It's 8:30 am on a Wednesday morning, and I'm already homicidal. That's bad.

I just got off the phone with ValueWeb, a hosting company I currently have 2 dedicated servers with. It's their fault. I will enthusiastically recommend that you never, ever use their Dedicated Hosting.

At the beginning of this month, I set up a server with them. That went smoothly, except that the server was set up on a Friday and they hadn't allocated my adiitional IP addresses yet. By the time I could talk to Customer Service to get them, they were closed and wouldn't be open until Monday. Why Customer Service? I don't know. But, I had to wait all weekend to finish setting it up. Still not a big deal yet.

Last Friday, I ordered a second server. I had to wait until Monday for them to set it up. Still not a big deal.

Monday came and the server was set up. (Problem #1) Again, they didn't assgn addtional IP addresses I requested, but that was resolved fairly quickly.

This time, I had them install Plesk on it because this was going to be a shared hosting server. I also requested they add on the Plesk PowerPack wich includes several add-ons for it. (Problem #2) That was not installed. After a quick phone call and several hours of waiting, it was resolved.

Then there were some major issues. (Problem #3) When I was ready to start migrating web sites to the server, I noticed that Bind (named), the DNS server, was not running. After looking into it, it's because Plesk wants to run named under /var/named/run-root instead of /var/named/chroot. That's not a big problem by itself, but when I received the server, it was not set up with the appropriate files in the run-root folder. I had to fix that myself. I mentioned this all to the tech I talked to about the PowerPack.

(Problem #4) While I was waiting for the Plesk PowerPack, I noticed that Tomcat wasn't running. I mentioned this to the tech that called to ask me for the root password to finish setting up the PowerPack license, which I had just done because Plesk let me. He said, "We'll look into it," so I didn't worry about it.

Over the course of the next 12 hours, nothing was done on their end, but I did figure out why it wouldn't start. An extra http daemon that ValueWeb installs uses port 8080, the one Tomcat uses. It provides some fairly worthless CGI scripts. I have since disabled it and Tomcat runs fine. I never heard back about it.

(Problem #5) Tuesday, I called them because the server had rebooted on me twice that day. No mention was in the logs of a reason, or even that it had rebooted, so it must have been a crash or the power being cycled. I told the tech what was happening, he suggested that my 30 hour old box had possibly been comprimised or was subject to a denial of service attack.

"After just over 24 hours of being online?"

"It happens."

"Could you check out the hardware anyway and verify it's not a problem there."

"Ok. We'll email you with what we find out. It will take a couple hours."

I then went on to discuss the DNS and Tomcat problems I'd been having. He suggested it was a "known issue" with Plesk and well documented on their site. It's not, I looked before I talked to him. This is what we call "Tech Support passing the buck". I called him on it and explained the situation again and how it couldn't be Plesk's fault. He again insisted that Plesk was working on it and that they would fix their install images (of the hard drive) after that was done. I hung up.

I didn't have a chance to call Customer Service and complain until this morning. They have no record of me talking to the Tech Support department about anything except the IP addresses, the PowerPack and some reverse DNS entries (unrelated). Now I'm furious. I'm currently waiting for the Customer Service supervisor to do a call back. He's not going to like me when I finally get to talk to him.