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Christopher Flannagan
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I host my web server with softlayer and use plesk 9.2. I work for a very large hospital and we get around 100,000 visits a month. Two or three weeks ago I came into work to find a load of emails (I'm the webmaster) all saying the website wasn't working. I go to our domain to see a landing page that's the default plesk homepage. I log into my plesk control panel and go to our domain which its saying is suspended. I try to unsuspend it in plesk and it keeps telling me that the domain is expired, which I know its not. I contact softlayer and they say that the domain had an expiration date within plesk in which it had expired. I do not recall setting up an expiration date for this, but softlayer went ahead and change it to never expire. I had got the site working again by manually turning it on before this in IIS 7. Here's order of events so far:
1) domain expires in plesk and site goes offline
2) I turn domain back on via RDP in IIS 7
3) Softlayer sets domain expiration to never in plesk panel
... now all sorts of things are wrong with the site. ASP.NET works but php doesn't... its send an internal server error. I contact plesk, they get php working but wind up making asp.net NOT work anymore and it sends a 500 error now. Also, all of my MSSQL databases aren't working with my .NET scripts anymore. Turns out I had to change some code from "SELECT * FROM table_name" to "SELECT * FROM db_owner.table_name" ... that took forever to figure out and still not sure why all of the sudden I had to phrase it that way after this. Softlayer finally got php and .NET working again by messing with app pools and permissions, stuff I'm just not too comfortable messing with. I had to recreate some database users and stuff to get them working again.
As you can see, this one little expiration issue caused a massive issue with my server. Now, 3 weeks later, I got to change an FTP user's password and plesk and what happens? Immediately the server starts throwing a 500.19 server error for ANY file being requested: .net, html, image, whatever. Softlayer and I work on it for THREE hours while our hospital's website is down until we find out there's an issue with the web.config file's permissions. How the heck did changing an FTP user's password effect this? It makes no sense.
Softlayer claims the expiration had nothing to do with the first problem, but I have no idea why these things would occur at the same time and have nothing to do with each other. Also, softlayer claims the changing of the FTP user's password didn't have anything to do with the web.config's file permission being changed. Again, it seems like this is all tied to the first expiration issue corrupting softlayer somehow.
I just hope plesk sees this post and takes it serious because this was an absolutely terrible experience and made me, the webmaster, look really bad at my job.
1) domain expires in plesk and site goes offline
2) I turn domain back on via RDP in IIS 7
3) Softlayer sets domain expiration to never in plesk panel
... now all sorts of things are wrong with the site. ASP.NET works but php doesn't... its send an internal server error. I contact plesk, they get php working but wind up making asp.net NOT work anymore and it sends a 500 error now. Also, all of my MSSQL databases aren't working with my .NET scripts anymore. Turns out I had to change some code from "SELECT * FROM table_name" to "SELECT * FROM db_owner.table_name" ... that took forever to figure out and still not sure why all of the sudden I had to phrase it that way after this. Softlayer finally got php and .NET working again by messing with app pools and permissions, stuff I'm just not too comfortable messing with. I had to recreate some database users and stuff to get them working again.
As you can see, this one little expiration issue caused a massive issue with my server. Now, 3 weeks later, I got to change an FTP user's password and plesk and what happens? Immediately the server starts throwing a 500.19 server error for ANY file being requested: .net, html, image, whatever. Softlayer and I work on it for THREE hours while our hospital's website is down until we find out there's an issue with the web.config file's permissions. How the heck did changing an FTP user's password effect this? It makes no sense.
Softlayer claims the expiration had nothing to do with the first problem, but I have no idea why these things would occur at the same time and have nothing to do with each other. Also, softlayer claims the changing of the FTP user's password didn't have anything to do with the web.config's file permission being changed. Again, it seems like this is all tied to the first expiration issue corrupting softlayer somehow.
I just hope plesk sees this post and takes it serious because this was an absolutely terrible experience and made me, the webmaster, look really bad at my job.
