Cybersmart Hosting

[CranialBlaze]

Yet another experience of lousy service and web hosting.

I recently moved my site to Cybersmarts CPanel package, i grabbed 2 as 500mb was just not enough, turns out even that was not enough and i have again had to move overseas.

Anyway, after about 3 days of hosting i get a warning from CPanel that i have reached 90% of my bandwidth allocation, i looked at CPanel and at AWStats and their totals differed exponentially from what you would expect, anyway i email their support the evening of Sunday 10/01/10 and was completely unimpressed when i got my response this morning only (Friday 15/01/10).

I was informed that my AWStats at this morning reported ~4.3GB of usage, which i could easily see myself when looking at my stats, my original query was to why their was such a great difference, as of this morning CPanel was reporting ~8.5GB of bandwidth on my 6Gb allocation.

Their policy is fortunately to not suspend accounts but to charge 5c p/mb over usage.

When Zaid replied to my query as to why their was such a difference, he stated that the difference between CPanel and AWStats was my emails, so according to him in the last 6/7 days i had received nearly 4.2GB in email, other than the fact i know i did not spend almost 2 days downloading email i was really impressed by his assumed expectation that i would believe that BS.

I would love to see how i downloaded 4.2GB of emails when i have a 3GB cap, 1.35GB left and the remaining space on my hosting account is ~500mb

I have no idea what is going on with their servers ability to calculate, just though i would alert the community to the "competence" (LOL) of such a well known company.

Just for interest sake, anyone here personally receive 4GB+ of emails in 1 week???

 

[bullfrog]

Awstats is statistics software for site visits only and doesn't include all the bandwidth usage on your hosting account. It should definitely not be used to track your bandwidth usage.

The explanation of 4GB of emails though, I have to agree is a little daft.

Out of interest sake, are you adding the "Not viewed traffic *" and the "Viewed traffic *" together in awstats?

 

[RSkeens]

Ask them to give you the output of /var/cpanel/bandwidth/x, where x is your username. You might need to ask for an higher level tech for that. It will give you a more detailed breakdown of your bandwidth usage.

You can get other stats quite extensively (every 5 minutes, hourly, etc) by similar files in that directory.

 

[CranialBlaze]

Awstats is statistics software for site visits only and doesn't include all the bandwidth usage on your hosting account. It should definitely not be used to track your bandwidth usage.

The explanation of 4GB of emails though, I have to agree is a little daft.

Out of interest sake, are you adding the "Not viewed traffic *" and the "Viewed traffic *" together in awstats?

The 4.3GB was what was given to me by Zaid, but suddenly without me even sending the cancellation request the account has been deleted so i cannot double check the figures he gave me.

I have worked with AWStats for many years and i expect a difference between the totals, but its usually around 5 - 10% unless you really do receive an inordinate amount of emails, but a 100% difference is a bit extreme especially in only 7 days and i have my .htaccess files restricting all directories with images individually to prevent images from being hotlinked, years of working with CPanel and working with the odd insecure server has taught me a certain level of paranoia.

 

[CranialBlaze]

Ask them to give you the output of /var/cpanel/bandwidth/x, where x is your username. You might need to ask for an higher level tech for that. It will give you a more detailed breakdown of your bandwidth usage.

You can get other stats quite extensively (every 5 minutes, hourly, etc) by similar files in that directory.

Doubt i would be able to get it anymore, it seems maybe 1 of their staff read this post and decided to delete the account with out me having sent in the request. They have no effectively deleted my account/site without my consent. The files are already on the new server and from what i can tell the domain has completed resolving so from that point I'm not worried, but i think on principal i shall refuse to pay.

 

[portcullis]

As you know, we have a pipe to Cybersmart.

The total amount of traffic between us and them this month has been a meagre 1.37GB.

There's no way that you - as my customer - could have pumped 4GB of traffic down a link that's only had a total of 1.37GB of traffic going through it.

Somebody at Cybersmart's pulling the wool over your eyes.

 

[PC Direct]

Else your webspace is infected with spyware chowing bandwidth. Possibility...

 

[CranialBlaze]

As you know, we have a pipe to Cybersmart.

The total amount of traffic between us and them this month has been a meagre 1.37GB.

There's no way that you - as my customer - could have pumped 4GB of traffic down a link that's only had a total of 1.37GB of traffic going through it.

Somebody at Cybersmart's pulling the wool over your eyes.

I know, i have been running a reseller account on US server for 7 years so i know usage trends and emails is a micro % of what a popular site can use in traffic.

Well now i am overseas, did not want to go over but with that CPanel i would end up paying close to 10k per month as its reporting around 1.2GB used per day, my average for December was about 1200 unique per day, but on their old linux server which i was using in December i did 4GB for the month with these 1200 users and about 17000 page loads of a 500mb website, so from 4gb in my busiest month to 8GB in less than 1 week and then they blame it on email...

 

[CranialBlaze]

Else your webspace is infected with spyware chowing bandwidth. Possibility...

Possible but my new host would of detected that and reported to me as soon as i transferred so unless the spyware was not in any 1 of the 44000 files i transferred or was somehow not detected by clamwin or any of the antivirus i run on my own network (i download a complete copy at the end of each month to use a localhost copy for testing and offline updates.) And i use Avast on the file server and Kaspersky ont he other machines