Data Centre Technicians / Support
May 2, 2008
After reading so many "negative" points or points which cause pain to dedicated server owners, I think it is important to focus on any "GOOD" resolutions and responses one gets from DC technical staff .... so, here goes our personal experience with the staff over at GNAX (Tranxact Global).
Server Down (panic sets in as client calls): 01:55 PM
Tried Avocent - power cycles - server still down: 01:57 PM
On the Phone to GNAX (Ed): 02:05 PM (asked to raise ticket, whilst he looks)
Ticket raised: 02:11PM
Acknowledgment (Ryan): 02:18PM
Resolution: 02:19 PM (failed Power Supply)
I was later to find out the PSU was actually replaced with a brand-new one on the server! My client was happy, and so was I!
I think if all DC's offered a comparable concern for their clients (who actually PAY them for the service), we'd have a reputable industry out there!
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Jun 10, 2008
Now I have a IP address and I want to know which data centre the IP belongs to.
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Mar 25, 2009
with the unfortunate loss of the last few months there's a need for reviews of hosts given that many things can happen, good hosts turn to bad and fortunately vice versa (ie the positive LeaseWeb thread that was posted the other day in Dedicated, I believe. It's great to hear those stories.)
So, for anyone expecting anything other than the standard 'FastHosting have been great for me' tale, then prepare to be disappointed. This is, as of today, a 1 month review for a London based 2x c2quad 2.00ghz VPS, with 1.5gb SLM RAM, 50gb HDD, 1.5tb transfer at $46/mo. Whilst this isn't my first host, it's my first VPS.
Background - I originally hosted my site on a server owned by the main admin of a site I moderated, free space for doing the work. I decided I wanted to put up a fair chunk of multimedia work, and it was 2001 so I moved to an unmanaged box at managed.com (now EV1 I believe?) Bad mistake. I wasn't ready for that kind of freedom, and a few months later I moved over to a small reseller account with cPanel which I got used to easily enough (having used Plesk originally on the 1st box). Against, constraints meant I decided to move my personal site to DreamHost whilst I resold the reseller space to pay for my overall costs. The DreamHost space simply isn't of high enough quality to resell, and the $200 a year I was paying felt like a decent enough deal as I was lucky enough to not suffer huge amounts.
Roll on to 09, my DH site is acting poorly over the space of a few weeks, users are moaning and my Reseller deal hasn't improved since I took it out about 4 years ago. I browsed WHM for a few days to find 'the right host' and nearly settled on one.. I did more research and found out whilst they offered what seemed a good service in general, a few major problems occurred late last year and I simply couldn't put my money down based on that. I shant name them as I'm sure it was a one-off, and unfair for someone who is not a customer to tarnish their reputation.
FH seemed to combine the specs I wanted, I was very eager to move hosting to the UK where virtually all my users are, and see if geographical location was all it cracked up to be. It works in online gaming afterall. Whilst I could beat the promises of space elsewhere, the enthusiasm that FH customers posted with convinced me that if I had a problem, these guys would sort it.
I had a bit of confusion with their signup process (it looks as if you can register a domain with them, but then it denies you when you try. This might be different now.) so I passed on a ticket enquiring about the process, as live chat was down due to the time (about 11pm GMT). A few minutes later I had a reply telling me what I needed to do, and an apology for the confusion. Whilst I can understand tech support being 24/7, I was pleasantly surprised that the sales team were still around to respond to requests.
I signed up and went to bed, hoping to hear something in the morning as they didn't make promises about set up times when using vouchers. This was fine. I woke up about 7am, to find emails in my inbox at around 4am welcoming me to the service and providing me with all the URLs I needed. I logged in to Virtuozzo, everything looked good and it was nice to see the overall panel for the first time. Now to log into WHM for the first time.. access denied. Argh! It was late when I did signup and I must've typed something incorrect into the root password field.. so amateur! I fired off an apology to tech support around midday hoping they could reset. They verified my details, escalated it to a senior (fantastic! I was kinda expecting a phone call at this point to prove I wasn't a scammer! I'm glad they take security seriously) and then I had my password reset within the space of about 30 minutes or so.
WHM VPS was a real eye opener, on a reseller box it's pretty limited, but on a VPS it's such a fantastic tool as you really feel like you're in control over the operating system without the complexity of command line if you're not used to setting things up.
Ping rates from Cardiff to London have been constantly good (<30ms, and pingdom's London box gives me between 2 and 5ms on the IP), and I'm able to pretty much max out my 10mbit port on my 20mbit Cable line. Perfect. With Dreamhost I was getting maybe 200k/sec, and my reseller account (who were hosted at LiquidWeb) I got about 350-400 at most. Ping rates for both were 100-200ms.
I installed my Invision PowerBoard, which has 3,500 members, 400k posts, about 60 users online and about 3gb or so in content minus any mp3/video links I uploaded separately.
The thing *SNAPS*. I've rarely seen anyones forum load so smoothly, let alone mine.
During the issues at DH, I was used to seeing page gen times of 15secs, this whole month I've barely seen it over 0.05 to 0.08.
Early on, I had a few problems.. I wasn't getting any joy with the nameservers resolving and I had noticed syslogd was down, and I couldn't bring it back up. I fired off a support ticket covering both elements at approximately 12pm GMT (so between 4am and 7am US, depending on the coast). I wasn't expecting this issue to be resolved for a few hours. By 12.30GMT I hadn't had just an email confirming received, I'd had 5. Each email told me who was dealing with the issues (it'd been passed to 2 engineers, 1 for each element) and they kept me informed as to what was going on. The 5th email confirmed my nameservers were running fine and that syslogd was back up and running. I was truly impressed. The only other ticket I've logged has been to sort out the RDNS entries, which I believe cannot be dealt with by myself anyway.
I filled in a questionnaire, because I was truly pleased with the way every query I had asked, regardless of how trivial. I don't know if it's a particular 'gimmick' of the ticket system they used, but the lowest I could flag my tickets was 'Important'. Even that speaks volumes to me. When I filled the questionnaire in, I thought it would be nice to mention by name each person who had helped me. I think I put about 10 names down in total. It's tricky to describe, because my server doesn't cost much in comparison to others, but I feel like my query is critical to their upkeep, and I get treated as if it's a local mom-n-pop store.
Over the last few weeks, I've read a lot of WHM threads, particularly the VPS section to see how other peoples experiences are, not just with my host but in general. A lot of the time people are told that they can't expect the specs they want in their budget, or that VPS can be a tricky scale up to reseller, even when managed. There's a lot of negativity in places, and that's a shame because it means that a lot of customers haven't had the experiences that I have.
Because there has to be some criticism, because the world is not perfect.. I'd just say as polite, speedy and effective the responses to my tickets have been.. they lacked letting me know what they did to fix any problems. I'm still a bit wet behind the ears, and whilst I don't mind playing with options, am wary of breaking things.. I'd like to know 'is this something I should've known how to do, and if so.. how'. But that's not their job, their job is to keep my box running and that's the priority.
It's a clear 5/5 from me, I think that much is obvious. I paid my 2nd months hosting last night despite money being tough... I'm happier with my (small, but important to me) customers and my own site on quality hardware with excellent support and having to eat cheap supermarket noodles for a few weeks, than eat well and suffer the consequences of the $5 'unlimited' hosts out there.
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Jul 17, 2007
I have been playing with the idea now for a while to create a site that will list all the data centres (datacenters for you americans) in the world.
Obviously I do not have the definitive list, so it would be community based, where users can add DC's and reviews can be written for it...
So....
1. Is there a website doing this already?
2. Would it be used...?
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Jun 16, 2008
Just wanted to get everyone's ideas on something. The web development company I work for is actively seeking business throughout the world. All of our applications are currently hosted on servers in the north west UK and London.
It may work out that we pickup some business in South America, South Africa and Asia.
A lot of people in our company are saying that it will need to be hosted near to our clients for speed issues as if we try and host the websites and backend applications from the UK they will be too slow. Surely the point of the internet is that it doesnt matter where the stuff is hosted. Colleagues are saying that if we are trying to administer servers on the other side of the world the poor connections will mean we will struglle.
In some of the countries the infrastructure must be pretty advanced. London has huge POP on the net and surely this will help.
Hosting stuff for clients based in South America isnt too bad as I think we would be ok hosting stuff in America. Likewise I'm sure there are similarly developed countries in Asia will be able to provide hosting. Not too sure about South Africa.
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Oct 11, 2009
Is London Hosting Centre in any way connected to BlueSquare 1, 2 or 3 in connection terms, for example with BlueSquare went down would London Hosting Centre still be up etc...
As I am wanting to setup a backup site.
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Mar 13, 2008
Has anybody heard of Flash Support and Real AudioVideo Support? MMHosting.com offers this kind of support and I wonder if it's effective?
What do you think of it?
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Jul 12, 2008
I'm undecided between an upcoming dedicated hosting server and am moving between Softlayer and ThePlanet. My decision partly comes down to support.
I've read many reviews on WHT about both companies, but not necessarily comparing them from people who have experienced both.
So my questions (keep in mind this is my first dedicated. I have used VPS in the past with good support) Which offers MORE support (not better) - I'm curious which company might consider my support questions as "part of the default service package" or "need additional service plan for that" More detailed support - my usual experience with support is support staff assume you already know a high level so it may take going forward and back 5 times via email to get a full answer
Overall support satisfaction - any other comments
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Nov 23, 2008
I've been with Hivelocity for 2 years. Occasionally we have problems, but it works. Their support staff can do very simple things relatively fast, however if you have some serious problems, e.g. failed disk and need to be replaced and do restoration from backup, it will be hell!
They will NOT do what asked in Reload Request, delayed answer to chat, no answer to tickets for many hours.
So far I'm very disappointed of Hivelocity support.
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Sep 8, 2007
I have 100+ sites on this hard drive, and one site in particular that meant the world to me.
My host sent the drive to Gillware first, but they failed saying that the file system was so severely damaged that they could not recover anything.
Then shortly after, my host sent it to DriveSavers, a very well-known company, but they also FAILED.
I'm extremely depressed because of this. Please don't post if you're going to say "make sure you do backups next time" because I've heard it 504329504395 times now, and while I do realize my mistake, saying that does NOT help me.
I am willing to spend ALOT to get my sites back. I still have hope. Are there any other companies out there BETTER than DriveSavers? Assuming that you'd still have hope even after two companies failed, where you would you go or what would you do?
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Feb 20, 2007
How can I find the data transfer rate on the server. I have done ifconfig -a , it
display the amout of data has been received and transfered. I want to see the live data transfer date. Can I able to check it?
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Aug 28, 2007
My host just recently sent the hard drive with my sites to a data recovery company called Gillware. Website is [url]- but they failed and gave the following reason:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gillware
Unfortunately, your file system was so severely damaged that no data can be
recovered. We will make arrangements to return your drive via UPS. Sorry
we could not help you further.
Gillware Inc.
Do you guys think there's still hope?
The hard drive is now being shipped to a more well known company, Drive Savers - [url]and I'm guessing that this is the last hope, because the more the drive gets tampered with, the more chance of permanent data loss.
So yeah.. I was just wondering what you think? If the file system is so severely damaged, do you think it STILL can be recovered?
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Nov 7, 2008
Do you know any vps that support vpn ?
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Aug 18, 2007
How much support should I expect/look for?
If I were to purchase a VPS without cPanel ( or any other panel), what kind supports should I expect from my host?
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Jun 1, 2007
how common is it in the VPS industry to do custom installs/configurations/updates on request. For example, I don't know how to configure qmail and I will want someone to do this for me. Does this kind of service exist? Is it a standard to be expected or is it fee-based thing?
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Aug 4, 2006
Everytime I go to hostgators live support my firefox crashes.
This usually happens before I initiate the chat or after.
Does anyone else have this problem?
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Nov 25, 2008
How many % of hosts have Zip support in PHP?
If you (the replyer) are a web host, tell me if you are supporting. (yes/no)
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Oct 27, 2008
IMAP Support
Im used DirectAdmin on my primary linux server, i need to IMAP support in php.ini for resolve my ticket import system in "WHMCS" But i dont know how can enable it on DirectAdmin.
Can you help me?
__________________
Need More Power?!PersianWhois.Com
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Sep 29, 2009
Do you personaly think that some companys don't answer right on support tickets or don't think the right way, (like dont care) when answering a support ticket in there billing system or support system then with the client comes on a forum such as WHT and posts what happens the provider comes and helps the client much more then he would of or had in the support tickets. I see many people come on wht and bring there problems they have with there provide, Im not saying this is a bad thing to do im just trying to show every else how i see it as that the hosts don;t care about there clients but when something goes public the hosting provider trys more to fix it...
Could it be that he or she dsnt want to lose customers thats the way i think it.
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Jul 31, 2008
GeekStorage's support is awesome. They usually answer within 10 minutes and so far (only been with them for 2 weeks!) they have solved every issue perfectly.
The quality of their support and their attention to detail is the best I have seen in the past 5 years.
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May 19, 2009
I've got give LW some props.
I was at a crossroads on my server running php 4x and needed to be able to run 5 and allow the sites using 4 to still run it. I read about how to do it but would of totally screwed it up.
LW support came to the rescue, installed both the 4 and 5 and now I can select the php version to run from the accounts cpanel.
Took a while to work through it but it's up and running and I'm a happy camper.
That's why I've had my server with them going on 3 years now.
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Jun 1, 2009
I want to buy a hosting service with following feature
1 SSH
2 SSL
3 Rsync
4 SVN
5 Wordpress, Drupal support ( plan to run multiple wordpress and drupal site in this hosting plan)
6 multiple domain name support in one hosting plan
7 a lot of bandwith
8 great customer support, and low down time
I do some research and have a chat with justhost.com and they seem to support everything i need however, after reading some review seem like they try to force you to update to dedicate server when your bandwidth is up.
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Mar 26, 2009
We are a web company that currently has a WHM/cPanel server that we manage ourselves. However, we are looking for a service that will be on call for us 24/7 in case something were to go amiss and our technical team was not available to restart services, restart the server or do whatever technical troubleshooting was required to get things back up and running quickly.
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Nov 25, 2006
Fantastico applications are offered almost everywhere, but so far I've only found one web host that dares to provide Fantastico support.
Can anyone here recommend any web hosts that do provide support for the 3rd party applications available through Fantastico's installer?
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