to get through to our support.

MyBadHost.com is certainly a boon for the hosting community and I certainly hope the community here will continue to grow in terms of size and outreach. It will certainly help to further boost the credibility of the site if the moderators’ responses are made in an objective and unbiased manner. In any case, I would like to personally apologize to Ryan for any inconvenience caused by the the failure and despite the fact that the account was closed on Aug 29, 2005 a refund for 2 months of paid fees was still processed as a good-will gesture on the same day.

All the best to the folks here and we appreciate any feedback on how we can further improve our services!