Vivaciti Hosting email

Cant send email getting connection refused, sent a ticket earlier which was replied to instantly saying it was being fixed. Anyone else? Still down for me.

It has been down three times for me over the last 5-6 days, also sent a ticket in when it first occurred. I was told the same as you earlier today, there is a problem, which is being fixed.

This has become a problem for myself, as I am missing emails from today again. I have been looking at email hosting elsewhere this evening, as I need a working email address by Wednesday at the latest next week, and if the servers are not fixed, it will cause a very big headache next week.

Can anyone recommend a good and reliable email host, is 1 and 1 ok?

Thanks

The Free version of Google Apps is good if you only need fewer than 10 users and have your own domain already.

https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/standard/new3

Been using tsohost for a couple of years. Never had an issue.
Contacted support a couple of times for set up help and have had instant responses late into the evening.

Another vote for Tsohost.

Thank you, to both of you, I have had a look at Tsohost, just one question Roberto, as you use them for email, is there a spam filter on the email accounts, if there is, can it be turned off?

Thanks again.

I haven't looked recently, but there was a recent upgrade to many things, and they said their spam filter system was to be improved. I haven't checked.

It was/(is?) Spam Assassin, and yes it could be turned off. I certainly had/have it letting everything through but with "SPAM" inserted at the beginning of the Subject for dodgy mails. That's how I liked it. You can also adjust the scoring level for that to happen.

I've had enough for tonight. Remind me tomorrow. If I look now I could misunderstand something and give you duff info. I'm dog tired.

Had my email account with Hostway for some years now, not the cheapest but very reliable level of spam filtering depends which service you buy.

Thank you for the reply Robertos, you have answered my question, many thanks.

Thank you for the reply, they look good and probably suits my needs.

I suppose you are not limited to using the pop3 email service with only MS outlook, as I use Forte Agent for emails and would prefer to carry on using Agent for emails.

I use Thunderbird. In the past POP3, these days IMAP. In cPanel when you set up an email account (or on the default) you can click for the login details. Occasionally those seem to vary in format. Possibly depending on which server you are on.

Thank you.

Yes, I have also raised a ticket. Its funny as I called in saturday morning and they said its not a problem and no one else has rung in. I must have been the first . It has been off for me since Friday. Its not just our hosting emails that are down but also the vivaciti (dot) net domain is also broken as it run on the same host. The vivaciti (dot) com is on another and is working. I wonder if the person who looks after the services engine is on holiday and they are waiting for him/her to come back.

Yes my control panel site is still working just SMTP that's still down for me.

SMTP is still down for me also, but I am also not receiving emails at all, on paid hosting (for least 5 days now), which is now becoming a major problem, as I need access to the emails for customer orders / sales enquiries etc.

I've managed to reconfigure some email reporting apps to use gmail SMTP but unfortunately it uses SSL and some apps dont support that. I can access email tho.

POP3 is accessible, but emails I know I should have received, are not appearing.

Have you actually received emails via the POP server? or only via gmail?

Thanks

Just sent a test email to the Vivaciti POP3 account and it never turned up so looks like POP3 is borked too. Not expecting a fix til next week.

Thanks for testing, if it isn't fixed on Monday, I will have to sort out alternative hosting elsewhere for business emails.

I'm out on holiday in Spain using a shared communal wifi system for the apartment complex (one Telefonica ADSL line shared across 48 apartments via a system of wifi repeaters although its never usually too busy except in July and August and for about two hours in the evening) and I was beginning to wonder if this was a Vivaciti issue or something odd with external SMTP port number blocking for security reasons by the local wifi system. So its good to have confirmation that it is Vivaciti at fault although poor that they have not responded to my ticket of several hours ago.

The main techncial bloke at Vivaciti is normally very good but he always seems to be something of a one man band (much though he liked to pretend he had other colleagues but strangely I never ever spoke to any of them) so if he ever got sick or had a bereavement or something it would be easy to imagine the whole thing going to pot.

To be honest my broadband through Vivaciti is actually their LLU prooduct from the CarPhoneWarehouse's business operation OPAL mainly because its the only 24Mbps option on my local exchange that doesn't involve a 12 month contract. So this SMTP server is the only thing I'm actually relying on Vivaciti itself to get right.

Let us hope this is put right tomorrow as if not I may be looking for a new mail host and a new ADSL provider.

Karl is off on weekends as I suspect other key staff are.

In reply to a post by Banger:

Karl is off on weekends as I suspect other key staff are.

He needs to make an exception and start working at weekends when a failure of this severity causing thus much nuisance to customers occurs. Otherwise customers will vote with their feet when making their next choice of hosting package.

I bet that Google's hosting customers don't have to wait all weekend for some guy to come back in to the office on Monday morning in order to get things fixed!!!

Edited by deleted (Mon 24-Sep-12 06:51:32)

I have already made my mind up, if I have to take another hosting package today because of this email issue (and I have made a decision as to who I will use) I will not be renewing my hosting with Vivaciti when it is time for renewal.

Working for me now.

it may be working, but I am still not receiving all the emails I should have done today and any outgoing email I have sent to other domains, not received.

Also my website is down, Vivaciti main site is down (for the last ¾ hour or so - at the time of typing).

I have been patient enough over the last week and have now had enough, as this is affecting sales, communication with customers etc, I am making a cup of coffee, then getting hosting elsewhere, I decided on Xilo in the end, as in the long run, they will be better for my needs than Hostway and TSOhost that RobertoS, gmoorc and elevator recommended, but I thank you for the recommendations and I will remember them for future reference.

Hi,
There have been some on-going issues with the mail server that we are aware of and have a company going over the server today, but the websites are not effected and our site has been up all weekend.
The telephone support desk only support our Internet services and not the web services, there are only a couple that can manage this and as the server has never really had any problems up until last week this has worked fine, hosting support has always been via ticket and not telephone, but in light of the issues over this weekend especially the telephone support desk are now going to be trained in the webhosting part as well.
Web hosting servers do have issues every now and then, none are 100%, and this is the first time we have really had any major issues that have taken more than a couple of days to be resolved.

I have checked http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com with my own website (cpanel also) and with Vivaciti's forum and main site, all are down and have been for over an hour now.

Yes, your website and forum and my own hosted website has been mainly unaffected by this mail server problem, until today, this afternoon.

I never phoned up about the problem, but opened a support ticket, when I first noticed the problem, about a week ago.

I know web hosting servers have issues on the odd occasion, but this mail server problem has been ongoing and is affecting my communication with customers and missing emails, now the website going down, means I may have to move it all and change what I can in other places, all today.

My email client Forte Agent when trying to retrieve emails states an error: unable to find address of server

Apologies if I do not have enough patience, but I have been patient for the last week with these errors and for most of it unable to send and receive emails.

Well that is odd, as I have just gone to our web site and its all up and running, but I have checked on down for everyone and that reports down, but it clearly is not.
Are you able to ping the site?

FYI I can reach http/https://5.77.38.161 but not the following:

http://vivaciti.net
https://vivaciti.net

That's on a BT adsl line.

Website down for me too, server not found.

Ping

[www.vivaciti.net]

Unknown error: 1214
Unknown error: 1214
Unknown error: 1214
Unknown error: 1214
Unknown error: 1214
Unknown error: 1214
Unknown error: 1214
Unknown error: 1214
Unknown error: 1214
Unknown error: 1214

Average time over 10 pings: 0 ms

I can't get to your site either Karl. So it's not just your customers.

Bob,
Can you ping and do a tracert

Can you not even ping the site?

Nope. But I could ping the IP address.

I have just spoken to the engineers who have been on-site all day and they are looking at right now, do you know what dns servers you are using as it looks like a DNS issue, as some people can get to it fine other cannot.

Hi,
It would seem they have found the issue and put the fix in place, it would seem there was some issues with the DNS servers database this has been fixed and just waiting on DNS servers to update some new glue records.

Straight in now from your sig, and a ping just worked.

Working for me know, but had to change from ISP DNS server (just now, as it would always time out and sites unreachable) to open DNS for me to get to your site, forum and my own web pages and emails

On C&W LLU if that is of any help to you.

I'm just on the default Plusnet DNS.


DNS1(Primary) 212.159.6.9 (Auto)
DNS2(Secondary) 212.159.6.10 (Auto)

Appears to just be propagation due to the change of IPs. The previous records have a very long TTL on them.

On our caching nameservers, the records have a possible 90920 seconds before they look for new records.

New records can be picked up directly from the 5.X IPs, but it'll just be a case of waiting for the older ones to expire.

Matt