mr_fern

I have been with Surpass for over 2 years now as a Dedicated Server customer. Eman and Kayla, you both have always been a big help, as well as the non staff members in the forum boards. Although I've got to release, so I shall release.

I've avoided using the helpdesk because I want to be able to solve my own problems, and with my last two encounters with 3rd Level Support, I'm even less encouraged to approach support. The following is lengthy, but it'll help you understand where I'm coming from.

The first of these two encounters was March 31st. Some of you remember my cries of my lost data. It really was at the hands of this support person. I basically couldn't get MySQL started. I was converting a table from MyISAM to InnoDB (I eventually found out it had a few corrupt rows and needed to be repaired), which crashed MySQL, and because of the innodb log files, I couldn't get it restarted. From my understanding after some more reading, I should have been able to delete those log files, lost the uncommitted changes to the DB, and been fine. I'll never know because of what ensued. Someone from 3rd Level Support received my ticket about MySQL not restarting. They backed up (moved actually) my innodb data files to a folder, backed up my my.cnf, replaced it with an outdated my.cnf (that didn't have innodb directives), rebooted the machine, and said everything was fixed. I knew this wasn't true because my innodb data files had not been moved back to the folder, and there was a new (the default 8mb) innodb data file in the folder. After I got everything back where it originally was, my problem was back. So I wrote back. They did this "backing up" procedure on my data files again, got my mysql started with my correct configuration, but it wouldn't load properly, because there wasn't enough disk space to create the innodb table space. After this, they did the "backing up" procedure again, which caused the overwriting of my database information. I was out of all my innodb data. After they wrote me "we've got it running again", I quickly became aware of the situation, and when I wrote back about how they overwrote my data, they said "your innodb was corrupt" basically to excuse themselves, as if they did no wrong. I felt like throwing in the towel, but visitors of my site had large demand and I had back up of data from February. May I reopened.

The other weekend Surpass was the victim of a DDoS, which some of you are aware of. Wednesday afternoon, my site was suffering the same symptoms, no access, timed out pings. This is how my 2nd story begins. I wrote support and said I think I may be under a possible DoS attack. They wrote back 4 hours later with log data about my legitimate traffic, long after whatever caused my internet problems went away. If it was a DoS, it only lasted 30 minutes. Now lately, my server has been surging through the roof in load (over 200.00), despite the fact I have eAccelerator installed as my php cache. I decided to check my bandwidth charts. The server is seeing double the average daily bandwidth than it was last week. WTF! is my first thought. My second thought is to check if gzip compression is working (my firefox used to, but now it's not accepting gzip pages, so I used a website that tests). Sure enough it wasn't. I ssh into my server, and find that my httpd.conf file has been modified, on Wednesday. Whoever was 'supporting' my server, commented out the gzip directives. They didn't mention that they did this. There was no reason for them to do it, and if there was, well clearly they didn't tell me. Now luckily I'm paying for an amount of bandwidth that's higher than the peaks of the past 5 days, but if I wasn't, I'd be a lot more pissed. And I caught on only because I decided to check my bandwidth.

Now maybe my data loss was inevitable, but the consecutive faulty "fixes" means I'll never know, and the changing my webserver configuration without an obvious reason and without informing me which affected my bandwidth, is bad business. Don't get me wrong, not all of my experiences with support have been bad, but these two were just awful.

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Nobody doing nothing

Geoff

Just to be clear, you and surpass are the only ones with access to your server(s)? lol

and ya, support doesnt think sometimes. Sorry for your loss Fern.

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Geoff Ellis - Surpass Dedicated Server Customer
www.adepttechs.net

Skipdawg

I hear ya there buddy, year one was awesome here, year two not even close to year one. So many times I loaded up that cancel page and closed it. But July I start into year 3 so maybe the adventure will start getting good again. Good would be cool but would love it to be great like year 1.

Hope things get better for you too mr_fern

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Noxic

The support here looks really good I am not a customer (yet), ill be here for a bit though :P

xeric

it was a big thread to read out. i read o nly few lines but i would like to say that, this company rocks. i can say easily that the support here is super fast.

GamingHybrid

The support is great, depending on the complexity.

Apparently the issues fern was facing didn't match up with support on the other end.

Sorry to see this, fern.

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jordanriane

That really sucks about losing your data; I guess now before you contact support, you'll make sure that you have everything backed up so you won't have to deal with anything like this ever again.

I just think it's also daunting to find out they've configured/reconfigured something as crucial as your httpd.conf without confirming on your end that it's A.) Okay that they did this, B.) That they did this, and what they changed.

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{o,o} O RLY? atourworst.org - mywhmcs.com
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GamingHybrid

I think this is just a good reminder for Surpass to double check the actions of their staff. Cause, although administration 9such as Kala and Eman) rules, the staff can slide a bit from time to time.

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infinite110

I chose surpasshosting because of their great pricing, but now understand with a low price comes less service. Im not going to speak bad about surpass from a currently angry users perspective but i will explain some of my cries and needs that seem to not get handled.

#1 - first thing i learned is that there supports lacks 100%. Maybe good when your ticket recieves a reply but i find dumb endless questions to be asked. Phone support is needed. I've had times when 1 question replies were being recieved then to be answered an hour later. I need something fixed asap but this ticket system is too slow for that.

#2 - ive asked for 1 change to be fixed and they still keep asking me questions. I tell them that i cannot connect to the server to do database work with dreamweaver and they say theyll foward to higher level who never did anything. I sent another post and tell them that i have sent replies before and you know what they do? They send me a message asking them to send my replies and never look into the problem?!?!?!?! is it me or is fixing the problem the number one priority?

Today i have a file that the permissions have changed so i cannot delete the file. i told them to delete the file so i can upload the working version to get my site images working that have been down for over 9 hours....Guess what they did? they did not delete the file to solve the problem, they prolonged it. They sent the ticket to abuse, leaving me with a site with no images, no answer for another hour, and pissed behind my computer.

Im not mad or pissed off anymore, i thought about upgrading my service to a dedicated server for these large sites like rickrosstrilla.com and 24hourhiphop.com but after noticing that i still wont have phone support i think i will be better off buying more servers from another provider.

just another surpasshosting client, just not one of the happier ones.