Reseller Story (good ending)

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Posted by fuzzyping, 04-19-2003, 07:44 AM
Well, I originally signed up with CyberWorldHost.com as a Linux reseller. I was lucky in that I got the "last account on the server". Well, from the very beginning, it was obvious the system was badly misconfigured. Any time a new account was added, the slave DNS never got added. Other issues included: constant reboots, badly unpatched software, unexplained outages, etc. Hindsight, this was a Microsoft-focused business... likely trying to hitch onto the "Linux bandwagon". It became obvious they were in over their head when news surfaced that they were selling their Linux assets to NetHost-us.com. Seeing as NetHost was a Linux-focused hoster, I expected this would mean good things for me and my clients. Alas, this was not the case. So far as I can tell, the only thing that changed was the owner. The server stayed the same... no noticable updates were performed, reboots, etc. Service tickets were often ignored for hours. When tickets were finally acted upon, no explanations were forthcoming. Then the camel's back broke. The final straw came this Thursday evening. Around 4:30pm ET, I noticed that the server, although pingable, no longer properly responded to services. SSH would respond a prompt, but would quickly terminate the authentication. HTTP would timeout. Mail would timeout. Something was amiss. I opened a ticket immediately, providing a detailed explanation of the situation. An hour passed. Two. Four. Night came. Night passed. By 8am the next morning, I was ringing the death toll. I was freaking out. All day, phone calls to their office went to voicemail. This was bad. Thanks to WHT's forums, I received a glut of new hosting offers. After reviewing them all, speaking with many of their reps personally (either via IM or PM), I settled upon CW3 (http://home.cyberweb3.net/). Joana was very helpful and while the deal was a couple dollars more than my previous one, I felt comfortable that their monitoring and support systems were superior to anyone else. By midnight last night, thanks to some DNS wrangling on my part, all of my accounts had been successfully migrated to CW3's server. Everything worked as expected, and their server... *gasp*... was actually patched up-to-date. Their default WHM news page is an excellent source of information on system updates/errata/etc. Mind you, not everything was perfect. I did have a handful of tickets that were opened. Turns out all of them were caused by my prior experience... everything was finally configured correctly, so I wasn't familiar with particular aspects of the setup. Nevertheless, all the tickets were acknowledged, updated and FIXED within minutes (after-hours, no less!). Needless to say, I'm very satisfied. :-D See, I told you it was a happy ending. -J. Last edited by fuzzyping; 04-19-2003 at 09:29 AM.
Posted by Aussie Bob, 04-19-2003, 09:10 AM
Happy endings are good.
Posted by inteltechs, 04-19-2003, 09:23 AM
good for you
Posted by DarktidesNET, 04-19-2003, 10:11 AM
Sorry abuot your misfortunes. Best of luck with the new provider.
Posted by Joana, 04-19-2003, 10:34 AM
Thank you fuzzyping for the nice remarks.. Hopefully your stay with us will be a long and pleasant one
Posted by petertdavis, 04-19-2003, 02:14 PM
I like the positive spin on a story we've seen so many times here.
Posted by Hostorb, 04-19-2003, 02:42 PM
That sure was a nail biting experience. Glad it worked out well for you in the end.
Posted by zarth, 05-12-2003, 09:09 AM
I can give you an update on http://www.nethost-us.com Unfortunately I am still with them. I too signed up with cyberworldhosts.com and actually my server was operating fine, hardly any issues and cyberworld were reasonable in response times. BUT NETHOST, They take several days to respond to any help ticket. I had a Help ticket rated "URGENT" subject "Server Down" and it went unanswered for 3 days. Then when they answer they don't tell you anything. Atleast if they explained what they were doing you could go halfway to fault find the problem, but they hide behind secrecy. Unfortunately I have to wait a week or so for my new server to come online, but if I get it ready any sooner, I'm outta there!
Posted by E-Insites, 05-12-2003, 03:00 PM
I would like to address this post. We did not just jump into Linux Hosting. We started doing it a while back and it was going fine. The reason we got out of Linux Virtual and Reseller Hosting is that we found that were having way more overhead with the Linux Servers as far as staffing goes. We had just over a hundred Linux customers and thousands of Windows customers, but yet more than half of our support requests were from the Linux customers. So we made a decision to cut the department. I do not know who would have told you that you were quote "last account on the server" but we did not just out of the blue do this. We told people in advance that we were getting out of the Linux virtual and reseller hosting business and that the only Linux hosting we will be offering would be dedicated servers. We posted it on our web site and also sent emails to all affected customers, well in advance. We were willing to refund anyone who had just signed up, and also stopped taking orders once the sale was decided upon. As far as downtime goes, we had one large problem with the server, and it had nothing to do with a misconfiguration -- it had a bad hard drive, which had bad sectors and would cause intermittent crashes once every two or so days for about a week. We always got the server right back on after the crashes and then scheduled it to be repaired late one night. We were very quick to get the backups rolling and with the help of our Cpanel Vendor, we were able to get the server back online very quickly. We also posted on our site about the problems the server was having and that we would be changing the drive in advance of doing it, as well as sending emails well in advance to all affected customers informing them of the situation and scheduled maintenance. There was never any unexplained downtime. Also we had the server at about 99.3% uptime despite this. We have been in the hosting business for over six years and have managed to do well be cause we are always honest with our customers and are keep on top of any problems that arise. Now, before we sold we made sure we chose a company that would be great for customer support and so on. These people were very friendly with us, and were always reachable, and that is why we chose them. After the sale we had one or two people who said they could not get in contact with Net Host, and we contacted Net Host about this, and got it fixed. There was an error in the phone number that the users were calling if I remember correctly. The server still resides at our Data Center, and we still monitor it. Whenever we notice it is down we get it back up quickly for them. We do know there was one day that the circuit breaker to that server was accidentally tripped by a guy doing construction work at our DC. The server then needed to run through a scan disk to fix drive errors, but was back up and running after the scan completed. We will continue to monitor the server even though it is not our duty, and have even went as far as helping customers who had problems with sites on the server. Also, as noted by zarth, we had reasonable response times to any support or technical issues that arose from our Linux customers. We will contact Net Host and make them aware that they have some dissatisfied customers, and they will deal with that themselves, but as far as Cyber World is concerned we have always been good to our customers, going the extra mile for them and we will continue to do so. If you do a search on here you will find that we have many happy customers, and the ones who had problems with us always got them resolved. No host is perfect, but what we strive for is to provide the best customer care you can possibly provide and that has helped us keep a good reputation in the industry over the years. Regards,
Posted by mferris28, 05-12-2003, 06:28 PM
I have had a really good experience with CyberWorld and would recommend them to anyone looking for a quality host. They have a new windows control panel that is extraordinary!
Posted by zarth, 05-12-2003, 08:06 PM
I can confirm that I was advised well in advance of the transfer of the linux servers and cyberworld did keep us informed.
Posted by babarami, 06-04-2003, 11:52 AM
Well my story become worst with Nethost if u read this thread http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showth...hreadid=149547 everything is explained about my BAD experience
Posted by AF, 06-06-2003, 10:53 AM
Geez.. what a nightmare fuzzyping ! - Andre
Posted by AF, 06-06-2003, 10:56 AM
I surfed now on nethost... Features : Host UNLIMITED Domains 99.9% Uptime Guarantee LOL Andre
Posted by akuo, 06-07-2003, 02:29 AM
Ahhh but that's fine SO LONG as they're giving appropriate credits if not meeting 99.9% etc. I'm not saying they are, but just trying to make a small point of clarification there