real bad

[aMike]

Well dont know whats happen to cat2 latly, but its performance sucks big time..

why dose the main cat2 site take so long to load, and why is the ftp laggin soo soo soo badly.. ? its been getting worse ..

[paulredpath]

Hi,

You keep posting these comments, but never provide anything to back it up? Some traceroutes would be very handy as I am regularly max 3 seperate dsl lines I have access to.....

[aMike]

Paul go take a hike.. im posting my personal feedback on your service.. i dont need to back it up..

i also see you have changed the damn permission yet again !

[paulredpath]

Excuse me? I have no problem with people making comments good or bad, but just saying something is bad with no reasons or explaination makes little sense to me.

How can we investigate a problem with no details....

[aMike]

Any problems I have experiencing were very much real, and were cat2 related, I do test to make sure if its my isp. me or something.

your based in the uk.. my isp is also in the uk, any routing problems that happen on my isp only effect sites abroad..

the lag on your ftp servers was extremely bad at the moment I pointed it out.. as well as your own website, again it was ONLY cat2 that experienced this problem with.

Your constant changing of permissions is driving me nuts too, as now not only can I not create a folder, and cant even save files, and this is without changing my code.

you were better than this before you upgraded, but since then there's been a lot of things going down, and slow..

my feedback was just that, customer feedback, it didn't require fixing.. I have a pending payment on my account right now, I have removed my card, I will most probably let you cancel it.

Yes i am not happy, which is why i gave you feedback so you knew i wasent.

Such as life..

[WhiskyFudge]

Issues with Cat2
aMike please could you let Cat2 know which ISP you use so at the very least someone can check the routing for you. After talking to Paul (after your 1st post), his frustration is not with you, nor is it with you making negative comments. But the fact that someone has a problem with his services, his company, and yet he is unable to do anything about it. Please believe me when I say the team at Cat2 do want improve the service for you (and all other customers) were ever they can. However they need feedback to help them do this. You've already made a good start by letting Cat2 know that there is a problem, but they need more information to help them properly diagnose the issue.

I realise that last paragraph probably sounds quite harsh to you, please note that is not my intention. It is my intention to get Cat2's point of view across to you. Despite popular belief I do not work for Cat2, I am just another customer with Cat2. Between the various companies I work with, I use most aspects of Cat2's services, shared hosting, reseller and dedicated servers. From this point I know what it is to be a customer of Cat2's, and know it well. I can understand your frustration, I have a large customer in china who were finding connections to the Cat2 network would randomly drop, especially during large transfers (be it web, ftp or mail). I was able to give Cat2 a list of end point IPs and they did a great job of sorting things for us. Point being please let them do the same for you, after all it may benefit one of my customers!

Downtime
The amount of downtime is unacceptable and there is no excuse for it (well no decent one) and I'll think you'll find Cat2 will accept that. Cat2 are currently putting a lot of resources (both time and money) it digging out all weak points in their systems and making them more robust. As a dedicated customer we have already started to see these improvements. Over the coming months more upgrades are due to take place.

Permissions
I can really understand your frustration with this issue, it's effected a number of my sites as well. There are ways and means around most things, although a number of compromises are required on your part. Unfortunately due to customers abusing accounts, and taking advantage of certain lesser tight permissions, Cat2 have been forced to tighten some of them up. Yes it does suck, but Cat2 have to put the security and stability of their customers first. Cat2's permissions are no were near as paranoid tight as some of the larger hosting companies, there are some I could name that won't even allow 3rd parties managed controls. If you work the logic out behind that one please let me know!

WOW - I need to learn to produce shorter posts!

I hope some of that helps, if theres anything I can do to help you, please let me know. And I'm sure the same goes for Cat2.

Regards

Jas

[rob]

Jason,

Thanks for the level-headed, informative post.

With regards to the downtime that we've had over the last few months - a large amount of this has been power related. Two incidents which affected the whole suite in the datacentre in which our core networking equipment is housed meant we experienced outages. In addition to this, we've had some problems with our own power distribution infrastructure. Unfortunately for us, and ultimately for our customers, it's almost impossible to keep a rack on fully redudnant, diverse power feeds in a datacentre - you rely on the datacentre itself to provide you with a reliable power feed for your equipment.

We are currently implenting a large number of changes to our infrastructure, ranging from replacing cabinets in order to provide a more manageable, and accessible physical infrastructure, to adding more power resiliency. Within the next couple of months, the network infrastructure will be completely resilient to power failure of both our own PDU equipment, and the datacentre's (core equipment is being placed onto UPSes). In addition to this, we're rotating all the power distribution equipment that we have currently, and replacing it with new equipment - in order to try and avoid any future failures. Our new infrastructure is also more distributed, meaning that we will not experience outages to such a large proportion of the network in the case of infrastructure failure.

In the cases where we have had extended outages - we have immediately dispatched staff on-site, and in my opinion, handled this as quickly, and efficiently as we could, given the circumstances, and have communicated to our customers as quickly as possible the actions that we're taking.

As Jason says, with more and more web applications, and packages out there having security issues (monitor a list like Full-Disclosure, there are hundreds), security is becoming paramount for a reliable hosting platform - whilst this sometimes can cause problems for some customers, I believe that once we're made aware of a problem for a customer, we do our very best to help with that problem. I'm sorry if this isn't your experience - please let me know of the ticket reference for your issues, so that we can optimise our support procedures to be more efficient.

Finally - if you are seeing performance issues with any of our servers, then we do need more information than "it's slow!" to debug this. Please put together a more detailed report (consisting of your ISP, time that the problem was experienced, your IP address, the site that you were trying to access' full URL, and any other data you feel is relevant) and we will look into it. Unfortunately, merely posting sketchy reports on these forums does not allow me to look into the issue to the extent that I'd like to.

At the end of the day - I believe that when an issue is reported to us, we will look into it in depth, in order to find the cause, and in order to ensure that the necessary performance/reliability is achieved from our platforms.

If any of our customers, or prospective customers, or ex-customers would like to comment on this, or ask questions based on our current upgrade plan, I'd be more than happy to answer them, please contact me personally at rob@catalyst2.net.

Kind regards,
Rob

[aMike]

I want to thank you for your detailed replay Jas, and I want to apologize to Paul, I know im not the best customer when it comes to reporting things, due to my frustrations, I will try to be more positive when I post things in future.
My isp is Demon Internet, using ADSL..

This is the kind of thing I have had, though I have to say the ftp is much faster now after the time I posted, and it connects straight away, but around this time, cat2 website was down completely, would give me a DNS error just couldn't get to it at all.. its happen a few times, but the funny thing was I could still connect to ftp, and still view my own websites, there are other times when my own are effected too, and it would take me 30 seconds to connect to ftp, sometimes not being able to connect, then each command sent would be lagging by the same amount..

It was getting worse, and it got its hi point around when I posted my feedback because it was just too much, before it was just the odd delay.
I am not sure what I can do to give you more information when this happens, I mean I check my isp to see if they reported problems, in case it was them, I check other connections to sites, I try ping to see if there's some kind of delay between my isp and the end point.

The only current problems I have at the moment is the permission one, and email not working on idreams3d.net, the email never got setup correctly on this when I first added the domain, I know its sad that cat2 had to tighten security because of some that would abuse it, the websites I create depend on this kind of thing, due to there very design and nature, it ideally needs to create folders, upload files.

Thank Rob, what you said there was probably what I was experiencing, I guess im unlucky in that I happen to be around and using things when these things happen, so I guess ive encountered it more times than most.

Thank you again for reassuring me.

If i encounter any more downtimes or slowdowns, ill note down the times, and create a ticket with the information you need.

Kind Regards,
Mike

[WhiskyFudge]

I will talk to Paul again about the permission thing. I help/work with a few other hosting companies who do allow access to the root and have no had any problems as of yet. However they are all smaller hosts. Otherwise the best solution i can suggest is a password protected folder inside your wwwroot to do you file manipulation.

And thank-you for the above post.

[aMike]

Thank you, the idreams3d site will be preety much usless if i cannot at least upload files, i mean its basic access, just to create folders, and uplaod files, or edit the content and save it back.. thats all i need.

Its a pain when i put in the work to do a design of a site, and then find its totaly usless because it cannot be used on cat2.

Im also doing webdesign for others, and if im going to make sertain designs for them, im going be stuck, if thay want to edit there pages for example, and save it, the access wont allow it.

Regards,
Mike

[WhiskyFudge]

I believe Jacob is dropping you a line with some info I've passed onto him. You can do it. If there is any further probs please throw me some of your source to me and I'll have a look.

[aMike]

Thank you very much, just this secound recived the mail, will put something together and give it a go in a few mins..

Kind Regards,
Mike

[aMike]

Yea no luck this end, the only thing diferent to mine is you use relative path, so I tried relative path same permission error.

This was just for uploading files, didont test on creating a folder, im out of ideas.

[WhiskyFudge]

Which server are you on?

[aMike]

strawberry