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Thanks for the input. I do not expect excellent service, or prompt customer service. I do expect to have access to a service I have contracted and I do not think that is unreasonable if I am a paying customer. To have VNC access to my server seems to be the most basic of requirements, Are you saying that if you pay peanuts you should accept being 2 months without access to your service? I must have missed that part of their terms and conditions.
All my time and energy was spent dealing with them - again, that is not the purpose of this post. Am I disturbing you for venting my frustration? You are welcome not to read the thread.
Although I do honestly appreciate your suggestion about encryption over ssh and the attempt to help me with the link you kindly provided.
To be fair, you service is probably ok. The tier service they provide that you rely on to access you service is broken.
true, but what good is the server if I can't access it? It Is like you contract a VPS but the provider does not give you network access to it. in practical terms is the same.
VirMach has a non existant customer support. They just don't care, you can't count on them and if you try you will just see their answer is out of scope. So this provider worth it for non critical services if you can get big discount and you backup everything (anyway you have to backup) to be able to move any time.
I'm really surprised they had good reviews in the past, that's why i've tried. I had to talk with support because they had outdated or non working images to boot and it took severale back and forth to finally point it ; i had to debug their issue ; and i've felt like a bad customer by reading everywhere that my support request must be legit. I mean, it fits well for probably most of their customers, but for serious issues or customer without any past "PEBKAC support" they should at least do follow up and try to understand / define the customer they have.
They are the best when it's about to talk publicly about complaint / dispute, this is the only time they shine and looks really professional. Unfortunately, it's only kind of marketing finally.
Time will reveal if the service is stable, since i don't need support (well, i need only if their is an issue on provider side) i can deal with this.
(2w is also what i had to wait for every answer from them)
Note: really cheap providers can provide awesome support. I will not talk about Racknerd (even if they always try to answer even the worst request) but more about NexusBytes in the past with every weeks discount, MikePT with lifetime web shared discount, UltraVPS with sometime discounts ; and they all provide quick and friendly support, they all try their best to understand you request and build their answer. Real pricing of Virmach is the same as others "low end" including BuyVM so the support should have some qualitys other than big and precise answer to non legit public disputes.
Top provider my ass lol 🤡🤡
I see VNC as a last resort access, not main access. Issues with VNC are common, no matter which provider.
I think this is because Soheil has made any outsourced support obsolete, also I assume the costs you're paying isn't going to get you priority support. I don't think Virmach as a whole is at fault here.
@o_be_one sad you didn't mention me among those names ( I'm not cheap but our support is as excellent as our fellow providers ) I think @MikePT and @seriesn can testify on my behalf
Yes, me too. I only need VNC to unlock the disk and for that it is essential (unless you set up remote unlocking through ssh).
I do not require priority support. In fact, I almost never required support at all. I don't think a fault in VNC is considered priority support - for me it is a critical issue in their infrastructure that they should definitely be obliged to address. If they are not at fault with VNC stopping working in their platform, who is? Surely it is something beyond the user control or ability to solve.
You know what the root cause of all this problem is? It's not vnc failing, it's you encrypting your disk without an objective. You think that virmach goes their your disk after they stop serving you? If you don't have evidence or know exactly what happens to your files after they stop serving you, then you are operating under "an unwarranted idea that people are after your files", there's a lot of reasons to encrypt, but let's be real, you're going thru all of these, based on a personal whim.
You should've enabled decrypt via ssh since the beggining instead of relying on your provider's vnc. It seems that your data is locked in as you also didn't manage any backups.
"A meteorite might fall on this airplane so lets reinforce it with 30CM of steel".
Ok so how does this justify the 2 weeks response time and VNC not working for so long?
Since I bought the 999 special, all my support tickets are answered within minutes, and I'm getting full HD on VNC sessions.
If you want faster support, you need to buy a bigger package.
I had no need for support if their infrastructure was working correctly. I also have no need for HD VNC - simple VNC is fine for me.
@Devas thank you for sharing your experience with VirMach. I got similar problems and I'm actively looking for an alternative. If you found one pls PM me.
Brave yourself, wall of text is coming from them.
We did not force anyone to purchase limited support packages and they are very clearly labeled. I'm guessing I'll be seeing a lot of you around any thread mentioning VirMach as it appears to be your sole hobby, but I recommend at least showing a single case of someone required to pay/purchase basic customer service from us. I can't recall any over at least the past year where someone was actually billed for support.
I actually just answered your ticket, weird coincidence. It came up in the queue, well not just answered it, maybe five tickets ago so I'll be able to give a pretty detailed response fairly quickly.
This was most definitely resolved by the time you made this thread. I believe you made this thread before actually checking if the migration was completed, which we'll get to in a moment.
I will not excuse our late responses here, it was badly timed and it was also a complex issue so we definitely dropped the ball here.
I'm not saying response time would have been perfect, but there were also certain issues on your end that caused further delays. Yes, ideally, this should not have mattered. It did given the circumstances so I just want to point these out so perhaps someone reading this can receive better support from us in an emergency situation.
Here's the main issue that happened on our end causing the delay:
Initial response was 3 days, then the response after that was 12 days later. Then 1 day for the next response, then 20 days in the VNC queue, 5 days for the next response, 5 hours for the next response, 3 days for the next, 1 day for the next, and 1-3 days for the last depending on how you count it.
This is just to clarify very specifically, the response times.
Whether or not it is hard to believe, I can confirm this issue has never once appeared outside of this case recently, and perhaps one other single case recently (not confirmed yet) in our nearly 7 years in business and half a million tickets answered.
Qemu is the emulator used. In the libvirt configuration file, your VM is essentially fired up with with this emulator under devices, and graphics type as "VNC" on a certain port, listen address, and password.
noVNC was making the proper handshake, SSL was fine, as was everything else checked and debugged. For some reason, it was unable to complete the connection. Same goes with direct VNC, it essentially timed out. The port seemed fine, no error logs. VNC also worked on other VMs on the same node. We did some research, there were some reported incompatibilities so that's the route we looked further into; we didn't just fabricate this data. The idea was that if such an issue existed, it most definitely would be plausible for there to be an issue so that VNC did not function. There have been cases in the past, unrelated to this but where if the disk image is found to be potentially "missing" then the VM does not launch properly. Those had their own fix, in this case we thought that encryption could, if there's a bug in our version of Qemu/libvirt supported by SolusVM that it could potentially appear as non-existing to the degree that something similar could have been replicated.
You were already answered as to why this wasn't offered 2 months ago. We did not have enough space at the time to migrate you.
We did not state that we are rebuilding the server.
We stated that we are migrating the server. The plan was to migrate it, and then also send a copy over to your SFTP details. The migration was started. The migration did also complete.
The issue is that this was in a specific queue, and then completed. Independent of completions, we provide responses to these tickets in that specific queue. However, within 30 minutes of the migration beginning, you provided a response which kicked it out of this queue. Again, the migration was completed. This was completed on the day it started. But you just did not receive a response as a result of the response kicking your ticket out of this queue. As I mentioned in your ticket, we will look and see if it's beneficial to process these in a different way in the future or to disallow responses in this queue.
You also replied another time that day then the next day, then the next day. Each time, this bumps it out of the queue. This is just how our billing/support system, WHMCS, functions.
Your service has been online/external VNC has been functional as of a few days ago when migration completed. It appears it's just now waiting for you to log in via VNC, decrypt, and networking should function after you reconfigure your networking manually from within the operating system, since automatic functions would not work with encryption unless perhaps it's decrypted in the configuration file (which it's not.) If it doesn't work then it's best at this time to create a ticket for the network issue, and provide the relevant details. Replying to that ticket may unfortunately delay response time as you'll have to wait for a specific person to process it at this point. No one else will be able to read through that ticket without it taking an hour or two.
We are still offering this as well, should you require it but just to be clear, you appear to have closed this off for the time being. You asked us to upload it to our server and provide download details, we wouldn't be able to do it this way due to security concerns. It's best if you provide details for us to upload to your server.
I've mentioned this in the other thread, we're down to about 0.2% of these type of tickets that have been waiting a long time. I'm not denying it either, but it is highly isolated.
These have mainly been fixed. Coincidentally, it's not fixed on the server customer was migrated to this time, it's one of the few left over.
We had to switch over our entire web VNC due to an update SolusVM pushed out, which seemingly made it incompatible to some degree with how we had Cloudflare set up. I believe this overrid one of our old fixes another team member did but at this point, when we tried going over it with Cloudflare, they blamed SolusVM, and then SolusVM blamed Cloudflare. This was the only way to make it work quickly without disabling Cloudflare or discontinuing using SolusVM (obviously not realistic.)
To be clear though, this was fixed fairly quickly from the time customer created the ticket. It's just that it did not fix his particular issue, his issue was on top of the error 1006/web VNC not functioning.
It's possible that if we had an outsourced team, they would be able to more quickly filter through the tickets that already have knowledgebase answers. However, this issue was mostly resolved before we ran the sale. We cut down the number of tickets by adding additional departments, troubleshooter, and knowledgebase articles. For whatever reason though when it came to a good amount of the specials, tickets were created at an abnormally high rate when it came to these issues that we already discussed on other pages. Perhaps we could have communicated it better and tailored it specifically toward specials since most articles/buttons were not directly related to specials.
To be very clear, we 100% agree with you here.
Under no circumstance is it expected that a customer have no access to VNC, especially for an extended period of time. I do not have an exact figure but seeing as you are the only person with this issue and perhaps one other single person, so two people, out of perhaps thousands that did have access to VNC but simply did not have access to web VNC, I can confidently state that luckily this was a highly isolated incident.
It's still very bad that anyone had to go through these situation. We did try to make amends as much as possible, by extending your service back in our February 4th reply... to an additional +3 months as far as I can tell (minimum 2 months if you had already received one month beforehand but I see 3 total.)
You absolutely should expect this to be part of your support and it is. Limited support still covers this under support, and under no circumstance would we reject providing support, nor did we reject providing support. We were even willing to investigate the potential clash further, but I just offered the other options (the image copy/reinstall and/or migration) because they would just be much quicker and we did not want to keep you waiting.
This wasn't meant to be as if we're blaming you for anything, you should be able to encrypt your VPS. It was just the best educated guess as to what could be the cause of the issue.
To be clear, we are still unaware what caused the issue, we just know it wasn't the encryption since migration appears to have worked (unless it ran into complications.)
As for SFTP details, we already discussed this in the ticket and you appeared to have initially agreed but it was to save time. If we could send off your data to you, so you at least have it and can do what you want with it, that would resolve one major issue, and then it would also allow us to bring your server back up with a re-install/recreation, and you could move your data back if you wished to do so. It was the quickest fix at the time it was offered.
I'm sure everyone at the company would prefer if I did not provide these type of transparent responses here, especially since it's been getting backlash lately. I'm still doing it because it's the right thing to do, not for PR.
Most of our customers... even many of those who heavily complained one place or another, have been our customer for a very long time. I'm not goin to state how long OP has been a customer and I obviously do not know if he'll remain one, but it's fairly a good amount of time.
At some point, during a very very long time, a customer is bound to have a less than satisfactory experience. In this case this experience was something that should have been handled much better but it just wasn't. In many other cases, it might just be a slight negative experience that for some reason ruins 5 years of good experience for customers but there's not much we can do in those other cases. In cases like this, we can always do our best to improve and change systems to ensure it doesn't happen again.
Trust me though, if what you're stating is true it would have a much higher impact than you're seeing here -- if we legitimately had no customer support, didn't care. Nearly everyone who has a "bad" experience will write a negative review. But almost no one who has a positive review (relative to the total quantity) will leave a good review. It's just how it works, and it's not just for us, it's pretty much everyone. The only difference is we do not try to bribe customers to change their reviews, or to ensure they do not write a review as many other companies do for PR. I'm not saying it's a good business decision, it's just how it is.
Support times have been improving, since a month and a half ago and we'd very nearly done catching up to every single ticket, with only an extremely small amount left over.
Newer tickets have been receiving, in most cases, much quicker responses (this is so we didn't fall behind.) Unfortunately, certain tickets created at a certain timeframe are still waiting. I'll try to provide an update for you guys by Sunday on exactly where we're at here.
Please look through the past flash offers, a list is here on a third party website:
https://virmach.app/
Do let me know who else is providing a higher level of support at the same price-point as these packages, as that's the majority of the recently tickets by quantity we had to process so it's representative of these tickets mostly requiring a long wait. If I receive a good amount of examples, I'll consider figuring something out to increase the level of support for these packages.
We get it, you are a completely unbiased and the go-to source for everything VirMach and you love making top provider jokes.
Ah yes, your only advice.
Lotto numbers?
@Devas : 17 paragraphs
@VirMach : 49 paragraphs
@Nekki : 0 paragraphs, vanished
(as of 04:34 UTC)
Sorry for the delay, there's your 69 paragraphs, give or take. Here's a few more.
I've made this clear elsewhere with a lot more detail, but we've already at this point moved past the need for what outsourced support performed, with the only exception being re-assuring messages as customers wait (which in many cases only delayed the proper response.) We'll fix that last bit with AI.
IP changes are automated, migrations will soon be automated. We have a troubleshooter now that outputs (usually) a fairly accurate response. We have many more help articles, improved departments/sorting of tickets where customers are provided some information beforehand. Overall, the number of tickets we have cut down by all these steps is greater than the quantity of tickets outsourced support performed.
It's potentially possible to do this in another way, and have your VM boot decrypted, I just did not offer it because you seemed very serious with your security (as expected, not saying it's a bad thing) so I did not want to mention that, and sharing your encryption information with us so I could plug it into the configuration for the VM. I assumed you would say no or be upset so I avoided offering this option.
I do want to re-iterate here that this situation would most definitely qualify for free priority support. I believe in some stages it was flagged as such. I remember discussing your ticket with the team in high priority, it was just time-consuming.
Thank you, we were nearly ready to file for bankruptcy but then you purchased the 999 package. I have allocated you personal support rep, he is not allowed to sleep and your tickets are sent directly to him in Morse code via electrical shocks.
Wow you called it perfectly but I don't think even you could have predicted the length of the wall.
I hear AWS provides great Enterprise support.
69, lol.
I bought an extra virmach instance after reading this thread
@VirMach I appreaciate that you took your time to copy most of my messages from under previous forum posts. It's a shame that after all those copy-pasted messages you still couldn't read and acknowledge what was written in them.
I do make Top Provider jokes, because I simply can't see how it's justified for VirMach, when:
I wonder how many support tickets you could have replied to during the time you wrote this Great Wall of China post. 🤡
Why the bashing of @Virmach for the "wall of text"? He goes out of his way to provide explanations and frankly some information that is none of your business.
Feels like a no win situation.
Some of you need to return to your perfect lives.
I'm not saying I don't agree with some of the complaints but look at the overall picture.
Whats your "cpu steal" like? x)
Uptime is good tho, so it makes it a perfect idler
Here we go again... (new generation does not enjoy reading).