Moniker.com Now Down For About 19 Hours

As yet, no word from on high

[Webwork]

From Moniker.com:

Site Unavailable

The Moniker� site is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

It would be nice, don't you think, if Moniker's customers received an email advising . . . anything?

It would be nice, also, if this wasn't happening at the same time I'm involved in a domain sale where I urged the buyer to open an account with Moniker because the domain transfer (to the buyer) would be "fast, safe and secure".

Argh. :(

I was concerned when Monte sold Moniker to Oversee. He built the company upon a reputation for attentive customer service. Moniker's CS reps were the smartest, most attentive, and oftimes the funniest in the industry.

After he sold customer service moved from live people and rapid email responses to a ticketing system. (Larger accounts still benefit from dedicated CS reps, so no "big" gripe.)

After he sold I increasingly saw instances of unscheduled server downtime. Not frequent, nor of long duration, but often enough to catch my eye.

This latest development suggests that Oversee is not investing in certain essentials, like failover systems. I say "suggests" because absent official word we're all a bit in the dark about the cause.

So, when it comes to a registar, when is enough enough?

How far do things have to go before you take a walk?

And, for anyone contemplating a move, is it fair to say that everywhere you turn . . there are (potential) issues?

[edited by: Webwork at 8:26 pm (utc) on May 5, 2010]

[lorax]

Every registrar is bound to have some issues but this one is rubbing me the wrong way for some reason. I think it's the lack of communication. I'm not sure if I'll move my DNs but I'm sure thinking about it.

[tedster]

It hurts even more when a company you depended on for their excellence seems to take a turn for the worse. We all know that many online businesses are bozos - but Moniker never was.

In the past I recommended Moniker's services every time the opportunity came up. Now I need to re-think, because any recommendation I make also affects MY reputation.

[Jon_King]

>>After he sold

These words have now bit me more than I care to say.

I think the buyer mantra is, buy a good company with quite a bit of overhead and then "Cut the overhead costs" and proceed to milk.

I have practically been ruined buy those words in the hosting industry and will run as soon as they are whispered by any key supplier to my biz.

[travelin cat]

They just came back online.

[iThink]

Now the site is up.

Someone posted on another forum that they are having a hardware problem. A downtime of about 1 day for a critical service provider without any email intimation of any type is too much IMHO.

is it fair to say that everywhere you turn . . there are (potential) issues?

I have already discontinued the use of OnlineNIC because of long and frequent downtimes. Enom has had frequent DNS outages but I still use them. Godaddy is something I hate and will never want to even look at. Joker and Gandi have decent enough sites but have higher prices and then their staff is not very good with providing support in English because they are located in Europe. UKreg.com has terrible support, perhaps the worst of the lot. Netsol is too costly. Who else is left?

There are not many registrars of size who offer registrations at such low prices as moniker does. I have already split my domains among 4 registrars and ensure that no single registrar is holding more than 30% of my domains at any given time even if I have to pay a little bit higher price to some registrars.

[travelin cat]

Netsol is too costly.

There are not many registrars of size who offer registrations at such low prices as moniker does.

Perhaps the old "you get what you pay for" applies here.

Their new owner may have not prioritized it for a reason, like lower income then expected for the amount of work involved in maintenance. Just a thought.

[Moniker_Man]

I am still here guys and working harder than ever. Our outage last night was unfortunate and all the details are still being investigated. We have never been down that long...ever and as most of you know, rarely go down at all.

We only went to a ticket system when we grew too large for an email driven support system and this has actually improved response times and logged time to resolve in a data base. Most of you know know your rep, their extension, and even their cell phone so can always get a hold of us.

my email is [e-mail], and my direct line is 954-861-3531.

Again our apologies for the unplanned outage and thank you for your patience.

[Brett_Tabke]

Thanks for stopping by Monte. Hang in there and good luck with the clean up.

[wheel]

Yeah, Monte's still cool :).

I would point out three things when it comes to server downtime:
1) You really should know better. It's going to happen. Plan for it now. this is known technology people, there's little excuse for a 'real' website to be offline the better part of the day. For the folks complaining, have you thought about what happens if I walk into the datacenter, pull your server and walk away? How long are you down for? (me, probably about 5 hours, maybe a bit more or less).
2) most of us here aren't Amazon. Get over it, a domain reg company offline for a day is an annoyance, not a business proposition. Really, chill. It's not like WebmasterWorld was offline and we couldn't get online to find out what Google's doing - nothing as serious as that.
3) one data point does not a trend make. I've been using moniker for a long time as well (also based on recommendations) and I've never had a problem. The support has been exceptional - though to be honest I only ever use email support. And that's despite my only probably having <200 domains there. Not a player - but I get good service every time.

[Moniker_Man]

Thanks Wheel! Appreciate the support and glad to have you as a customer. Turns out this outage was a result of human error in our NOC. They were upgrading drives for a completely different set of sites and switched ours by accident - that brought down our data base until they reloaded. We could not send out email as a result to notify customers. Back up was there but could not kick in due to the type of error even with redundancy - so we learned another thing about what and how to back this up in the future should someone make that mistake again. I guess anything can happen ;-(

[Webwork]

Monte, it's reassuring to know that you're still in the game.

this outage was a result of human error in our NOC. They were upgrading drives for a completely different set of sites and switched ours by accident

And here I thought the answer was going to be that someone tripped on the power cord and the janitor eventually found the plug lying on the floor and plugged it back in :P . . but, really, . . "the NOC did it"? Ratbert and Homer Simpson are now both working in the NOC, eh? :-/

Too funny.

P.S. Really? Pulled the wrong drives? That's up there will cutting off the wrong arm or leg. Aren't the drives physically labelled, in addition to all the other safeguards I'd imagine would/should prevent this type of blunder? Guess I already know the answer . . unless there was a language problem in reading the label on the outside of the drive/server.

[Moniker_Man]

no kidding - that is what happened. We have hundreds of servers but last time I saw, they were all marked properly. And its our own NOC!

there was some ass kicking and and a good old fashion #*$! storm in LA last night and today.......

[madsere]

Turns out this outage was a result of human error in our NOC. They were upgrading drives for a completely different set of sites and switched ours by accident

That's a pretty serious mistake to make. I hope steps are been taken to prevent this kind of mistake from happening again.

[ponyboy96]

I feel bad for the NOC that made that mistake. He/she will probably never be able to live that one down. I'm sure they are probably at the unemployment office today.

[lorax]

Thank you for the updates and insight Monte. You were one of the reasons I switched to Moniker.

[rogerd]

Thanks, Monte. One step that I'd highly recommend is having an editable error page so that instead of a generic message one can be informed of progress and an ETA for service restoration. Even if it is "we don't know, we've got three engineers working on it right now" users would know that something is being done.

[Moniker_Man]

Rogerd - thanks, that is something we had in our plans for early this year...but it got pushed out for other priorities. I think our tech folks in LA now have it as a priority again. ;-)

[jdMorgan]

In addition to kicking the techs' posteriors, you might also have a word with your Head Chief Senior Lead of the Department of Redundancy Department...

Jim

[internetheaven]

I was concerned when Monte sold Moniker to Oversee.

Aye, I saw the same downfall of customer service. I think they have a computer generating template responses for 90% of tickets. Then, if you complain, a real person will look at it.

I've only held out this long because, as someone else pointed out, there really aren't any good registrars anymore. Moniker was it ... plus, moving 1500+ domains is a pain in the arse ...

[bluelook]

I have to say I was affected by the outage, I lost some good domains from that day's drop because even when the system became online I was unable to fund my account with more money... until the next day.

All those domains I wanted were immediately grabbed, hand registered, and of course the price skyrocketed when I tried to acquire them.

But oh well, this happens, I didn't lost my trust on Moniker because of this incident. I'm a longtime customer and we all have bad days...

[local]

Anyone else having trouble with Moniker.com and dns servers again? Both appear completely offline to me at the moment

[Moniker_Man]

we are up - we did a port change in LA and the site was restarted

[physics]

I was hit by this too. So... angry... right... now.

[wheel]

I was concerned when Monte sold Moniker to Oversee. He built the company upon a reputation for attentive customer service. Moniker's CS reps were the smartest, most attentive, and oftimes the funniest in the industry.

After he sold customer service moved from live people and rapid email responses to a ticketing system. (Larger accounts still benefit from dedicated CS reps, so no "big" gripe.)

After he sold I increasingly saw instances of unscheduled server downtime. Not frequent, nor of long duration, but often enough to catch my eye.

This latest development suggests that Oversee is not investing in certain essentials, like failover systems. I say "suggests" because absent official word we're all a bit in the dark about the cause.

So, when it comes to a registar, when is enough enough?

How far do things have to go before you take a walk?

Pretty close to that now. I've been happy with moniker to date but two things have just happened that mean I'm unlikely to keep my stuff there.
1) brand new ticketing system. I have to register for a seperate account to ask questions, right up to and including the confirmation email (and my spam filtering means a 10 minute delay). I'm already logged into my moniker account and I have to register to a different system all over again, just to ask a question? No way, I don't time to jump through hoops when I'm already unhappy that somethings gone wrong and all I've got is an 'error 2030'. (turns out, this is because I put a 'www' in front of the domain. If only computers could figure that out.
2) phone support means I have to listen to an annoying, ingratiating ad before I can even get to tech support. Then I get told it's a 10 minute wait. Then it becomes clear that they've sent their tech support overseas.

The time to do things write is when clients have problems. Used to be I'd email or call moniker and get a straight answer right away. now I've just spent 10 minutes on the phone and I'm still not sure my problem is resolved.

This is networksolutions type of service, not Monte level.

[Moniker_Man]

Wheel - you can send an email to [e-mail]

send me an email with what is going on with your issue and I will have it escalated.

Monte Service ;-)