KhmerConnection moved from Lunarpages

A week after moving KhmerConnection to Lunarpages, we started experiencing major problems. It turns out we were moved to an over saturated server (constant loads of 6-12 on a dual CPU system) and they blamed KC for consuming excessive resources (5% CPU/Memory, their “maximum allowed” is 1% CPU/Memory which is ridiculous given the amount of bandwidth and disk space they provide, just downloading files will run that figure beyond 1%). Now that KC is off their servers, the load is still high.

Last Friday, Lunarpages moved KC off onto another server without notifying me and broke a handful of important parked domains that were major entry points to the site (i.e. khmer.cc). Come Saturday, they moved KC back onto its original server and renaming the .htaccess file which exposed a fair amount of KC’s code. That action broke KC for several hours. They also failed to restore my access to the control panel, so I was forced to call their technical support and waste over two hours working to get everything back in order. Not only that, they failed to copy the DB back to the original server, so we lost roughly 1000 posts from the 24 hour period before.

After half an hour on the phone they managed to finally give me access to the account, after which point I quickly fixed the gaping security issue with exposed PHP code. I don’t really get why the admin that pointed KC back to the original server didn’t check to see if the site was functional; at the very least he/she could have just gone to the URL to verify it–very novice. Unfortunately, I gained zero traction on the phone with their technical support guy on restoring data from the server they had moved us to; he had to forward the request to a higher level admin, but all the admins had gone home for the day. He wouldn’t even give me access to the account on the temporary server.

As such, I faced the dilemma of keeping the site down for another day so their tech support guys could finally give me access to the temporary server database, or restore the database from a pre-move backup that I had from the day before and let it run. At this point, I had lost complete faith in Lunarpages’ support team to follow up on anything. They had done things without so much as asking nor notifying me of any change until after the action was completed, at which point they notified me by e-mail which is not acceptable for a site of this size and activity. They had also deliberately broken the site and failed to check to see if it was still working and had egregiously exposed mission critical code.

I decided to restore the day’s old backup to a new server I had just installed the night before at stimTV‘s datacenter on my way back home and pointed all critical DNS entries to the server. Unfortunately for me, it took the better part of Saturday evening to setup and configure the server from scratch but everything worked well after the DNS finished propagating. However, this turned out to be a great choice because Lunarpages did not contact me on Sunday as promised. Instead they called me Monday to inquire about the site, though by this time, all that needed doing had been done. Even if they could restore the lost data, there were already inconsistencies between the current and old database (some 400 new posts already). As upset as I was, I decided to just let it go and instructed the support guy to note that I would be discontinuing the service.

For anyone interested, the server is running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS with Apache 2, MySQL 5, PHP 5, Postfix, Postgrey, and Dovecot. The most non-trivial portion of the setup had to do with Postfix and Dovecot since there weren’t any documents readily available for configuring Postfix and Dovecot with virtual domains; they’re both setup to use MySQL as an authentication layer. I think I’ll spend some time to put together a HOWTO on that when I have some time.

In closing, I absolutely do not recommend Lunarpages to anyone. The way they handled the KC account was very irresponsible and lacked the quality of an experienced service provider. A good service provider will contact the client before any changes are made, especially if urgent. There are dozens of variables that need to be considered before any major moves take place. I should have gleaned from my initial e-mails with their technical support staff during the setup and configuration of KC that quality was lacking since they avoided a number of my questions. Their technical support is difficult to get a hold of on weekends (I was on hold for 20 minutes before someone got to me), and their escalation procedures don’t exist beyond technical support–tickets have to be filed even in urgent situations to get the attention of a system administrator, and if it’s past business hours, you’re SOL until the next day. Their primary mode of communication is e-mail, even when site e-mail is down. They will not call you before they decide to make major changes to your site (such as moving it), so if you have any custom work done, especially with regard to .htaccess files, be warned that they may mess things up.

Naturally, others using Lunarpages likely have better experiences. However, you will never know the quality of a provider until something goes wrong. It didn’t take me long to find that out.