Did Blacknight really have to take down my site with no advance notice because of out

RainyDay

I was disappointed and concerned by a number of aspects of how Blacknight handled this issue. Here’s the history;

I got this email from Blacknight on 5th April, relating to a Joomla website that I look after for a community group:

Hi There,
We note that your application Joomla for xxxxxx.com is out of date.
As a result of this your site is causing excessive load on some of our servers. Please update your application to the latest version and contact us to let us know once this has been done.
Regards,
Blacknight Support

I’ve masked the domain name for reasons of confidentiality. I don’t want it to appear on this thread. As I’m an amateur, volunteer webmaster, I didn’t get round to following up on the email until Sunday 7th April. I tried to get into the Joomla control panel, and I found that the site was down. I replied to the Blacknight email, with the following query;

Hi Blacknight folks
Have you taken the site down? I tried to get into the admin page to get this sorted, but it’s not working for me. See below for the error message I get.
Can you please bring the site back up so I can work on the plugins. If you have any information as to which particular plugins are causing problems, that would be very helpful.
Regards

I got the following reply later that day;

Thank you for your email.
For security reasons, please reply to this ticket from the registered email address on the account, and I will be happy to advise accordingly.
I look forward to your reply.
Kind regards,

This seems crazy – why would you not accept a response from the email that you sent your message to? Anyway, I sent the same reply from the registered address for the domain, on Monday 8th April. I got the following response;

Thank you for your email.
We note that your application Joomla for xxxxxx.com is out of date.
As a result of this your site is causing excessive load on some of our servers. Please update your application to the latest version and contact us to let us know once this has been done.
Note: Your current version is 1.0 and thus can not be upgraded via the control panel.
You will need to migrate the application from 1.5 to 1.7, and then to a 2.5 as per this article:
http://docs.joomla.org/Migrating_from_Joomla_1.5_to_Joomla_2.5
The alternative option will be to do a fresh install, and create the site from scratch.
Please advise how you wish to proceed.
Kind regards,

So there was no answer to my question about whether you had intentionally taken the site down. I did get a useful link about upgrading the Joomla version, but I still wasn’t sure why the site was down. I didn’t have access to the main email address for the domain when out and about, so I had to through the online support service, asking:

Neil - thanks for sending on the links to the additional Joomla information. However, you didn't really answer my specific question - Have you taken the website down because of this Joomla issue?
Thanks

I got no immediate response, so I went through the live chat support. The technical that I contacted immediately got the site back online. So, here’s my questions;

1. Did you really need to bring the site down without any advance warning? Were the problems caused by the outdated Joomla plugins really that serious?
2. If you did need to bring the site down, how did you expect me to update the plugins when I couldn’t access the site?
3. If you did need to bring the site down, why didn’t you tell me in the notification email that the site was down, to avoid this confusion?
4. Why did you refuse to accept an email from the address that you sent your email to, which is also the registered technical contact email for the site?
5. Why did I have to ask four times to get a straight answer to the question “Did you take my site down?”

All in all, it seems like a bit of a catalogue of errors. Shouldn’t this have been handled better?

mneylon

Thanks for raising this issue.

I've raised this issue internally and someone will be in touch with you directly

RainyDay

Just to confirm that Blacknight got back to me with an explanation - hopefully this will help them to improve their communications in future.

Yurple

Hi,

Im unsure if you still follow this thread but what was the response you got?

I had 8 websites and 12 clients with individual hosting accounts (we do website design and graphic design) and several of our older clients got this same issue... these websites all of a sudden started creating core dump files in the root folder... filling up the space and had to be manually removed...... impossible.

I had many live chat talks and email contact with them but they were very short and even sounded aggressive. I since then moved the 20 accounts to another hosting provider where everything runs smoothly.

Even though older joomla versions are not supported anymore, our websites have the latest (always updated) virus and security checker component installed. These stop any threat coming in and therefore these websites are and will always be running fine.

What solution did they offer you?

RainyDay

Sorry Yurple, just saw your query now. Blacknight didn't really offer any solution. I kept my head down and hoped the problem would go away. Unfortunately, it came back last week to bite us on the ass. They have disabled the site all together, as it has been used by spammers.

Let me know if you have any solutions yourself.

We do have web developers in-house now who can migrate the site to a stable supported release. Please contact us and ask to speak with Alan and I can assist you.

RainyDay

AlanBlacknight wrote: »

We do have web developers in-house now who can migrate the site to a stable supported release. Please contact us and ask to speak with Alan and I can assist you.

Thanks Alan - will follow up.