Regarding Today’s DNS Issue

Ahh so thats why my Google mail wasnt working! Thanks for the heads-up. Got it sorted anyway.

P.S. I liked you old site design more.

Seriously guys not what I would call a proffessional response to the problem, and to be refered to this blog post by way of an explanation is also pretty poor especially as it was 15 plus hours after the event. I also had difficulties contacting you as my password was not working, and without the password you cannot submit a support ticket, and if you are not receiving emails you cannot reset your password. GET A PHONE NUMBER ON THE SITE!

@David: How is this not a professional response to the problem? What is the issue with being referred to this blog post, exactly?

You had an issue opening a ticket because you told us that your web developer was the one who had all of the passwords, not yourself. They should’ve left you with adequate login credentials to contact us if needed. We do not provide telephone communication, please see our FAQ’s.

This has been really tough for us. Our email has been down for an entire day without explanation and I just now was able to figure out the problem and update the DNS settings (which will now take up to 24 hours to propagate). I’m sure you can understand the frustration of having your email down for over 24 hours.

@Colby: If you’d submitted a ticket, we would’ve informed you what was happening and would’ve gotten your e-mail up and running as soon as possible. The same of course applies to everyone else.

The purpose of this blog post is not to provide initial communication of the problem, it’s to provide a summary for those who were already affected and knew about it, and to inform those who may not be aware of any issues that they should check their DNS accordingly. Just to be clear; anyone who submitted a ticket today about this issue was informed there was a DNS problem and that they would need to fix their records. This is not our first communication of the issue.

Let’s assume you had sent out a notification e-mail. A customer who was not affected would have spent 5 minutes checking his/her account, realized there were no problems, and would’ve thought “Phew, I’m unaffected, even though I wasted some time it’s good that This* took the time to keep me updated”. A customer who /was/ affected would have been able to re-modify his/her DNS settings and suffered a minor inconvenience with minimized downtime. Neither situation seems bad enough to justify not sending out an e-mail. Most affected people are probably annoyed with the issue, but will understand that problems do happen. I would wager most of them are much more disappointed by the lack of e-mail notification than the issue itself. Your affected-MX justification for not sending one out seems disingenuous; certainly most of your clients have a contact e-mail address on file that isn’t routed through This*.

I don’t receive a lot of e-mail to my domains, and so when I received no mail to my Google Apps e-mail I wasn’t alarmed. In fact, I probably would’ve gone several days before noticing. The only reason I checked my MX records and caught the problem was because I follow this blog in my RSS reader. I can imagine you have other clients in a similar situation. The correct thing to do would’ve been to send out a notification e-mail. Even though now it would be late, it should still be sent out.

@Raymond: Problems do indeed happen, and given our track record and the situation I’m confident that this is a rarity.

Regarding the mailouts, with respect I strongly disagree. We have a good idea on the number of clients who use us for e-mail and you would be surprised how many route all of our communications directly through their main domains with us. Given this information we know that those affected would likely not receive the mailout and not know of the situation. This is why we actively use Twitter and our blog to communicate these significant issues and have also put a notification without the client area.

Even accepting the possibility some clients wouldn’t receive the e-mail, there isn’t a good reason to not send it out anyway. I have a gmail address as my primary contact, and accordingly would have: 1. received such an e-mail; 2. been able to correct the problem with shorter downtime as I wouldn’t have had to wait for this blog post to appear; 3. had a generally better feeling about the whole situation.

We receive scheduled downtime notices, invoices, etc. through e-mail; there’s no reason something of this magnitude shouldn’t receive an e-mail notification also. You are well within your rights to stand by your decision not to send it, but if you were to poll your clients, I’m positive most would have wanted you to at least try.

@Raymond: We’re going to have to agree to disagree.

You’re assuming most people utilise a third party e-mail address, when the reality of the situation is sadly much different. For any global issues that affect clients we would normally send a mailout, and have done in the past (see our recent ns2 IP address update for an example). In this instance since some e-mail was affected, it was deemed (and quite correctly in my opinion) that this would not be the most reliable method of communication.

Not cool guys but like you said, given your track record so far I can let it go. I’ve now got to try and remember the MX record settings for my domain :/

Re your ‘What now?’ paragraph…I’m a photographer and not a web specialist and since the issue was of your doing surely you could offer help to rebuild this ‘missing or incorrect A, CNAME, MX or other DNS records from your domains’? I wouldn’t know how to accomplish that and wouldn’t know if I’ve been affected by this notification.

and….? seriously, things like this shouldnt be happening, at least i would like to recieve an email explaining this… i just had to figure out by myself why i had 0 emails this morning…

I agree with Luis. To hang everyone out to dry without backups is pretty irresponsible; especially without any type of notification that it happened. I had a client emailing me saying they weren’t receiving emails, and I don’t even offer support like this — but I felt obligated to fix it, since I set it up.

Also to offer no assistance is also irresponsible. Your system broke, so you should help fix it.

We didn’t “break” anything, and we are not responsible for cPanel resetting DNS records.

Is cPanel not our your system? Is this something I set up on my own when I created my account? Do I have a pre-installed alternative?

Maybe you can’t prevent issues with cPanel, but to take no responsibility for it is ridiculous. “We don’t know what happened” isn’t a good enough answer for people whose businesses were interrupted because of this.

Without a single apologetic word in your post (except for to those you think will leave your service), I find it hard to believe you actually care about your customers.

@Ryan: cPanel is on our systems yes, but you’re accusing us of causing this issue when we did nothing of the sort. We cannot take responsibility for cPanel, much in the same line of we cannot take responsibility for products such as WordPress, etc. If WordPress were to cause corruption of your website, would that be our fault?

I understand some users are angry and frustrated, but lashing out at us for something that is beyond our control is not productive. Yes, this is a cPanel issue, yes this is something we’re looking into it. No, we do not know what caused it. Would you rather we lied about the cause, just so you would have some finality to the situation? Sorry, but we’re not in the habit of lying to our customers.

“We understand your frustrations, and we apologise for the inconvenience if you were one of those affected.” is that not apologetic? Of course we care about our customers, but lashing out and demanding we do the impossible is not going to get us anywhere.

My website went down on the 14th of July but I have no idea how to get it back up again? My other domains hosted on the same WHM reseller that I have still work, and my nameserver setting is ns1.thiswebhost.com ? Dissapointing that the way I found out about this was checking my google analytics after two days and seeing traffic fall to zero..

As well as this, support tickets that I have been making are never actually created. What I thought was just lousy support was actually a broken system.. not sure which is worse..

@Hector: Our support ticket system works fine. Please ensure you read the pages carefully when submitting a ticket.