Ken Hada

If you were looking up one of your favorite pages and suddenly found this page please don’t panic. I am upgrading some server software and will return your pages ASAP.

My Godaddy VPS websites started acting flaky around 1 PM on 1-02-08. When the sites finally crashed and took down some of my clients sites plus my own ecommerce site I put in a trouble ticket with GoDaddy via the web.

About 5 hours later there zero action form Godaddy support. So I decided to call them. It is always stressful when you call Godaddy support because the techs have this defensive attitude from the moment they say “what is your customer number”. By the way the automation on the phone systems asks you to key in your customer number for faster service - Your always thinking “didn’t I just key that in?”. I explained to the tech that my system crashed around 1 PM today and that I was unable to startup Apache via my plesk module or via telnet. He said he have to put me on hold while he checked it out. After about 10 minutes on hold he come back on and tells me that I changed something on one of my skateboard sites that caused the problem. He said to try to start apache and to read what the log says in order to fix my problem. I told I did not change anything on my server (I had not touched it in months). I didnt press the issue because these techs can get really indignant if you question them. After he accused me of messing my own system up he asked me if I would like to renew any of my Godaddy products while we were on the phone. I said thank you…no. By now its about 10 pm or so I decide to get new hosting for these clients in the morning.

I wake up today and I get a email from tech support saying that they fixed my Apache error. so yes one portion of Godaddy tech support said I caused the problem and that it was my job to fix it. And other portion of Godaddy tech support seemed to feel that it was Godaddy’s fault and that they would fix it. So if you have Godaddy VPS and you need tech support you might want to send in a trouble ticket so the real techs can assist you, That said sometimes the real techs act like jerks too.

After upgrading my Mac to 10.4.9 I ran into the now famous capture preoblems with Final Cut - it appears Apple was trying to capture some money from people who have not upgraded to the latest versions of Final Cut and final cut express. i had to decide between giving Apple more money or doing a dreaded archive and install on my mac. I opted for the archive and install since i did not know at the time what other apps would be rendered useless by Apple’s latest security update.

Now 3 days later I am get the message.-
The application “Transport Monitor” could not be launched because of a shared library error: “8
<>”

Seems to have something to do with a Palm install. I will try to reinstall the Palm software - Why not? - I have already re-installed all kinds od music apps etc. don’t even know if my scanner works anymore…hmmm where did I put that scanner install cd-ROM?

One of my favorite celebrity clients is the actor Michael York. You will never meet a more personable, kind and above all talented person. Michael recently sent me some information for his web site www.michaelyork.net regarding a play (Camelot) he was about to perform in. When I received the information I emailed Michael and told him about my first experience seeing that play back in he 70’s when I was about 12 years old. It starred Richard Harris and played the Pantages in Hollywood California. It was one of those theater experiences where one becomes so immersed in the performance you are actually startled when the house light’s come up at intermission. Michael asked me if i would like to see the play as his guest. I said yes of course. Michael was kind enough to leave some tickets at will call for my wife and I.

So on the day of the play off we went from our home with our 2 children and my mother-in law to the theater - this is a large leap for parents. Thanks to Michael we had the best seats in the house. Once the play began I was swept away to King Arthur’s world of honor, love and magic. And yes when the house lights came up I was not only startled to find myself in a theater with a sold out crowd of people standing at their feet roaring as each actor took their final bows I was also sad to say goodbye to King Arthur once again.

Now it is one day later I am back in the rhythm of regular life. But I have borrowed something from my experience yesterday. I have borrowed Excalibur (King Furthers sword) and when stress tries to invade my daily routine i just think of a song from Camelot and I am instantly transported to the world Michael York, Rachel York, James Barbour and the rest of the fine cast of Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot created for all of us in the theater the day before.

CAMELOT, starring MICHAEL YORK, RACHEL YORK, JAMES BARBOUR began it’s national tour today. Do a google search to find out if it will play in a theater near your town. Get some tickets and transport yourself to Camelot. you will be happy you did.

Thats right Godaddy does not send trouble ticket confirmations to it’s customers. I was told that they log the ticket and keep it in their own system.

My Godaddy VPS account has been going down quite a bit. About 6 times in the past the plesk would die. I would call Godaddy and tell them i could not get into my plesk, SSH and my websites were all down, After 1-24 hours the site would come back up - without a word from GoDaddy.com as to why. So I called them on outage 5 or 6 to ask what exactly was happening. They said we have a problem with the server your acount is on and we are in the process of moving yo to a new server. i said OK and asked why they dont document trouble tickets. he said Oh we knew what was going on so we just fixed it, but this time we will send you a confirmation - and can i send you a cutomer feedback form?. I forgot to mention that everytime you contact GoDaddy for tech support they try to get you to purchase either new products or pay in advance for products you already own.

I think the Idolator says it best.
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I am writing most of the errors and solutions that I encounter with my Godaddy vps hosting package. i am doing this to help other webmasters who might need a hand.

Are you thinking about using Godaddy for your vps needs? There is one thing you need to know. Godaddy support will not only not help you with 95% of your problems - they will even kind of treat you like shit - why? - because they can. I think they love vps calls because they dont have to do much for those accounts and they seem to like hearing another human being squirm on the other end of telephone line.

So-
if you have a pretty good knowledge of basic unix commands and your clients wont kill or take you to court for outages give Godaddy a try.

And-
Oh yeah and backup everything you do. Back it up via the godaddy backup system and then bring it down to your hard drive because they are famous for killing you entire account to fix the smallest thing. sort of a Microsoft windows way of fixing a Unix problem i guess. At any rate they wont ask you (the paying customer) if they decide they need to re-build your server.

I log on to my phpbbs on one of my domains and find some message about the database not found. I go to another site running a cms and part of the cms is there part is not- there are error codes running down the clients webpage. I put a trouble ticket in with godaddy support at 6:18:39 PM PDT. 8 trouble tickets later it is resolved at 9:03:15 PM PDT. turns out my plesk was down. They said

For future refrence, if able to access SSH, login to the root access and type “service psa start” to restart the plesk service.

So if you have a Godaddy vps account and you suddenly see all of your scripts go haywire but your websites still work it might be your Plesk.

I am working on removing the ddefault favicon that litters every site i create on my godaddy vps account. I contacted support and after 3 escalations on the ticket godaddy support said-

Dear Ken Hada,

Scott P.
Online Support
Technician

After a little search on the web i have found that there is a hidden favicon.ico file located by doing a-
cd /var/www/vhosts/
Then do a ls -ahl
You should see a dir calle .skel there should be a dir in there called 0