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Hosthatch: very disappointing support
Last month, I learned that Hosthatch has native IPv6 for its Chicago location. I opened a ticket to request a subnet. It was answered within hours. However, IPv6 was not working at all. So I replied, and waited 3 days, and got zero responses.
I figured maybe they simply ignore customers' reply, so I opened another ticket addressing the same problem. The support agent assigned another subnet for me, but it was to no avail. The agent obviously had no clue what was wrong with their network, and said "we trust that this issue is isolated" while it was not. I ran tcpdump, and found that while my VPS can receive ICMPv6 packets (RA and NS), but it appears packets sent from the VPS (NA or NS) were dropped and did not reach the router. My guess was that the bridge or firewall filtered IPv6 traffic sent from the VMs. I replied, with detailed explanation and logs attached, but got no responses.
I waited another 3 days, only to find that my second ticket was simply abandoned too. So I opened another ticket, and this time someone with some sense escalated it to their L3 support team. But now, after 14 days, I got zero replies. Apparently their heroic L3 team couldn't even figure out a simple IPv6 issue in two weeks.
While I was writing, I found another thread about Hosthatch's very disappointing support. I don't know why it's Offtopic, but it surely should gain some publicity. Potential customers (especially "promotional" customers, perhaps?) should beware the bad support.
Comments
Post ticket screens or it didn't happen.
Fair enough - I would like to clarify that the cause of this is the large setup we have to re-do to migrate all OVZ6 (which is EOL this month) customers over to OVZ7 and promotional customers' support gets deprioritized in these cases when downtime/emergencies are not involved and investigation is required by L3 to fix the problem.
I don't think it is a secret our support can be really bad for promotional customers - I am working on changing this slowly on the whole, and we've paused launching new locations/promos until that is fully done.
You can always ask the ticket to be pushed to Abdullah in your ticket and/or send me an email.
That's no excuse for the total lack of responses for two weeks. They (or the L1/L2 who escalated the ticket) could have explained that you were busy -- that would have helped alleviate the frustration -- but they didn't. How could I possibly have known that you were working on OVZ7?
What's most disappointing is that after the initial responses, your support agents just simply ignore my reply, like the ticket was abandoned. And that happened twice (three times if you count the pending L3 ticket). If they need more time, or need to transfer my ticket to someone else, they should have let me know.
Thanks. I didn't know that. So will I get "not-so-promotional" customer support when I mention you? If every "promotional" customer sent you emails, won't that overload you?
You're a brave man :-)
If there is a genuine problem, I am happy to have it resolved faster.
A lot of the times these emails are because someone is denied a refund, or something of the sort - and that does not happen.
Again, I am working on making sure it does not need to go there and that we have policies to prevent this from happening in the first place, and everyone can have equal quality of support. This is not an empty promise. I expect that you will see a clear change in support responses (both in terms of quality and response timings) in the start of 2020.
The idea behind deprioritized support for promotions is that it does not make financial sense for us to spend 30 minutes L3 time for a customer we make very minuscules amount of money from when something large is happening in the background, which is a few times per year (now it is the OVZ migration, few months later it might be something else, just like few months ago it was something else).
But this does not really work because having happier customers generally leads to better things, rather than having unhappy customers, and not every promotional customer needs L3, all the time. I have to deal with several companies every day, and I know how frustrating it is to be stonewalled regardless of whether the company on the other side is something we pay less or more to.
I used to pay full price for a Storage VPS a few years ago. Back then their support for non-promotional servers is also slow and unhelpful. It took me over 5 tickets and 2 weeks to get the custom ISO uploading feature in their control panel working properly.
@psb777 you need to wait for them to hatch. Otherwise they cant reply to the ticket from within the shell.
Which was a BETA feature we had just introduced around that time, including a BETA note in the control panel itself. Now first line support can resolve nearly all of the issues related to it.
I would like to add that I'm surely not in desperate need of native IPv6, and that you don't really need to handle this ticket personally. If your L3 team need another month working on OpenVZ 7, I can wait that long. But without better communication, that's totally frustrating.
Call it bad bromance.... (hope the pun is caught)
I'm afraid I don't even understand its literal meaning, much less the pun you intended... Enlighten me, what's "bad" bromance, and between whom?
You need to have listened to Lady Gaga.
FWIW, I've never had any issues out of their support. Always receive responses of maximum of a few hours.
Lucky you
@psb777 I can guarantee that @Adbullah is trying to do all he can to fix the issues, hosthatch was always a reliable provider, my guess is that he expanded too quickly this time (@cociu style), but its just temporary, and as he said, at the start of 2020, all will be fine again.
@Abdullah I guess you can provide some bonus to the affected customers as a compensation for the issues they've been experiencing (migration, support issues), just my two cents, of course it's your company and you decide how to handle it.
I did receive responses within a few hours, too. But when I replied that it didn't resolve the issue, no further responses did I get.
Yeah, I recall the song "bad romance", but never listened to it. American pop music is not my cup of tea...
I believe you, and I am surely looking forward to the improved support. I have friends who have been customers for years, and they all had good words for Hosthatch.
Well I don't really have an issue with HostHatch as a whole.
Infact, I have an OpenVZ node at their NL location which has been up for almost 2 years.
17:02:46 up 660 days, 12:25, 0 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00I'm just not satisfied with their Support Team and how they handle their tickets. I know that sometimes you can't just be too transparent with whatever issues that you as a provider are facing but when the customer is impacted, it shouldn't reach to a point where the customer is forced to start posting on LET or any other forum seeking for feedback, information or even 'attention', when it all could've been dealt with internally and communicated professionally via mail or tickets.
In this industry, if you're providing such services and support to your customers, you not only have to be technically skilled and competent, but communication skills is also crucial, especially if you're customer facing.
My 2 cents.
Edit: p/s: If there's something wrong, just say it. Our technical knowledge might not be at the same level but noone's asking for a formal RCA and to take this under Problem Management for improvement. Just a brief summary of the issue and what was done to fix is sufficient.
This certainly needs improving. I think @Abdullah is pretty ok but some of the customer service folks really need some training.
Not to excuse their lack of response after an extended period of time, but it's possible that the IPv6 issue wasn't/isn't so simple
I have to admit that I had to make similiar experiences with HostHatch.
Basically I would rate their services above average, I am quite satisfied, their servers show good performance and it looks like they know what they are doing. Considering the price/specs I do have nothing to complain.
Unfortunatelly their (only) upstream in London M247 seems to only peer with Telia for DTAG/AS3320. IPv6 didn't work for quite a time (it is working now) but the main problem remains that the Telia InterConnect in London to DTAG/AS3320 is hopelessly congested most of the time. During daytime it's a few hundred kbit/s with constant very high packet loss of 10-20% making it literally unusable whereas everything seems okay between Midnight and 3 PM.
I reported this more than two weeks ago but the only and last reply two weeks ago was "this will be reviewed by our network team and please allow some time". Of course this requires ticketing with their upstream to properly fix this and most likely importing routes via some other upstream or increasing the congested IC. But I heard nothing from them within two weeks. I do not know whether they are working on it, what is the status of their carrier's ticket etc.
Ticket#910611
It doesn't hurt me as I am using that VPS only as a cold backup storage box and my backup jobs are all running during night time. Just as feedback, I think support could indeed be a bit more responsive and transparent.
The only disappointing support I got, if any, from companies I purchased VPSes or related items/services is from HostFlyte.
You get replies, answers, and even solutions for your tickets, while I've been getting "soon", "3 to 5 working days", till "to ten days" etc. multi-times from different names. Simply a copy-and-paste job for customers and kept goods undelivered/un-recovered.
Time changes, but never change a person's behavior. Liars seldom get back to normal track. HiFormance is an old story.
In summary, communication is key
That might actually represent some improvement compared to a similar situation I experienced from June to July this year. I noticed really slow transfer speeds between their storage servers in Los Angeles and Chicago (both in Psychz datacenters). I put in a ticket with some
mtrreports on June 19th and got an automated response. It wasn't until July 13th that I got a follow-up asking if I was still seeing the problem. When I cbecked I was happy to see once again that the network was fast my man!Anyway - in retrospect this makes sense to me. If I was ever wondering how HostHatch manages to afford the low prices from their occasional super-cheap deals ... I now have a pretty good idea that their budget might not include even an extra 5 minutes of technician time to whisper sweet nothings while they wait for their (also bargain priced) upstream to do the needful.
I actually like having this no-frills "not for the faint of heart" option for my personal stuff. But I do think twice (and make sure to mention the caveats) when making a recommendation to anyone with presumably normal expectations. And I do (sometimes) choose to pay a bit more for systems that might require a higher level of support.
That's actually a pretty short list of providers here though. Most are decent enough, but the bottom line in the log run seems to be that competent people tend to cost a bit of money. Exceptional outfits might have the wherewithal to automate and avoid inefficiencies at scale. But these might also have the sense to charge a bit above rock-bottom anyway, just because they can. And ultimately they're not perfect either, so ... you pays your money and you takes your chances I guess.
tl;dr: Hot single support techs in your area are waiting to contact you!
Just wondering what this has to do with HostHatch ...
That means, there are always people with worse luck & experience than us.
Anything I say on this thread is going to be taken in a negative context, but since you are an old customer, I will go ahead. In this particular case mentioned above, we did spend quite a bit of time in the background trying to work with our upstream to have the issue resolved, but DTAG is a pain to work with and it is not a secret. The problem was not that, but it was communicating to the customer regularly - this is a lower priority on promo plans.
Support/human cost is the single most biggest expense and we've always followed the same policy from a few years, that customers who come through very highly discounted promotions will be assigned a lower priority of support for cases that require L3 time. For the most part, this works fine because we have people covering 24/7 shifts and L3 has plenty of free time...other than 1-3 spread out months per year where we are busy doing something else.
I already realized that this does not work long term, and I mentioned on our last promotion that we are changing the way we handle support for promotional customers. Happier customers lead to more happier customers, unhappy customers do not - regardless of whatever they pay.
By the start of 2020, I aim to change our support policies and training enough to make sure everyone gets better support.
The "(also bargain priced) upstream" comment is far from true and not appreciated at all. We operate out of some of the most expensive datacenters in the world and some of the best network mixes, and this goes for all of our locations. You might find that your favorite provider might be using single-homed Cogent (or Cogent/HE) in a cheap datacenter (actual fact). We do not do that, and we pay far far more for actual very good network mixes and high quality datacenters. You will find a bunch of Equinix/Interxions/Digital Realtys on our list of locations and no single location where our upstream is single-homed Cogent or anything even close. All of our locations have brilliant network mixes. If someone was to make a chart/website and list quality of networks and physical datacenters out of all your favorite LE hosts, we would come on top, no question.
Psychz LA was an exception because we moved in a haste in LA and they moved us to a different part of the datacenter than the one we wanted because of availability at the time, but that had more to do with not having A/B power and network, something that we have in all of our locations, and in LA now as well.
@Abdullah I'm not sure about other customers, but for me, all I needed was for your Support Team to speak up, rather than playing safe with responses.
But as usual, thank you for stepping in and addressing something which quite obviously requires management's attention.
I can't really comment on the support as I haven't used it, but just wanted to voice my very positive experience with HH. I have a storage VPS as well as a small NVMe VPS. Both have been rock solid for me, both in terms of uptime and (disk) performance. Keep up the good work @Abdullah!
Same here. I ordered my HH VPS via a LET Promo, and it is the best performing Lowend-VPS i have had so far (at 2.50 USD / month....). I needed support once for a minor issue (routing from me to my VPS (same city) was was going through another country) and it was fixed on the same day.