HI,

I have been a SM/TP customer for about 1 year and in the last 2-3 months I have had nothing but terrible responses on support until it gets pushed to more senior techs. 6 months ago my ticket was usually resolved within 6 hours which IMO was good but now I have trouble with getting a first reply within 8 hours. I also notice they often will tell you what's wrong and then not fix it. And I have to go in and say well what can I do to fix it? They reply another 5-6 hours later with either what to do or they have already fixed it and delay the ticket resolution another few hours. Lately my worst experience has been with virtuozzo. cPanel will just not work on them so I end up opening quite a few tickets. Each time some one fixes one thing another breaks.

I know allot of you will say call to speed up the ticket but if I have 5-6 tickets open I don't want to be calling 5-10 times a day. I am not looking for a rushed response or fix but when I'm waiting to set-up a VPS for a customer <10 hours would be nice. I am just wondering why have the support reply time and quality diminished over the past 3-4 months and is anything being done to improve support?

Jeff

Nothing wrong with support here. They usually jump right on the problem before I know there is a problem. If I submit a ticket, they let me know they're working on it and then e-mail me with a solution. Sometimes they call. When I call, they sometimes fix me up right over the phone. Not that we ever have any major problems though.

Maybe they were very busy when you sent in your ticket(s).

expansion, getting readyfor dc5 im guessing

think i read somewhere a few weeks ago that there hiring loads of staff ready fo the new dc? or did i just dream that?

Please remember that Virtuozzo is still a fairly new product for us. We are still trying to hammer out the issues and get that process streamlined.

Once we have the majority of the big problems documented, it will be easier and faster for our techs to resolve. We do test software packages before releasing them, however, it's very hard to catch all problems without exposing it to real world situations. If you have any specific ticket numbers, I would be more then happy to get the proper attention to the tickets for you. Just shoot me a PM with the information. Thanks.

Well, Since I've been here its been kinda so/so with support. The first ticket I opened was responded and resolved within an hour. Then it went down and it was slow. Then it started to go up again. Then down, then we had a few issues with accounting and being double charged and they said that we dont owe anymoney so were all set and i asked them are you sure? they said yes. That was last week and they said it would be fixed it was a problem with the accouting software and they had somone in fixing it. Then a week later it stil wasnt resolved so i called up today and they told me i owed them money and i told them i didnt even to look atthe ticket. but they insisted i did so i slamed the phone down and i contacted Live Chat and then i called up to talk to a manager. But that was resolved. I'm just waiting for them to remove the account balance. So its been up and down. Hopefully we can steady out and have excelent support . Most of the people are nice and helpfull then theres the ones that go for a day or more with no response.

I am glad that this is getting resolved for you. Please send me a PM if you need additional assistance.

I've been with SM for about a year and a half now - and I have to say that for awhile, about six months ago, tech support seemed to be slower and less helpful, but not to the point where it was worth switching providers.

Over the past couple of months, though, I've noticed that support is better than it was when I first signed up (of course, as I write this I have a ticket open, but I have every confidence it'll be at least responded to soon).

Sometimes a company will experience growing pains a little when expanding services, opening a new DC, etc. SM is no different. I think they're doing a bang-up job mitigating downtime and fighting against an ever-increasing number of worms and DOS attacks.

And I'm the first to complain when something goes wrong, so that's high praise coming from me.

Same here..

Been customer for over 2 years, but support now is awful, and they constantly push for paying "admin time" instead of guiding or helping.

I have been ticketing around for 2 weeks and they still can't aid me in setting up Cpanel under Virtuozzo.

> Been customer for over 2 years, but support now is awful, and they constantly push for paying "admin time" instead of guiding or helping.

I don't think configuring your software typically falls under a datacenter's role. There are exceptions, as clearly here TP is selling Virtuozzo and they need to provide a working frame work. But beyond that? I don't know. Most datacenters won't do anything beyond rebooting your server unless you're ready to pay for their technicians salary, and those datacenters are still far more expensive.

Since I posted above, and someone just replied to this, I'll add here that in April 2005 I switched from the Planet/Server Matrix to LiquidWeb and haven't looked back. At the time The Planet was down or unreachable more than they were up, and support was completely ignoring me.

When I left I noticed that a lot of sales posted on WebHostingTalk were titled things like "ThePlanet Refugees Welcome Here" or "Leaving The Planet? Come here!" It was pretty pandemic.

I hope they've gotten their stuff together since then.

I have been with the planet a year and support seems pretty constant to me, although I don't use it very much. I rarely ever need to because my servers have 99.9% up time.

Jough's original complaint was 1 1/2 year back. Lots have changed since then (for better or worse). I don't think it is fair if any of us to resurrect an old thread like this that deals with a complaint

I agree. Times have changed. We're stricter on what we will and won't do for you. We don't run the server for you (installing apps, setting up accounts, performing maintenance, etc) unless its part of your service plan or unless you agree to pay an administrative fee.

Why are we stricter now? It's made us much faster in our response times more efficient when dealing with more serious issues like outages. I recall when I started here that there was a time or two when we in support were all knee deep in *name of weird custom app here* and couldn't divert resources to incoming outages and reboot requests, things which took higher priority. I don't look back on those days fondly.

Doing things like creating our Professional Services group to handle longer and more involved tasks and getting tougher on charging for system administrative tasks (which are ultimately your responsibility as system administrators in the absence of a management plan purchased from us) have made overall support more focused and a whole a lot faster. We're still more than happy to help you install cPanel on your Virtuozzo VM, but you need to be prepared to pay for it. I'm glad we made these changes.

I totally agree with you there Kev. Its your server (sh*t), so deal with it yourself. If you need help running your server, pay for the appropriate services.

But obviously if its hardware related, then I would appreciate it if the ticket was taken care of ASAP.

A little side question, whens the serial console thing going to be ready?

I didn't have a problem with strictness. I had a problem with my server being down for four days straight and support not responding to me. Then it was up for a few hours, then down again.

The month I switched my box was down or inaccessible more than it was up.

But I do hope things have changed. You guys didn't go under so I expect that it was just a speed bump of a few months of bad time.

Just out of curiousity (and I've not read every word up to this point but..) did you call them to find out what was going on?

We are having the same bad experience with support.

Two days ago one of our servers got locked and we have asked to reboot it. Support told us that the reason of lockdown was Power Supply and they have changed the chassis.

However right after this swap server become instable like hell. It is reboot on itself, locks and so on from 5 to 7 times per day! Server has almost no load.

Wonder what support is telling us? You need to provide proofs that these issues caused by Hardware! Great answer!

We NEVER got the same attitude from EV1 for example. They are all into solving your issue. TP/SM support are not.

Seems like TP/EV1 union hasn't produced any results yet...

Thats some bad experiences right there. So we need to provide evidence that somethings wrong with the hardware? Where did that come from? Do they expect us to run Memtest or Prime on it to verify its a stable/working system?

Sultanhost, I wouldn't expect a response like that unless they strongly thought that your crashes were not hardware related. Please PM me your ticket number, and I'll talk to them.

After whole set of tests was performed server got RAM replacement and it at least make the server operational.

I'm never go rude, however as some cases really should get more priority than others, it is possible that previous message sounds little offensive.

If problems are software/administration related - TP/SM should act less "serious", without guaranteed response time.

But on the cases when Hardware impacted (or Outage experienced) everything should be done to resolve the situation as soon as possible. Remember, this is the area we cannot do on our end - you have control over servers.

P.S. We got our situation resolved when B.Clark paid attention to our ticket. This guy was with us till the successfull resolution and it was after original response has been posted. This kind of support looks much more promising. Thank you, Clark!

His attitude ten times better than from guys "mchandler", "mphillips" and "fmerrill" which just spoils each other's work... Fortunately we have opened Outage Ticket which Clark worked on!

P.P.S. Original ticket number is 1274589PLNT
If you wish to comment anything, Kevin, PM me.