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Here's my situation: I bought a hosting account and SSL certificate at one hosting company. After the site was online 1 day, next day it's offline and the only page I see is IIS 7 welcome page. I was told that they are doing update server first (by one person) and after phone call after few hours I was told they are installing SSL certificate to my domain and that WHOLE server is down just because of this problem, which means that all websites on that server are down. I waited for another 10 hours but nothing happened, so I decided to check if this was really the case. So I found this website:
http://www.websiteneighbors.com
And looks like it really finds websites on the same webserver. I have opened most of these websites and they all work normally. Basically, my only question here is, how confident this service is? I need to have an argument but I am not sure if I can rely on this website completely. I have also checked DNS on whois tools and they match with my domain.

Any suggestion is appreciated!

PS Sorry for non-technical and "personal problem" intro

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If it takes more then 5-10 minutes to install a certificate then your ISP is seriously incompetent. There is no reason the server should be offline for more then the few seconds. – Zoredache Mar 13 '12 at 23:02
The site should never even go down, technically, sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 graceful would reload the config files and no downtime and the SSL certificates would be active. – kobaltz Mar 13 '12 at 23:05
1  
But then again he's IIS7. bah windoze... – kobaltz Mar 13 '12 at 23:05
@kobaltz: IIS7 it's also just a matter of inserting the certificate and doing a graceful restart of IIS7. But it seems like this company decided to turn it into a mess instead... – Tom Wijsman Mar 14 '12 at 0:10
@TomWijsman I'm sure that it's simple to do in Windows as well and definitely good to know, but I got tired of expensive server licenses and chose to go the open source route. :) – kobaltz Mar 14 '12 at 0:16
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closed as off topic by techie007, random♦ Mar 21 '12 at 16:48

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2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

Just because your IP Address is shared with other domain names does not mean that they are on the same physical server. For example, I have a reverse proxy gateway that will look at the domain name of the request. It will send the domain name to a different server based on it's subdomain and domain name.

Typically it is a standard that if you are using a SSL certificate that you have an IP address dedicated to that SSL certificate. While most browsers will play nicely with multiple SSL Certificates per 1 IP Address, mobile browsers and Internet Explorer do not.

It very well could be a case that YOUR server is down and/or being provisioned while everyone elses is on a separate machine.

Did you purchase this plan from someone reputable or is this from a kid with a few computers in the basement?

Personally, I'm a kid with a few computers in my basement, but I have better up time than a lot of other homebrew servers. (except that time my dog ate the power cord to my UPS Series and fried them all).

EDIT AFTER MORE INFO:

It could be the path settings in your IIS server. If you're able to access the Welcome to IIS page then that tells me that your server is running and functional and this is more of a configuration issue on your part.

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I have just contacted support and they sent me few examples of websites that are on the same server but these actually work (now they change a story that they temporary not work). It's a company I've heard about before and I've heard only good things about them, but looks like their service has suddenly stopped to be good. – ile Mar 13 '12 at 23:17
What kind of service do you have with them? If you have a VPS or VDS or DS then the issue is more with your configuration of the server. If you're just purchasing web space then the site is probably up, but the index.htm/default.asp/index.html or whatever is being hit instead of your default page. – kobaltz Mar 13 '12 at 23:19
I have VPS and your explanation makes sense but when I create a test.html in wwwroot I still can't access that file and get 404 error. – ile Mar 13 '12 at 23:41
Go to your IIS settings and look at the directories that the websites is plugged into. It could be something where it's pointing to inetpub/www and you're putting stuff into inetpub/wwwroot – kobaltz Mar 13 '12 at 23:43
I have checked that and it's not a problem. It was set to inetpub/wwwroot. – ile Mar 13 '12 at 23:50
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up vote 1 down vote

1.) To answer your question: That service listed every single site on my own server, so yes, I'd say it works well enough!

And yes, sites with the same IP are going to be on the same server, since two servers can't share the same IP address.

2.) To give some perspective: While it sucks to wait ten hours for resolution, remember that no one who manages a server wants it to be down so your hosting company wants that box back up (if it is indeed down) even more than you do!

Also know that, during an outage, support says random stuff to customers because:

  • they don't actually know what's wrong yet
  • they don't want to explain what's wrong because it's too complicated
  • the individual helping you is 1st tier support and doesn't understand what's wrong so they made something up.

The likelihood that installing your certificate took the whole server down is, as you suspect, extraordinarily low.

Recall that your terms of service don't promise 100% uptime, and be aware that nearly all hosting outages are caused by configuration errors made by the customer. That in mind, remember to be polite when contacting support (if you're not, they'll just ignore your ticket for another ten hours) and ask them again when you can expect your service to be restored.

Good luck!

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Thank you, this is very interesting opinion. Unfortunately, my problem still hasn't been solved and I understand how frustrating it can be when there's a problem which you don't know how to solve, but I don't think this was a problem here, I actually offered them my help but their support is very bad and unprofessional. If they say they will give me alternative server until 8am then it's 8am, not 1pm, like it happened in my case, so I believe there was no enough effort from their side to eliminate the problem. – ile Mar 14 '12 at 11:56
In the end, I got response from them that they set up new server for me and that I can change DNS of domain but they haven't set SSL even on this new server. Conclusion is that I am definitely changing hosting company. – ile Mar 14 '12 at 11:58
one more question: is it possible that SSL is related with technology (asp.net mvc) or it's completely independent on technology? – ile Mar 14 '12 at 15:52
Installing a certificate on a site shouldn't be this much of a problem. I think you're right -- they're idiots. :-( – goblinbox Mar 15 '12 at 0:57

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