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HostHatch suspended server and ignores ticket
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I just explained it in my last post. Read above or click https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/4018413/#Comment_4018413
If you feel like you need to add something to that to drag this futher, be my guest. I will read it, but I can't promise that I will respond, as I've already explained it.
Just read that now. Your explanation why feels very shallow. Imagine if HostHatch said they provide 7 days for the customer reply in these abuse cases, but suspends a server in 2 days. Wouldn't it feel weird? That's how reading that feels. I just think it does a disservice to everybody reading, specially because you seen to not have any beef with the provider, so it's just weird seeing this coming from you.
Just my 2 cents.
Shallow? With all the time I invested in my detailed explanation? Ouch ... that hurts!
The 48 hours wasn’t the response time but the time after the OP complained about not getting a response. The issue was still open with him left in the dark.
Also, if you had read my posts carefully, you might have noticed that I am discussing about 'support' in general, based on my experience.
And no, I don't feel like I have beef with the provider. Like I've said numerous times, there are pluses and minuses, and in my opinion, the pluses outweigh the minuses for the price. But this doesn't mean I am not willing to discuss both.
What is wrong on HostHatch's side? Customer generated internal costs with this support incident by not replying in a reasonable time. You expect HostHatch to burn even more internal budget by investigating this report in detail? That's the customers job to do so imo, especially on discounted services. If you don't reply within three days but rage almost immediately after suspension, this leaves other questions... host this stuff at Hetzner or other bigger lowbudget DC and they pull the plug after no more than 24 hours (escrpt for OVH maybe, they are very leniend).
You could have written 5 pages, still doesn't explain very well how 2 became 7. If they resolve this by EOD, it would still be 2, maybe 3 and a half days?
I know you won't explain "again" or in-depth, but it might feel to others that you are doing this in bad faith, which I'm aware you aren't. This exaggeration aren't doing you or anyone reading this any favors.
Yeah, I think we all are discussing support here, but if you had an issue in the past that took 7 days to resolve (or you were left in the dark for this time frame), is it really safe to assume on day 2 that the issue will not be resolved by day 7?
We all have been providing on our experiences with their support on this thread, if I were to assume anything, I could just as well assume that they have responded to their ticket today after the traction this thread got, as it has been the case in the past.
Again, this could have been handled better, but why are we discussing 7 days of outage when we know the facts already? Again, it just does a disservice to people reading, specially if they don't bother reading the thread to the end.
The same as your polar opposite and I believe false claim that "people expect premium support" if we go down this route, right?
Who are those people? Is expecting a response in, let's say, two days regarding a potentially false-positive suspended server due to an overlooked email now considered premium?
The same thing you reproach me for, you’re doing as well - just that you target with your narrative, that I don't feel is exactly fair, clients.
Sorry for turning this on you, but I wanted to give you an example of how easy it is to pull people up on their words. I am stopping here.
It has nothing to do with what hosthatch did to be honest but how they responded.
I see many small site owners among their client who may not be technically that advanced or familiar with the standards of hosting. If you held these standard against enterprises, that's perfectly justified but for these small scale customers? I believe there should be some leeway.
I don't even have issues with the suspension. OP failed to reponse within time frame, hosthatch suspended the server... totally valid. But, the way he responded to OP very aggressively since the first post, that's what made me a bit uncomfortable.
OP does comes a bit angry. There are two ways to deal with it.
Reply equally angrily blaming the customer and shut him up (somewhat like in this thread).
Or, you can try to understand the issue that he is facing and try for a resolution.
some X, Y or Z provider can provide the BEST deal of all the providers with the best value for money in the industry yet, it will still be a deal breaker in my eyes if the provider responses in this way to conflicts.
you're also misrepresenting facts, hosthatch demanded a reply quicker than they themselves replied, that was the complaint, nothing else
hosthatch called being kept in the dark while the server wasn't working "definitely is not ideal", so big picture, they themselves agreed with the complaint (my understanding)
so I'm not sure what you're trying to do here
edit: also, he did reply within 3 days, he replied on the third day, why the need to exaggerate OP and downplay Hosthatch?
TLDR: Always check your emails daily. If there are too many messages, then create filters or a separate email inbox just for critical services.
This is a very malicious post to misinterpret OP.
OP has already acknowledge the mistakes on his part. He seriously is one of the "ranting customers" i've seen here who is honest enough to say, "look, i know i f**ed up, just tell me what to do now."
What OP is complaining about:
When you expect a quick reply from your customers, then you shouldn't make it 3-4 days to reply to a message containing the subject of SUSPENDED server.
If you are expecting others to hold a standard, then you should also maintain the same.
This bit is missing in how hosthatch works.
I still fail to get it. Why would HostHatch have to reply in a timely similar manner than the customer? The customer doesn't have a SLA or anything but bought a service with explicitly longer support waiting time. If you get suspended at Hetzner, MyLoc or any other budget provider it can take longer than 24hrs to unsuspend than to suspend, too. Absolutely common in this price area and something one should be aware of. To me this looks like 'ohh my server is offline, i'm loosing millions' drama on super cheap services. If you want specific maximum reply time, sign up for a SLA, pay for it and sue when broken but this here is not even against their ToS.
You fail to get it because you are not in the receiving side (till now and hopefully never). If you do, then you'll discover the double standard that exists in the manner that hosthatch responded in this case.
To be honest, if I gave the customer more-than-standard time to respond, and he didn't in that timeframe, I'd expect that it isn't that important for the customer.
Basically, HH is saying "Customer, please respond because we got a complaint. Although we could shut it down immediately, and other providers wait for max 24 hours for a reply, we need you to reply within 36 hours. We give you the opportunity to tell your side of the story." When the customer replies quite some time later, I wouldn't expect to drop everything they're working on immediately.
Third person now who uses language to greatly downplay any fault of hosthatch and blame the OP.
Let’s start off with a FACT, the OP responded after 3 days (though HostHatch suspended the server after two days), and that’s not very fair to OP because HostHatch reaches out at 21:52 and OP responded at 04:10.
HostHatch, after over 48 hours, had not at all responded to OP.
You referred to the first time period as ’quite some time’, you then referred to the second as ’immediately’.
Why? It’s dishonest.
What don't you understand about me saying "I wouldn't expect to drop everything they're working on immediately"? I'm not saying they responded immediately, I said that I wouldn't expect it for them to do.
I also started by saying that if the customer isn't responding within the 36 hour timeframe, which I think is quite large, it apparantly isn't that important to him.
You are picking out quotes and using them out of context. Why would a provider who gives an opportunity to a customer that the customer isn't using then put that customer in front of the queue? Because the customer responded too late?
Yes, they could have done that. That would be neat for the customer. Would they get praise? Hell no. But when they don't, they're demonised.
And what did HH do wrong? You're saying I'm downplaying a fault of HH. What fault? Warning the customer? Giving him an opportunity? Not suspending the service immediately after a complaint?
Or do you think it's a fault of HH not to respond in 48 hours? We're on LET here, we all know (I hope) that we want lots for less. And if you think 48 hours is a long time, I'm currently trying to get a VPS up and running with another LET provider and to get IPv6 working - they've already needed over 2 weeks (but they still advertise that they provide IPv6). And even asking them what the status is takes a couple of times asking and in total 4 days to get "we're working on it".
That's fine. I do have a better explanation for my exaggeration though. Not only HostHatch, but a lot of providers receive "tickets" from angry customers complaining on LET, sometimes with reason, sometimes without it. Not sure how much this has been happening nowadays as I have been away for the last year from the forum, but this was very commonplace about 1-2 years ago, this was even worse for plans that explicility stated that no support will be provided whatsoever.
But yeah, I was wrong calling it premium support, but at the same time, for these types of services I would align my expectations with responses, because I'm not paying enough to request that. Sorry if I offended you somehow, we all make mistakes, myself included.
That's completely fair to be turned off by that. I have been here for a while and I have seen HostHatch (and other providers) receive a lot of abuse from customers and that's probably why they are like this. Should they be like this? No, not really, but I can't blame them.
For me personally, as long as my service works and my tickets are being answered, I'm fine. If I was in OP's shoes, I'd probably be unhappy too, although I know (OP probably didn't and had no obligation to) that they were having a pretty big sale around here and response times might be longer, I'd probably keep bugging support at least once a day, but there is nothing much you can do once you've signed up for these special deals, unfortunately.
this is what i said. but you get 3 likes and i got 0. so that's a discrimination here.
OP expected them to respond within 48 hours. You said it can’t be expected that they respond immediately. So either you consider 48 hours immediately or you’re painting the situation as something it’s not.
Which does make some sense since the OP is in fact to blame for only bothering to respond to an abuse complaint after Hosthatch suspended them.
OP expected them to respond immediately because now they had a problem instead of Hosthatch having a problem. They complained publicly after 48h.
So there's that....
Ah yes ... which the OP also did so I guess fair is fair.
@Ouji—our reputation for the service we provide is quite solid from both a performance and support perspective.
This has enabled and fueled our growth and has helped us achieve success. That said, I'm sorry to hear your experience has been the opposite of what we're known for. For that reason, I would like to make this right. Please do give me an opportunity to help by reviewing your environment. You can e-mail [email protected] and I'll help
The ticket explicitly says 24 hours to resolve. Looks like this isn't automated, so eventually someone processed this manually.
Op,
You were told in the first abuse message what to do. Instead of responding with an action plan to look for infection and prevent future abuse (firewall, automatic security updates, fail2ban, etc), you responded asking them what to do. So you got stuck in limbo because that's your responsibility, not theirs.
One suggestion, you can request they unsuspend it without network and you investigate over console.
In the future, if you have proper backups, you can always delete and remake a clean server.
So.... you are ok with when providers take frustration of one customer on another? That is unfair in my eyes. I'll show a simple example.
labze upon reading the issue, his immediate reaction was, may be it's a false positive due to docker container. You can see the difference of approach right there.
While hosthatch, wrote a post pretty much aggressively to a customer (who already acknowledged his mistake), that is not a professional response in my opinion
It shows the work culture, work ethics of an entity. You are a happy customer because you've found resolution of all past issues. But it requires just 1 complex issue to change the tipping point because only then, you'll realize the double standard of hosthatch between what they expect from customer and how they respond.
I actually almost bought one 3-4 days ago (storage promotion) but since host_c is preparing his offers, so I decided not to go for it. Looking back now, it was a wise decision because I defnitely do not want to deal with providers in this kind of way.
Not that I'm okay, it's just that I can't really do anything so I don't really care, I use my time elsewhere.
Yes, an unresolved and complicated issue would make me unhappy, how did you guess?
I'm sorry to hear that, that promo was pretty great. host_c seems great, but their offers are like Taylor Swift tickets, so I didn't really want go through something like this. But whatever floats your boat, if you are happy all the power to you, hopefully you can get a good deal later on
@labze is really amazing, I like how he treats his clients like humans while the other provider treats his clients like, you know, punching bag
You're doing it again. I don't care what OP wants regarding respond times. I just said what I (that's important, read again: I) wouldn't expect, and that is that they respond immediately. And regarding the situation (as I explained) immediately is quite a bit longer as a couple of hours.
Hosthatch had every reason to suspend, I have some sympathy for OP only if hh never sent an email, or if it went to spam. Agreed that having to go to the panel would be unreasonable.
But anyway, automated suspension is a pain, especially when you have to reply frequently to automated abuse complaints.
I recently stopped using a host and moved to a "DMCA ignored" host because I had to reply within 24 hours or the server would be blocked. I received automated DMCAs regularly that completely invalid i.e no infringing content, but the host doesn't take any diligence in checking if the complaint is valid. If I received an actual valid report, of course I would action it quickly.
This is also interesting:
Would hosthatch have treated the situation differently knowing the report from Hetzner was automated and not caused by actual malicious activity/port scan?
Yes, I still remember before I buy blackfriday 2023 package, I indeed read the offer and TOS, where it stated to be provided within 10 working days, then what happen is I wait till 2-3 months to received it, I am not being a dick, I just stated the truth, if @hosthatch really confirmed that OP doing bad things, there's really no need to give time, just suspend the server, but if they just suspect the OP doing bad things and give 36 hours only, it's indeed not enough, I would prefer they wait at least 1 month in my case.
So you argued against something that nobody expected? Got it.
36 hours is more than enough to reply abuse report.
Hetzner/OVH and many other web hosts just have just 24 hours or less and boom! your server is unplugged.