UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads Version 7/8 Support MindRaven

Does Rick no longer own that? He is not answering and am getting messages from names I have never heard before.

and they are NOT fixing broken things.

AFAIK Rick's wife is still running MindRaven (as it was her "project"), the Domain Whois doesn't really supply any owner information though...

I got an email from them today that they where changing payment processors, but I haven't really heard anything from them lately other than that.

What's broken ?

I believe it is hostmammoth.com now.

SOME DOMAN NAMES are not being redirected right, I spent hours with them basically messaging the same thing..

I do all of my client domain registrations through my Reseller account with eNom; ultimately everything goes through their servers (including DynDNS services).

It's most likely that they're ultimately doing the same thing with whatever reseller registrar they chose.

I had problems accessing our sites that are hosted with Mindraven via FTP yesterday, but now it is working. Rick emailed me saying he had to sell Mindraven We went with Mindraven because of the great support Rick had always provided. Now what to do, first UBB and now the hosting.... Thoughts?

Am in a similar situations...

At least you got a response.

the server has moved from chicago to Virginia for me. I expect that is why we had so many missing posts on my forum.

I understand changes, but is it too much to keep us informed?

R E A L L Y?

Stan--having problems with missing posts as well this morning. Is this the same thing you experienced?

I opened up a service ticket, should I ignore it?

Well I thought I was fine with Mindraven. But one of my sites appears to be down now. No FTP,HTTP or email.
The site in question is on the ruby server.
Off to the support desk I guess.

My site also has had some missing posts. AND PMs sent, then disappearing.

Larger issue, my site has two webcams, connecting via FTP every 5 minutes to upload a new picture. Yesterday (Nov 7), they were completely unable to connect. And I was unable to connect directly via FTP as well.

I opened a Mindraven support ticket, and was told they had shut down ftp access while they migrated the site to a different server "for better performance". About midnight Pacific Standard time (San Francisco, California, USA), I noticed there were missing messages.

FTP started working soon after that, but today, I had more trouble with ftp: One remote connection working, the other not, then vice versa. As I write this, one is currently not working.

In my Mindraven support ticket, I have been answered by several: Anand, then Priya, and last, Yogesh.

Edit: And I see my server is now listed at iWeb Technologies Inc., Montreal, Canada.

Found this tidbit Mindraven for sale with google.
Looks like it was sold 10-25-2011.

...and to think I transferred to Mindraven hosting so it could be handled by the people who built UBB Threads. This stinks. ...sold down the river.

Yes it does. That was one reason I went there. Besides the pricing tiers.
Still have not figured out who actually,really owns Mindraven now.
But the interesting note on the sale was Rick was keeping the dedicated server accounts.

Interesting, I would have bought it to bring it all back together again but was never approached.... I have servers ready to go with cpanel so the transition will be easy to move over, PM me if anyone is looking to move....

thanks!

Brooks

Kinda how I feel this morning. I sold the hosting move to Mindraven to the club board members for that exact reason... I also moved my dads website there earlier this year. If I had not had FTP issues yesterday I would have never known...

PM Sent!

PM sent.

Fairly small site for hosting.
Waiting on Brooks to respond to my PM.

That "was" what I liked about Mindraven, small and great support!

Should I close the board until they can resolve this? It was stable an hour ago and now it is glitching again. Losing posts and threads.

I can't believe this.

I'm one of Rick's dedicated server customers, so I guess he didn't sell me? Yet?

I'm very disappointed in this turn of events.

My site is on the blink again.... webcam is uploading, but on the web, pics are two days old. And I cannot connect directly to the server via FTP.

They are really messing this up.

Another sad day but glad things are looking up with UBB and I'm sending a PM to Brooks.

"This hasn't been a full time job"......

Sounds eerily familiar that does, along with the way things have been done.

Good luck everyone.

how do i switch to a hoster that works again?

Contact Brooks

Buy new hosting, move SQL DB and Files and Domain to new host (or have the files and db transitioned for you).

Honestly, I was tempted to go with MindRaven for hosting for the longest time... I'm glad I didn't, I wouldn't want my sites hosted in Canada by a company located in India...

Yup, I was close to moving a friends site to MindRaven, glad I didn't.

http://www.expresshosting.net/content/linux-web-hosting-packages/

"We are the official hosting company of UBB.Threads. Ask us about our free migration services to migrate your UBB.Threads installation."

Just signed up with Express, thank you Brooks.

Moving in an hour.

so if i sign up with them they will come in and switch everything for me? what will i have to do other than make the payment? im pretty puter dumb.

Yes, he is doing it for me at this moment.

The only thing he needed from me was access to c-panel (user name and password and the URL registration info)

As soon as I set up a billing profile he was off and running.

ok im on it!

the blogs I host, and other forums, my amazon store are down. Was not told that was going to happen. Am thinking.. ... this is not going to work out well for them.

Nope, I made the move earlier. I know I am small potatoes compared to some of y'all but my money is just as green as anybody else's.

This was a terrible way to treat a customer when the initial implementation was so smooth. Then to be slapped in the face with this mess?

I have a very sour taste in my mouth currently.

Cripes. We were just in the midst of planning for a move to Mindraven due to a history of good service from Rick, so found this news of the sale quite disappointing but glad to have found out in advance!

It is beyond me to comprehend why he would not have approached you for an offer first Brooks, to at least see if you might be interested.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention for the benefit of readers, that Brooks' team was asked to put 7.5.6p2 into place on our site. The process was handled professionally, quickly, and without a hitch it was done - a good first experience overall. Thank you Brooks (et al)!

Two quick questions, if I may:
Our current host is at times 'throttling' our site and from what I gather, many hosts actively discourage business of hosting community forums. 1. Does your partner, Express Hosting, utilize any form of throttling and, 2. what rate is charged should a site exceed the monthly bandwidth limit please? Not that we'd exceed it - just curious.

Thank you!
And thank you Stan for the heads-up about this!
mig

My issue is I just renewed for a year on one site in October just before the sale.
So unless the walls come tumbling down I will probably stay there for the one site for now.

Hi there. My name is Tom and I run ExpressHosting. Brooks pointed me to your post and I wanted to take a minute to answer your questions directly.

1) Throttling: ExpressHosting has no problem hosting community forums, but we do use a form of throttling on our shared servers called CloudLinux. CloudLinux is designed to help moderate sites and prevent them from using more than their fair share at any given time. Most customers never even notice it.

For example, we had a site that was listed on a big site suddenly one day. The surge in traffic crushed the site, but CloudLinux prevented this site from crashing the other sites on the shared server. We moved that customer to a dedicated server and throttling is no longer an issue.

2) Bandwidth: We have a pretty lax policy on bandwidth utilization. If you happen to go over one month, we don't mind and we will just reset the bandwidth for your site for that month. If it is something that is consistently occurring, we would suggest you move to the next hosting package up to give yourself more bandwidth (our packages double in size for each tier). Our base package includes 100GB of monthly data transfer, so you have to try pretty hard to meet that.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Thank you for the response but most of us here with a shared hosting account have had issues with email throttling.
meaning I have a ubb forum with say a 1000+ users.
So I decide to use the email function in the ubb control panel.
What will happen?
What is the limit on sending emails per hour,minute?

Just for a FYI type thing

Mindraven seem to have fixed all issues...except, now I have to set up my own upload limit size in htaccess.

I'd move my site to ExpressHosting now but I don't get paid until next Tuesday.

Ah, good question Ruben.

The answer is nothing. The system will send out emails as fast as it possibly can. What the receiving end does is another matter (Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail will all throttle a specific IP address for having sent more than an allowed amount in a specific time frame) and that is, of course, out of our hands.

We have many customers that do daily mass mailings to thousands of users. We understand that this is a viable method for communicating with customers. The only thing we ask is that removal requests/complaints are acted on quickly. That's just good Internet etiquette.

If you are sending out 1000's of messages to your clients every 15 minutes, then we might need to have a talk.

We also offer VPS and dedicated servers for those customers that need more capacity/control/etc.

Hi Tom, I really appreciate your quick response.

It's nice that you are welcoming to community forums and it's helpful to know that you are using CloudLinux. With our current host, we felt certain that we were being penalized for errors being generated by other sites on the shared server, yet our requests for support were met with a series frustrating 'form letter' types of responses, which proved next to useless in helping us to resolve anything. We tolerated the slowdowns and things eventually improved (they probably moved the culprit site) but the experience left us with a desire to move. Your responsiveness here is a good sign. And you are right - we're not apt to reach 100GB in bandwidth anytime soon!

Thank you for attending to my questions!

THANKS RICK!!!

Now I have had about 15 sites down for several hours. No response from our friends in India who have take over this.

What was the uptime guarantee??

Has anyone asked for a refund from Mindraven yet? My site seems ok today, and they did respond to my call for help yesterday, but I still don't have a great feeling about them yet... I think we are paid up till July of next year with them.

Ian

MY SUPPORT TICKET TO THEM BOUNCED BACK


Your inquiry was sent to the server administrator because no contact information was configured on the server. Attached is a copy of your inquiry for your reference:

body: Whats up? I do not get responses to my email. I just lost a $300 a year client.

Generally when people take over a business they want to keep the people they just paid for.

I am not getting the 99.9% uptime I was guaranteed .

Please fix this or refund...

This is getting old.. We deserve better.
domain: clubadventist.com
email: stanjensen@mac.com
ip: 75.51.170.218
owner: root
realname: Stan
server: Box1.myprivatecompany.ca
subject: ????
uri: /cpsess1673882696/frontend/x3/cpanelpro/support.html
user: clubadve
useragent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; intel Mac OS X 10_7_2) AppleWebKit/534.51.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.1 Safari/534.51.22

so a company in India took over MindRaven?
And moved everything to their servers in India?

I upgraded to a semi-dedicated server on Sept. 14th.
Today i get online and I've lost all posts and over 1000 new members dating back to Sept 14th. Where is the last 2 months?????

Who are the new owners?

Has anyone contacted them yet?

how are the dots connected with a Canadian Host?

Just got this email from "support@mindraven.com":

I expected:
1. to be notified BEFORE a move.
2. to be signed by an owner or support personnel, not "The Administration".
3. I expect them to grammar and spell check their emails...

I did an ip whois on the ip of the new server my site is on.

I get to http://foxhost.ca

I think that is why people are saying Canada host.

I fully agree with Gizmo here, I expected better.

As for the information lost, I appear to have lost about 1 week of data. I am currently pulling my old SQL database from mindraven by use of the ip address I had gotten when I signed up.

as for support, I did get an email back within 5 minutes of a ticket submission.

I got a response as well (within 1 hour). They never fixed the issue, said it was done but only worse 24 hours later.

I don't tolerate that nor do I do business with people like that. It was very easy to make a decision to move to Express Hosting.

Mindraven customers were kicked to the curb IMO. I can say more but think I will stop here.

sadly I just renewed about 2 months ago. I will likely ride it out for now and then move myself.....I wish it had been sooner to my renewal date.

I'm a little surprised that with all this going on - ubbcentral is still advertising Mindraven in its interstitial banner slots.

As for the Mindraven Difference "Your website deserves better".

Well....

I got the following email response... and what is DNS propagation?

We are currently migrating the server, do not worry all your data is still there, might just be the DNS propagation.



Thank you

----------

Alexandre Brosseau

Mindraven Hosting

They mean that your browser is possibly still reading from the old server. What is DNS Propagation

looks like I'm finally back to normal

Back when I was doing Tech Support for a webhost based out of the UK with servers in the US (I was the US point of contact) we had to move our servers from a center in Chicago (Voxel) to one in California (Hurricane Electric), we set the TTL for DNS queries ultra low so the propagation on domains was easier on the clients; but we also emailed them all like a month prior that we where migrating them to new servers (then again the servers we migrated them to where far better machines as well).

yea, would of been nice if they gave us a heads-up

I stil have multiple sites down... but they are working on it..

am still waiting for them to bring up the rest of my sites,... anyone else having problems still?

Wow. When Rick started Mindraven, I felt slightly guilty for not going with his ops when it came time for me to re-up at my current host.

However, I made my choice based on tangibles.

Which serves to support something I learned a long time ago...

Never let sentiment rule a business decision.

Still, I hope Rick and his wife made out like bandits when they sold the outfit.

Stan both of mine are up, what kind of problems are you having? Sites down or broken?

I have several down still
http://www.christianwebdate.com/
http://sdapg.ca/

and more... these are not busy sites... but have them hosted there,

man.. that is shoddy business practice by Mindraven

yikes

do you have backups? you could have moved them already.... do they have any explanation?

I do not have back ups, they should have everything still. The transfer did not go well for those who had more than one domain...

The UBBThreads went ok, it was weird but ok.

The transfer did not go too well for those who had one domain.

Stan,
I think
http://sdapg.ca/
is up now. Don;t know if it is correct!

these and a few other sites are now working as they should....

AND am thankful for that..

all things worked out in the end... they are treating me right.

hmmm this actually seems a lot faster now. The person who does my THIS WEEK ON... said it went screaming fast..

Hello,

We confirm than we have make an error to outsource our support with an India company and this is for why we have got a lot of problem in the migration of our server.

We have rectified the situation and now we have our own technicians.
We apologize really for the customers that have lost posts in the migration of our servers, our "outsourced" technician was forget to update the mysql localhost for the ip on the new server.. Our error, and i confirm also than we have applied some credits to customers due to this error.

Now our team of technical support is simply awesome and we work a lot to make our customers 100% satisfied !

Israel Gaudette
Mindraven.com

I concur, I had several frustrating issues which were fixed by Isreal, and the IP number in the cPanel quit being an Indian IP.

I am not against outsourcing, but that did not work well here.

To be honest, when we had choose to purchase Mindraven, we had invested a lot in "competents" technicians to assure to our customers a fast migration without problems. By the way, our outsourced support company (that i will don't give the name here), have started the transfer without advertise us because they said simply, only a downtime of 15 minutes was scheduled for all hosting accounts.. what was completely false !

Because these "stupid" guys, we have lost all our credibility and we have lost 4 customers.. customers that we respect and that we are really sorry to see leave from our new company.

Now, we have a solid structuration, all our servers are now fully compatible with ubbforum and we can guarantee to our mindraven customers that we can guarantee now a REAL 99.9% uptime guarantee and the best technical support possible.

For the next new year, we will put online our new website with a brand new look and we hope this new year 2012 will be a new start for us.

And to stop all rumors, Mindraven was not purchased by an Indian company but from a Canadian company. Our servers are hosted at Montreal(QC), about 3-4 states of Chicago, where was localized the old datacenter, by this way, you can keep an excellent ping and a fast servers.

A big thank to all customers that understand our situation and that continue to support us ! Thank you very much.

Greetings,

Israel Gaudette
Mindraven.com

Mindraven.com continues to be my best hosting experience ever, I get personal emails, and get my problems solved, even the ones that I am able to create.

Stan that is good to hear. Other than the hicup with the server move we are still happy too.

They have fixed some problems with one of my dating sites I host there as well, sever issues that did not get resolved before.