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In this type of case, I would suggest you are transparent with the client about the situation and provide options.
For example:
Explain to the client that their issue is low priority and complex, and that they may wait a very long time until you get around to looking into it. Otherwise, we have little way of knowing what requires expensive engineer time or what you rank as low priority. Ivan is very polite, which I appreciate, but I'd rather know this hard truth up front than wait for weeks with no replies.
Offer to recreate the VM to see if the issue is still present.
Provide some method to migrate customer data to a new VM, even if it involves downtime. Yes, I know it's hard for a big storage server, but it's no easier for us to shift those terabytes around.
This is just my wishlist, intended not as criticism but as (hopefully) helpful feedback.
I can confirm said comment and someone I know thinks exactly as mentioned above. I've let my vm's unused due to the lack of reasoning of your "prompt support".
Support wise I would simply say Racknerd's is the best ( prompt and useful, even @dustinc takes care of issues himself) and I do not recall any sort of "support" any worse then yours.
Your products are nice-ish (perfomance/price) could be good but your support...
I dont remember if we have weird issue like this in Coventry. For this type of issue, we always suggest customers to boot into rescue mode first to troubleshoot. If you need anything else you can always drop me a PM here on LET so I can take a look further.
Really? Please remember that we provide unmanaged service and usually our support can go beyond that.
If you were to make a list of all the 'major' issues you have had, how many of those would an average provider fix for you with fast speed? DO, Vultr and any of the big ones would simply have a standardized response saying straight forward no. Your requests are extremely complicated, and require hundreds of dollars in human time per hour to process, while you pay a very small amount of that. We pay thousands per month to CDN77 and GSL, you should try seeing one of our network tickets, and you will quickly get a much better idea of what we have to go through.
Your last request to ask CDN77 to ask PCCW to ask CU to fix their stuff - try asking that to Vultr, then realize how much less you pay to us instead of them, for much better quality/resources and human level support. And I assure you, Vultr will tell you no. Just quicker. If you want to use us as a replacement of someone who charges $40/Mbps for access to China, and then complain that we are not fast enough, then there are multiple problems at play here, more than just the "support is slow", because of course it is, in those cases. A simple problem of expectations.
Also, thanks for the graph (just one correction: Arelion is not removed, it is just prepended 3x since CDN77 has Arelion already, we just it as backup)
Indeed, we need to do better on these things. And I think this will sound counter productive, but please try to push it through and see if you can get your server rebuilt. That will be faster.
In the background, we're building a complete rewrite of our panel, which fixes a lot of these things and its coming "soon".
Support, at the moment, is slightly overloaded, because we are moving thousands of VMs from our old storage VM plans on RAID50/60 to RAID10. That is not an easy task by any measure due to all the steps involved. And just to add the cherry on top, since there's a lot of criticism and not a lot of "hosthatch is migrating everyone to newer (intel gold) hardware, with RAID10 arrays, at no additional cost"
I have both and both are pretty good. I've had to inform GreenCloud of downtime whereas Hosthatch has never been down unplanned for me.
GreenCloud support is quite good if you get the senior people. They're really helpful and knowledgeable.
@hosthatch does suffer with support triage issues, though. I once lost my 2FA and it was over 2 weeks before I even got them to hear me, after messaging on LET, email, and facebook. They're still my favourite provider (given the London location and pricing) and top notch though, just be sure to use the premium plans if you plan on hosting anything important.
Hey I actually did ask Vultr to see if they could ask NTT to fix congestion to one of the China transits and they actually did email them. And I only pay them $12/month now which is much less then I spend at hosthatch.
Proof
All I'm asking for is a simple email, and if you don't want to do it, then just say so politely?
This is in no way trying to use you as a replacement for someone who charges $40/mbit to china, this is just a simple email to see if your transit will fix their normal links.
And also one of my tickets was just a simple question about the bgp communities in Sydney and that took a while to get to as well. As well as just asking about cpu steal on a server that has all shared cores removed.
The biggest problem with Hosthatch is that whenever they run promotions, they sell out really quickly and usually before I've noticed the thread. The (storage) VPS I already have with them are great, no problems so far.
How is that progressing? I was contacted three months ago to migrate a 1tb server within a few weeks. I also had a 2TB server about to be set up I wanted migrated so I only needed to set it up once and not deal with migration hassles. I had to migrate the 1TB at my and customer's inconvenience but support said I'd be contacted in the "coming weeks" for migrating the 2TB server. Still haven't been contacted and have no idea when to expect to get a migration notice. Murphy's Law says as soon as I setup the server, I'll finally get the email.
Also, I have not found any performance increase since the migration, so most people will just remember the hours of inconvenience and not any measurable increase in performance.
have both GC and HH storage VMs.
never had issue with hosthatch network, and it does seem they invest more in network and they appear to have "more control" over it.
key difference is GC storage is much snappier due to a good RAID10 config. glad that HH is giving free RAID10 upgrade after all these years so IO no longer becomes bottleneck during network transfers. the IOwait is always a concern during RW operations.
from AMD 7551P to Intel Gold? hope its the latest and greatest DDR5.
support wise GC comes out top at response time. but be realistic, both providers selling LE prices here, take it and go, don't bother their support unless absolutely necessary. let them sell more to higher tier buyers so they can fund the low end.
True! Dun disturb the support unless necessary!
I know people love to bash on @hosthatch support. For me, it has been decent, but I’ve seen screenshots where it’s far from that.
Question is: Are people ready for their service pricing to be increased for HH to hire more support staff? Cost of human hours is huge, and realistically one thing they’re trying to cut costs on to be able to run these yearly deals.
Love to bash...? If anything I prefer to praise great hosts.
But let me ask you something else.
What do you consider as support?
If your VPS goes down due to some unspecified reason that isn't your fault and is beyond your control (host node or network-related), and you don't hear from the host for days while your server is still down, and you have no idea what's going on... is that on you, your too high expectations, or the host's responsibility?
During an outage that lasts more than a day, isn't it the bare minimum to let the client know what's going on, acknowledge the issue, etc., rather than leaving them in the dark for days?
If your IPv6, which you may happen to use, goes down for an unspecified period, let's say two weeks and you don't hear from the host about what's going on during all this time... don't know when it will work, if it will work at all... is that on you, your too high expectations, or the host's responsibility? Isn't letting the client know what's going on, acknowledging the issue, etc., the bare minimum, instead of leaving them in the dark for weeks?
If you try to reinstall the server (the old one is purged) the templates aren't synced with the node and something is broken with the image reinstall (as happened at some point with the old control panel, related to their Norway E5 NVMe node), and you basically can't use the service for a month, you're completely stuck, is that on you, your too high expectations because you don't pay much (for a long-term outage?), or the host's responsibility to work on it?
Will you still be so positive about your service next time your server is down for days and no one responds to you during that entire time?
I don't think I really need support from the host per se. But if something is broken on their end, it would be nice if they at least acknowledged the issue and worked on it, especially if the service has been down for days.
I admit that if I ignore the "support" response times, this host offers great value for the money, and there's always a compromise between various factors.
However, this doesn't mean that substandard support "for promo plans", which competes with Virmach (and no, that's not a compliment), shouldn't be mentioned or criticized.
When I talk about this host, I believe I always fairly review both the positives and negatives. So far, the positives (stability, resources for the price, and especially the location for the price) outweigh the negatives for me, which is easier since I'm hosted with many companies (that means I can use other server anytime..). But if I were hosted with only one company, HH wouldn't be my pick, because I know that when/if something goes wrong (don't get me wrong, their services don't fail often, they are pretty stable long term), I would be at their mercy, without knowing what's going on for longer than I'd like.
In my case, New York and Chicago were completed some time ago. London was attempted and then paused a couple of weeks ago when it hit some problems (I don't know if it was one node or location-wide). No word yet on Stockholm.
I don't see any obvious performance improvements with the new servers, but I haven't been checking this in any scientific way. They are stable and running at least as well as the old ones, and are hopefully more reliable, which is the important part.
Moving from hardware to software RAID is a major architectural change, so it doesn't surprise me if there are some growing pains as they continue to tune their systems based on experience. I don't know what went wrong in London, but it suggests they haven't quite gotten things streamlined yet.
For me, the possible improvements in reliability are worth the inconvenience of migration. I appreciate the opportunity to move to a better platform for free. But at the same time I don't appreciate not getting support when I hit random bugs with things like networking, which prevent a successful migration.
@Mumbly I wasn’t postive. I just asked a question. There was no hidden point or argument.
They’re quite stable. When/if things go bad, how fast you’re getting assisted seems to be somewhat of a gamble.
Question remains: How much more would you be okay with your prices increasing to provide quicker support?
People complaining about them but still using them tells me not that much, because there’s plenty of more expensive providers than HostHatch that offer quicker support.
My whole point is: Everything costs money. Human resources costs a lot of money. Hire a few extra full time support agents and something will likely have to give. Should that be the price, or something else?