Will build 9 be the end of our reseller hosting?

 
 
I will tell you a small story. Its almost true.
 
I have a car – a Porsche 911. Nice car, smart, fast but also a bit strange and not without problems. Anyway, the strange thing about it is that the engine is in the back of the car – not in front.
 
So one day, not so long ago I go to the store where I got the car and ask for a check up. Its starting to misbehave. I can start the car, but I cannot drive it really – Im thinking there is something wrong with the gearbox.
 
To my big surprise I hear the mechanic say after at quick look at the car saying ”of cause you cannot drive it – there is no engine”.
 
”But its in the back” I argue. ”And its starting”, so surly you understand that here IS indeed a engine in the car?”.
 
”Look, the engine should be in the front and there is no engine, so how can you drive” he repeats on every objection I make. Its become a mantra. Not paying any attention to any arguments on my side that ”well, this is how I got the car from You” or ”You have done service on the car two times the last year so how can it now be that the car should have the engine in the front when You have been happy selling, servicing the car with the engine in the back, and I have been driving it for the last year like this with out problems”?
 
”Look, the engine should be in the front and there is no engine, so how can you drive” he repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats.
 
Its a silly story :) not true and would you believe me if I said it was? Would you accept the idea of a mechanic that would totally ignore the trues of the history and facts like this?
 
OK, so welcome to my world of HC. This is where the story starts to be true and very scary.
 
One year ago we started to look for a replacement to HELM but one that could also run and handle Linux in one setup.
 
Hostingcontroller looked good.
 
One important business idea we have and share with our resellers is this: a reseller can have his customer on dedicated servers when it comes to www and DB, but the mail is run on shared servers.
 
This saves resources. We have to run only few mailserveres comared to the number og resellers, and the main think for the resellers are anyway, that the www sites they have are isolated from other resellers. They love the idea and so do we.
 
So on contacting HC back in 2009 we asked if this was possible. It was and we hired HC to setup and install such a system so we could start testing.
 
It simple – this is what we have
 
1 shared linux www server
1 shared mysql server
1 shared www windows 2008 server
1 shared www win 2003 server
1 shared mssql server

AND then 1 shared mailenable mail server
 
AND then X dedicated www/mysql linux serveres – one per reseller.
 
Actually in the beginning we tried to have one shared sendmail server to cut the last license savings :) but it did not work well, and the “shared mailserver, dedicated www server” did actually not work – there HAD to be a dedicated mail server when it was sendmail.
 
This think with sendmail was a mistake we where told – if only we would change mailserver to Windows and MailEnable or something else on windows it would work.
 
So we did. It worked.
 
When ever our reseller (at the moment only two have been partly moved to the new setup) create a website, the www and mysql part is created on the dedicated server and the maildomain on the shared mailenable server.
 
Happy days... except for the bugs and other issues in HC of cause, but that’s just a question of waiting for the updates, right :)
 
Happy days, build 9 came and promised some of the long waited features we where missing and was a “need to have” for us to start really migrating websites from HELM. They came – with errors of cause.
 
But this is not even the crazy or scary part. The crazy and scary part is that with build 9 this shared mailserver, dedicated www/mysql server simply does not work anymore. Our reseller can still handle all existing websites and the mailboxes already created on mailenable. He can also create new websites to the extend that www and mysql is created, but he cannot create maildomains anymore.
 
Ok, so the scary part is just starting! The scary part is not that something stopped working – its HC so what else have we come to expect from updates.
 
The really, really ****ing scary part of the story is that the mechanic is saying “of cause it does not work, the engine is not in front”.
 
How can the support just keep saying “but look, the engine is not in front so how can you expect it to run” and totally ignore the facts that it WAS running, was working, that there are already lots of domains on the setup – lots of domains on our mailenable server? From where did they come you think? God? Im trying to cheat them into thinking it was working?
 
Im then trying to ask them things like...
 
Was it a bug/feature of the pre-build 9 that our setup worked? Or is it a bug that its not working anymore?
Was it a mistake they told us this setup would work (and it did work)? Or did they simply change the business logic of the system in build 9 so it does not work anymore and dont give a **** that this has a huge impact on some/us?
 
They don’t want to answer that part, but simply keep stating “you can see its not working because there is no dedicated mail resource – no engine in front”.
 
So what am I left with here?
 
Its scary to sit back with a system that is not working and might need to be totally deleted and recreated (can you imagine the situation where we had already moved all our setup – 10 times the size of our current HC setup) and had to tell all our resellers that this was “end of line” for HC – we need to move/recreate all the websites because HC broke our setup and refuse to do anything about it?
The real horror of it all is the blank expression in the face of HC support, the complete ignorance and the hidden idea that HC can, will and have done “life changing” business logic changes without any concern to the impact it will have on the users.
 
I understand that business logic can change over time – but call it a version upgrade from 8 to 9 maybe, not a feature update and bugfix that a “build” should at max be.
 
So it seams build 9 was the build that broke our business.

If it helps, I'll confirm your setup does work.  Maybe not on build 9, but it does for a fact.
 
We have the same setup as you.  We're still on build 8 waiting for the general consensus that build 9 is ok.   Other than a couple linux DNS and MySQL servers, we have not migrated our linux servers to HC yet so that is the only thing that differs from your setup.
 
We have the following.
1 control panel server and master hc db server
1 shared MSSQL dbserver
1 shared MySQL centOS dbserver
1 shared Smartermail server
2 shared centOS bind DNS
2 shared windows
x dedicated win servers
 
The dedicated servers are assigned to our resellers and ONLY manage their www. Everything else, DB, Mail, and DNS is hosted on our shared service servers.
 
We moved to HC from a rather large Parallels Business Automation and Plesk network.   At the time we purchased we were assured our scenario would work.  Unfortunately we haven't been able to put our faith in the nix side of things enough to migrate, essentially making the whole switch to HC worthless.   We're still paying for Parallels SUS just in case we have to abandon HC all together.   In the end it may have been a huge waste of manpower and expense for us.   We're no a large hosting company in comparison, however we have 2 full racks of 1u servers in a VMWare cloud environment which equates to hundreds of servers with room to grow.   When we initially talked to sales about the size of our environment and some of our concerns, they offered to dedicate development to fix any issues we had If we were willing to license all of our servers at the same time.   While we appreciated the offer, there was no way we were going to invest that much in a company that fails to put out solid bug free updates or acknowledge their customers needs.   We already made that mistake with Parallels.   Now we're just monitoring these boards and waiting for some success stories from some other companies.   I haven't lost faith yet, but the dream of a centralized panel is certainly less important than it once was.   Running websitepanel and virtualmin will be our next step.  Both offer an api that our inhouse devlopers can merge into a centralized panel for our customers.

I'm in the same boat!
I did the error to install the buld 9 on Nov. 30 thinking the latest installer build released on Nov, 27 solved the bug and my system that was working with build 8 is now broke.
I have 4 open tickets, 0 solutions
I bought 6 HC license  2 for windows and 4 for linux none of them still used in production. Maybe I need start thinking to alternative for my growing hosting business.  
 

there is hope it seams, suddently today things turned on both this issue and at least one other... regarding this one I got:
 
Dear Jan,

We have consulted this issue with our concerned department in detail and finally concluded that HC should create mail domains on the mail server which is allowed in the hosting plan.

We are going to escalate this issue to our concerned department for further investigation and will update you once we get any update from them.

Thank You
Regards

As you I have 4 tickets all escalated to different level:
1)No AW Stats creation  escalated to level 3 support on Dec 3. No solution yet.
2)Error on Mail Domain creation on MailEnable  the latest reply on Dec 4 was:"We are checking your issue and will update you soon" no solution yet
3) WHMCS problem on creation Mail domain. Maybe related with point 2
4)Can't sell linux plan from WHMCS. Latest reply today: "We have forwarded your issue to our concerned department and we will update you once we get any update from them"
 
I hope they don't take long time to resolve our problems
 
Best Regards
 

I have been closely following the threads in this discussion forum and am glad that I have still not updated any new server with build 9. Apart from all the issues that are being discussed upon, there is one more issue that's around since ages and there is no solution in sight. In none of our windows servers, the awstats of the websites update automatically and lots of statistics are lost. I have to spend time to rebuild the statistics and have to create separate batch files for updating the website statistics. But with a few thousand domains hosted in different servers, even that option is not feasible. We have been telling HC about this issue since day 1, and everytime we are told update to the latest build and the problem will resolve. However, the problem never solved since HC version 6. I wonder if HC will ever work on this issue.

Natish we wouldn't be agreed with this statement that awstats update not working since HC6 version. You can see on HC forum that user get furious whenever any basic feature stop working in hc panel, how come we don't see any other user reporting the same.. especially if a feature don't work since 6 years :)
 
Anyway I will strongly recommend to contact HC support and let them check on your server which causing the  awstats update issue.

So far at my end the Testing of Build9 is not too bad. There was an issue with the mailbox sizes in the beginning of this new build release but that was soon sorted out in the installer updated by HC team.
 
 
 

@agermose and @rocconeri
Your issues are with Level III support dept. and you would be updated about further in the respective tickets.

@renhack
We would like to know the issues which you are having there. Please open individual ticket with Support Deparment for the each issue you are currently facing with HC panel.

Hi all
I got similar installation
1 db server MSsql
2 dns servers linux
1 mail server windows
2 windows web server, second windows never got in production
2 linux web server, second server not in production
And also bought click and install application
A reason for buying hc was windows/linux combination and i could buy seperated cheep lic for db/dns/mail servers. Cost was about 1500-2000$ if i remember right. And i could used my not so new servers.
 
Installed version 8.0 wen it got out and that was our start to hosting. Installed tryit and the asked HS teem to install everything and after that bugging begins, DNS problems,installing application always problem plan problem, quota problem .......
 
I have been working with i almost  everything in IT for  25 years and this is first time i have this complicated system installed with syncing,communicating, and „clustering“  and not a single log file to debug. I upgrated everything to newest version this week, and now i can only create new websites from my default reseller, tried few  application installing and dont have quote to do that in unlimited linux plan, and they that installs is access denied,  cant see where im short in quota just a number to create ticked to HS. Dot Net nuke install has not worked over 6 mounth for us manual install only, but when HS support tried that no problem and tikcet closed always. After 1,5 year i need have have to something more stable and automation that work on windows and Linux together. Another thing is security to get them fixing thing they dont ask for information, logs, screenshots or nothing, only root acces to Linux and Admin account to windows. For me now that is not an options anymore. We have customer data on this servers now.
Im thinking about putting hc on windows servers only and migrate everything there into 1 machine. And let HC get it up and running.
For linux i need something better, dns has always been problem seciondary zone not created, dubius files appeard and zone deletion not happening.Security not supportend in fyrst 8 versions I could go on a lot more, and one thing thas funny when you esculate 2 problem in 1 ticket they only read thru first one. And you have to create another tiched for latter problem.
 
And the other thing is this conserning department, common i have been thru 1 level support, to enginering, at Digital/compaq/HP/IBM  and so on  and they all been conserning about my problem but have dedicated department for that is hillarius.
 
What is your recomantation try one more time to get HS team to go over my installation total and test everything or buy Plex and/or cpanel ??
 
Regards,
Kristjan
www.midheimar.is

My story is totally different and I am enjoying working even with the build 9 of HC. I have switched to HC few years back and have found my life at ease since then. There were issues in the beginning with DNS problems,installing application always problem plan problem, quota problem but those were minor configuration issues and once those were resolved I have not found much trouble in managing my mix cluster of Windows and Linux servers. Also, I have found HC support team to be the best as compared to Parallels who do not have time for their clients until they buy support plans. There were other good names like Helm, HSphere who have gone dead after acquisition by cruel Master Parallels. And I find no other name other than HC in the market whose support is easily available and they are also providing Bug fixes and enhancement features on regular basis. I am looking to switch Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 as HC is providing full support in the newer builds.

I will give it a last try.
my 2 server license  not i production i will create new clusterwith everything installed on them. dns,mail,db,web. one windows and other linux.
Get it up and running  move everything over to them, and forget the distributed system
Regards,
Kristjan

HC Support,
 
I have been using HC since more than 6 years and have always faced stats updation issue in all the servers in which I have installed HC. We have lots of HC licenses running all our shared hosting customers as well as the dedicated server customers have been complaining about the awstats updation problem. Both me and your team knows that this is an old issue, and you have to agree to it. I am referencing a few discussion threads in which the issue has been discussed by your customers.
 
http://forum.hostingcontr...mp;high=awstats+update

http://forum.hostingcontr...mp;high=awstats+update

http://forum.hostingcontr...mp;high=awstats+update

http://forum.hostingcontr...mp;high=awstats+update
 
Have a look at them. Also your support team knows we have in the past have given server access to them many a times. The reason you may not be receiving frequent complaints is that many of the customers are already using statistics software like Smarterstats or running separate batch files for the awstats updation. I would suggest you conduct a poll about this and will find yourself how many people say that the awstats updation is always a problem.

Its surprise to me that you give up the awstats issue ticket without receiving any conclusion. Question is why you skip or close communication for this issue. I have looked at the system and can't see any of your active ticket.
Just a friendly advise don't let hc support free until your issue been resolved :)
 
Secondly, the posts which you provided have pretty much same statement which you explained in this post. Still my advise would be to open ticket on hc support only if you want to resolve this issue.
 
Feel free to open ticket http://portal.hostingcontroller.com

Wow man nice story its so funny lolzzzzz
By the way I love Porsche car, nice choice