So. Very. Pissed.

I'm going to go out on a limb here....

Some more background - I work with enterprise software - in an environment supporting between 2,000 and 150,000 users. I KNOW things go wrong.

I've seen SAN - which isn't supposed to fail - ever - fail.

I've seen a tiny desktop app take down over 100 servers, databases, and backups.

I've seen a lightning strike destroy a power substation and take down an entire building with a generator because the local grid got fried.

Every host - every system - has some single point of failure. Even co-located data centers with multiple separate hooks into the backbone can - rarely - go down.

That said - I actually got a call from the owner of the company today. We talked and he explained what happened. My biggest instinct in these situation is "How will it be prevented in the future?" and before I even asked that he had talked through that point.

Shit happens.
 


My experience is that I signed up with the papa vps package. It was low-cost but seemed to provide plenty of good features like ram. On one domain I installed prosper202 for redirects. The first thing I noticed was my redirects were slow and sluggish but I was thinking it was my lame-ass connection with TWC.

Next I setup a new installation of wordpress and wptweetbomb. Before even getting any traffic to the site it dies completely and was un-responsive. i was told that 'some program the site runs on is consuming too many resources'. now the reason i went with the papa vps was because it offered more resources and i was barely using any! how the hell could i kill it already!? This was a new install and I hadn't even started tweeting or running heavy cron jobs.

i'm still with them but i honestly don't trust that my sites are up 100%. i certainly can't recommend them with confidence and will probably go somewhere else. after reading this thread and the "if you can find a better host buy it" response i may as well shop around.

Also, one thing I did notice was my server IP resolves to turnkeyinternet. net rather than volsh. is volsh just a reseller for a larger host???
 
S M W said:
My experience is that I signed up with the papa vps package. It was low-cost but seemed to provide plenty of good features like ram. On one domain I installed prosper202 for redirects. The first thing I noticed was my redirects were slow and sluggish but I was thinking it was my lame-ass connection with TWC.

Next I setup a new installation of wordpress and wptweetbomb. Before even getting any traffic to the site it dies completely and was un-responsive. i was told that 'some program the site runs on is consuming too many resources'. now the reason i went with the papa vps was because it offered more resources and i was barely using any! how the hell could i kill it already!? This was a new install and I hadn't even started tweeting or running heavy cron jobs.

i'm still with them but i honestly don't trust that my sites are up 100%. i certainly can't recommend them with confidence and will probably go somewhere else. after reading this thread and the "if you can find a better host buy it" response i may as well shop around.

Also, one thing I did notice was my server IP resolves to turnkeyinternet. net rather than volsh. is volsh just a reseller for a larger host???
Click to expand...

TurnKey Internet is one of the data centers that we use, that's why it resolves like that. We lease the dedicated servers from them.

Now, my question is, if you were so dissatisfied right from the get-go, why didn't you request a refund?

As for WP Tweet Bomb causing your VPS to lag, I personally use WP Tweet Bomb and others use WP Tweet Bomb on the servers without a hitch. While we want to help you, we do need some form of communication other than the way that you chose to go about this.

If you want to go to another web hosting provider, that is solely your discretion. The responses from TLWrite didn't go unseen and I have dealt with that accordingly, but this is not the place nor the time to talk about him as far as I'm concerned.

You can hit me up on live chat, phone, via ticket, the client area, or aim if you wish. I'm not going to sit here and hold a gun to your head to force you into staying with us. That is completely your choice and I wish you the best either way.
 
GetYourWriter said:
TurnKey Internet is one of the data centers that we use, that's why it resolves like that. We lease the dedicated servers from them.

Now, my question is, if you were so dissatisfied right from the get-go, why didn't you request a refund?

As for WP Tweet Bomb causing your VPS to lag, I personally use WP Tweet Bomb and others use WP Tweet Bomb on the servers without a hitch. While we want to help you, we do need some form of communication other than the way that you chose to go about this.

If you want to go to another web hosting provider, that is solely your discretion. The responses from TLWrite didn't go unseen and I have dealt with that accordingly, but this is not the place nor the time to talk about him as far as I'm concerned.

You can hit me up on live chat, phone, via ticket, the client area, or aim if you wish. I'm not going to sit here and hold a gun to your head to force you into staying with us. That is completely your choice and I wish you the best either way.
Click to expand...

-rep this stupid ass.
 
Well Volsh is a fishy Valhgaina in my book now...

I am Still looking for a two cheapo win. hosting servers (VPS...) with Remote Desktop Access - don't care about bandwidth as it is just for testing out some .net apps.

Both servers have the following min. requirements:
* NT server XP 5.1 (windows server 2005 and up)
* IIS 5
*Remote Desktop Access
* MS SQL Server - 2000

......... I figured as the competition is watching valhgina getting it's well deserved fucking I can do my part and do some fucking of my own.. so you a kick-ass hosting provider hook me up!
 
GetYourWriter said:
You can hit me up on live chat, phone, via ticket, the client area, or aim if you wish. I'm not going to sit here and hold a gun to your head to force you into staying with us. That is completely your choice and I wish you the best either way.
Click to expand...

pm sent.
 
TLWrite said:
Going forward, I will be glad to contend with clients comments via our ticket system or our live chat system. If you have any comments, questions or concerns feel free to contact us via those methods as we will no longer be addressing this thread.
Click to expand...

Yikes I would love to submit a ticket but in addition to my dedicated server being inaccessible so is your website. My server WAS up earlier today on the 5 occasions I checked it. When I went to go modify some landing pages is when I noticed my stuff is down again. *yikes*

haha I should just blame all my horrible conversion rates on this issue not my shitty creatives.
 
HOLY FUCKING SHIT. I am also a forgiving person but this support session basically is like them begging me to call up and switch hosts. I really cannot believe this is what I got from a 'Talk to Online Support'. Mind you I HAVE used this in the past and had great success and thought the users were extremely knowledgeable but this is just stupidity to the extreme.

Forgive the imgshack image...my server is down not many other places to host lol.

 
Lucid said:
HOLY FUCKING SHIT. I am also a forgiving person but this support session basically is like them begging me to call up and switch hosts. I really cannot believe this is what I got from a 'Talk to Online Support'. Mind you I HAVE used this in the past and had great success and thought the users were extremely knowledgeable but this is just stupidity to the extreme.

Forgive the imgshack image...my server is down not many other places to host lol.

2whm61h.jpg
Click to expand...

Copied to tinypic.

All I can say is... OWWWWWW

I'm glad none of my private clients ever had to have that kind of conversation with me.

I would have kept her off the computer, that hurts more than not responding.
 
Update for whomever cares. James replied back to me approximately 1:41am, about 2 hours after I had went to submit a trouble ticket. I was already sleeping (attempting to). This morning when I got up everything was functioning again as it should be. James apologized for the service etc.

Probably the most frustrating support ticket I have ever submitted. The only thing keeping me remotely calm is that I still have my old host up hosting most of my domains and basically have a single domain hosting a few FB ads that I was in the process of reworking so most of them were paused yesterday as I was submitting new lps and ads. Still coulda cost me a huge chuck of change. Luckily I was able to get into ftp this morning and change the site before FB got to review/cancela ll my ads lol.
 
wow. Buckets of fail. I guess it just goes to prove that the old axiom

Fast. Cheap. Reliable. Pick any Two.

Is still VERY true.

Now just to show some contrast... here is how the big boys apologize. The following apology was a response to a 5 minute power outage that resulted for most customers with a downtime of 5-10 minutes and a very small number customers with downtimes up to 2 hours because of equipment hard bootups and DNS issues.... remember.. 10 minutes (for most). NOT 24 fucking hours:

From Rackspace:

Although the power outage was very brief (5 minutes), it forced a hard re-boot to occur on a portion of our cloud infrastructure. As our engineers worked to bring hardware back online, we experienced several unforeseen hardware failures. Further complicating our recovery effort, the incident also created internal DNS issues, which caused additional delays. With that said, the vast majority of cloud customers affected by this outage had service restored within one hour's time (many in as little as five minutes); however, depending upon the service, a few customers experienced service interruptions for up to two hours.

Going forward, Rackspace is reviewing its policies for maintenance notifications, and reviewing procedures and systems to ensure quick resumption of service in case of events like the one this week.

Here is how we plan to deal with it:

• We have invested massively in the DFW facility to ensure it delivers at a level you expect from Rackspace – despite last night, we feel very good about our plan and have high confidence in the DFW facility – clearly we have to prove it.

• We are reviewing our maintenance notifications – we typically do not share information on expected non-impacting events, but clearly we need to ensure we calibrate these events and are fully transparent.

• We are reviewing our procedures and systems for quickly resuming cloud operations when an unexpected event like this occurs – unexpected events will happen, our job is to minimize their impacts.

We live by high standards and clearly have not lived up to them. We welcome any feedback… We have work to do to earn back your trust. We will not rest until we have.

Thank you, Emil Sayegh, General Manager, The Rackspace Cloud



Gee anyone want to guess why I use places like rackspace and single hop for my hosting? I guess if you are still making nickels instead of dollars budget hosting is the way to go... but otherwise WTF are you thinking? These Volsh guys are total clowns... that being said... its half your fault for being so cheap when it comes to your bread and fucking butter. If you built houses would you use the worlds cheapest hammer? If you were a chef... would you buy cheap knives? You work on the fucking internet. Buy decent hosting. Duh.
 
apexSEORM said:
wow. Buckets of fail. I guess it just goes to prove that the old axiom

Fast. Cheap. Reliable. Pick any Two.

Is still VERY true.

Now just to show some contrast... here is how the big boys apologize. The following apology was a response to a 5 minute power outage that resulted for most customers with a downtime of 5-10 minutes and a very small number customers with downtimes up to 2 hours because of equipment hard bootups and DNS issues.... remember.. 10 minutes (for most). NOT 24 fucking hours:

From Rackspace:
...
Click to expand...

While it is a semi-canned response, I wouldn't doubt it, they're one of the most expensive host out there (overpriced in a way, as I'd sooner go with softlayer or liquidweb with the same quality of service but not nearly as expensive as rackspace).

I guess in contrast Knownhost , a somewhat reasonable VPS provider I used to host with, didn't even send out an email when they had an issue that knocked out least six of their nodes. Instead any ticket was responded to with a link to a forum thread which explained what was going on (sort of) and the progress of bringing back up the nodes which took a few hours.

When people asked for a reason they said that one of their power strips was tripped and it was inspected for damaged and placed back on the rack when it seemed fine. But normally when something like a power strip is tripping it means they're overselling the power usage on a particular rack since you normally pay by the amp and most of the time trying to shove more than 20 AMPs of racks into a single unit tends to trip the circuit breakers.

But despite all that, even a cheap VPS/Dedi provider was more professional than this.

I guess Volsh wouldn't have failed so hard if he just simply told his clients exactly what he was, just a guy who has a dedi leased and is making VPSes off of it. Least then the expectations wouldn't be so high compared to what he set forth.

What separates the pros from the rest, is not preventing problems, but how you handle your shit when shit hits the fan. I guess the point is, its not always about how much you spend on a host. Kinda like when I moved to wholesaleinternet, they got cheap and quality down, but not exactly speed (2 of the 3)
 
I agree with Keith there...in business, business etiquette is very important. If you have made a mistake then accept it....soft skills are a great asset and they can pull you away from any problems.
 
I think too often hosts don't realize that for MANY of us access to 24 hour a day support is critical.

I'm not very technical and in the 2 years I've had a ~$500/month dedicated server THEY'VE fucked up exactly 0 times. I've never been down by anything that I haven't directly caused for more than 5 minutes.

HOWEVER I have screwed things up probably 10 times by now, and it's extremely refreshing to know that whether I call in at 3pm or 3am I'm going to talk to an american US based techy human being who's always been nothing but extremely courteous and rapidly fixed my problems.

This obviously isn't cheap, and I'm paying a premium for it, however for this sole reason I have no plans on moving. I truly can't afford to, it's like paying an additional couple hundred bucks a month for a bulletproof outsourced IT guy.

Obviously this isn't needed for everyone, many of you here would laugh at what to me is something that I can't fix and need help for and you would never want to pay a premium for it. I just think that more thought should go into hosting 'reviews' - webhostingtalk is full of tech this and tech that however one segment I rarely see represented on there is the business owner with no tech staff who is going to lose a lot if hosting goes down.

Just food for thought on a general level.
 
My first ever post here - just to agree with the general sentiment that the "customer service" shown here was outright amazing...

I tend to stick to one fairly small host that offers nothing amazing, just damn good techy support.

"no-ones holding a gun to your head" to remain a customer? That's just bizarre! Seriously dude, outsource your PR.



AC
 
AlanCarr said:
My first ever post here - just to agree with the general sentiment that the "customer service" shown here was outright amazing...
Click to expand...

AlanCarr said:
"no-ones holding a gun to your head" to remain a customer? That's just bizarre! Seriously dude, outsource your PR.
Click to expand...

You answered why that's bizarre to you, with your opening sentence. Welcome to WF!

Just a sidenote because kbless mentioned softlayer, they're still trying to bill me 3 months after I left - fuck softlayer (they don't even deserve correct caps on their name).
 
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