Poor Support - stealth charges?

[pgtips]

Hope someone can help me, I have had a nightmare with support, my client sites have been affected, (offline, no emails or at worst all my client email wiped out with no backup) I've lost a lot of goodwill and contrary to the claim "support is not satisfied until I am satisfied" I am now being expected by Jaguar PC to pay extra for mistakes and wrong information.

I've been a client for 2 months and had a lot of expectations, asked a lot of pre sales questions and believed I had made a good choice but I still have not been able to migrate my site across fully from my old host. Support seem to be putting up obstacles now and it is going very sour.

I should note I am not on a cheap package, semi ded is 4 x more expensive per month than longhorn. I came to Jag PC for quality, reliability and good support.

Here is my problem that I desperately need help with, support have shut up shop, you must pay more or go without, for a service I was led to believe was suitable :multihosting:

I went for a semi ded to achieve multihosting over domain forwarding, it was one of the main factors/reasons for switching, in my mind it is cleaner and I warmed to Greg who I think runs JagPC, like me he seemed to focus on the needs of customers. Semi ded is NOT the cheapest option for hosting in JaguarPC but this flexibility to multihost over forwarding made it worth the extra cost in my mind.

Lets say i have a customer in Kansas, a customer in Alabama and one in Texas.

For good housekeeping I put alabama websites under alabama, kansas under kansas and texas customers under texas folder, each in their own folders.

i.e root/texas/texascustfolder/index.htm
or root/alabama/alabamacustfolder/index.htm

I need to map (multihost) the customer domain to this folder so that www.texascust.com diaplays texas cust folder.

I do not need ftp for all of these, if I did I would pay for some extra work to be done but for the most part I manage everything.

At the start I was told this would be ok. No charges applied or clearly displayed on the site to achieve this but, because of the folders being 3 deep, I was advised to ask support assistance.

And so i started to migrate from my old host. This went ok until recently when my site was corrupted by support.
After hours and lots of emails they eventually, reluctantly I felt, rectified the problem. My customers felt the pain, not JagPC.

Now they have decided to imposed a charge per request for multihost even though i specifically asked to have the ability to do this myself.

I think this is a stealth charge. It was not made up front and made clear to me in the beginning and I am not given the option to do it myself. In my cPanel it says unlimited multihost, it does not say there are restrictions on depth of folders nor was this ever made clear, nor a charge would be applied of double the longhorn account amount ($15 per time). The example in cPanel help shows 2 levels but does not say you cannot choose a sub folder of a sub folder if you so desire.
The cPanel demo was (and still is) offline so I could not review it before I took the plunge.

<<techname was not correct and he was updated about this (to request support help to set up multihost). The charges are not new, they have always been there. You were not charged before because of mistake by techs.>>

While he may have been incorrect it was actually the basis of my decision to move to JagPC.
Was not charged before and now I am, it is not fair to implement charges when you want to. It is not consistent.

I as the JagPC customer am the loser in this, not satisfied. I need to resolve this without incurring more expense on not so cheap plan. 2 months and I have had limited assistance in transfer, I am halfway migrated and totally stuffed.

I have seen other posts and I am still confident that someone will look at this in context and work with me to resolve this.

My focus is aimed at keeping my customers happy and this is quite stressful. I actually think it is an important part of running a good business. If I make a mistake I generally take the hit for it, I don't palm it off or get curt with my customers, I try to find a solution that keeps everyone happy.

Do I need to speak with someone again about my requirements, have pre sales mis sold me?

Do I downgrade to a cheaper package and go back to forwarding my domains.
In the long run I will save hundreds of dollars but it is not what I wanted, or could I meet my requirements by multihosting a domain to the second level folder and then multihosting on that domain
i.e make /root/alabama/ map to www.alabama.com

and then multihost under alabama.com to pick up the sub folders.
This would be a chosen route possibly, but is it possible.?

or can i do something with .htaccess to make this happen

I really need a solution and not a headache. I'm obviously a bit sore about this at the moment. I need proactive, not obstacles or more cost please. Surely in this day of creative thinking I can do this myself, or have the facility, within the realm of a semi dedicated server.

I emailed Greg but no response as yet, in fairness he may have emailed me and spam blocker collared it hence I am using the forum.

Hope the community can help me, I still have a bit of hope this will work out, I am strongly customer focussed and need to protect my customers from any more sloppy mistakes.

I want to be a happy JagPC customer.

Thanks in advance
Kevin

[Vin DSL]

Well... I would say your 'good houskeeping' is causing the problem. Is it really necessary to have your multihosted sites three layers deep? On face value, I would say, "No!"

If it was me, I'd nix the /<state>/ layer, and go from there. It seems to be adding an unnecessary level of complexity (and expense), IMHO -- and for what -- tidyness

Either that, or go with a reseller account. That way, everybody will have their own cPanel and so forth, e.g. added value for your customers, i.e. which is your expressed desire and stated goal.

[pgtips]

unfortunately it is necc to have the structure this way, it has to be root/region/custfolder as region folder contains other info as well

thanks.

[Gwaihir]

Indeed there are no charges for multihosting and you can do multihosting just fine. However, aside from hosting the domains from your account under their own name - which is what multihosting is - you want a specific folder structure for their data.

That 'region' layer is what's adding the expense. WHM/cPanel doesn't support such a 'region' layer. Therefore, if you want one, support needs to do all settings by hand and needs to be very carefull that neither they nor WHM/cPanel upgrades screw anything up later on due to the non-standard setup.

I'm glad JagPC makes YOU pay for that work, rather than all of us via the general price level. It is you who seem to have a very specific need for this structure, so it's up to you to figure out whether it's worth the cost. Personally, given the risks of future troubles, I wouldn't dream of messing with that. As for the region folders: they aren't accessible through your client's websites anyway, so why not just put them in a seperate place, like root/mymetadata/region ?

[JPC-Greg]

We support the things listed on our site through the control panel. The costs are being incurred becuase you need support to manually work on your site for you to acheive a specific effect. I would contend there are esier and better ways to do this such as mod rewrite, or a db of results by state, etc.

It wouldnt be hard to drive a site from a db listing of what clients are in what state, and the relative db data. That would also leave you free to use the tools in the cp that are instant and automated. There always has been a charge on those types of things but it sounds like someone did a few for you free at first.

You can keep doing it the way you are no but that needs to some manual editing of some conf files right now becuase cpanel doesnt support going that deep automatically. If you had a vps you could edit the conf files yourself, perhaps thats an option?

[jason]

When you were considering JPC did you actually explain how you wnated to set up your multihosted domains? If you simply asked "are they supported" then you got your answer--yes. JPC would have had no reason to tell you anything more unless you specifically explained how you intended to do things. They've probably never had anyone request anything different and therefore wouldn't have considered an alternative response.

When you signed up for service you signed up for a specific set of services. Custom configuration of multiple domains was not part of the agreement--automated installation of them was, but the automated system doesn't meet your needs. JPC has every right to charge you an additional price for a non-standard service to recover their costs of providing it.

As for the free domains that you got because of a mistake, consider them a gift. Just because you got something for free once doesn't mean you're entitled to it for life. I worked in retail several years ago. Sometimes an item would ring up at a price different from what was marked on a package. When that happened, we'd charge the custome the marked price and then check that the rest of our inventory on that item was priced properly. If the customer came back later, or the next day, and bought another of that item he wouldn't be entitled to the erroneous price simply because he got that price before. The same principle applies here.

JPC offers a 30 day guarantee on their services. The idea if you you to test drive what they offer to see if it works for you. If I were in your shoes, I would have signed up for the account and moved a couple of my customers sites over, using a dummy domain name or subdomains, so I could test the service out for a couple of weeks. If it met my needs then I'd start a formal migration. If not, I'd seek a refund and look for a new host. On that note, I think you'll be pretty hard pressed to find another host that is as accommodating as JPC. Most hosts I've seen either limit you to only doing those things that can be done in an automated manner or charge high prices for every little thing they have to do by hand. JPC, on the other hand, in most circumstances will give you the world for no extra cost. Some things, though, like manipulating server configurations, can be risky and require the time of a skilled tech to prevent the entire server from crashing. Therefore they sometimes need to impose an extra charge to recoup thier costs.

Now, to your problem...

Although I don't have any fancy directory nesting going on in my sites, I do share libraries among my sites. What I've done is set up a libraries directoy in my home directory (not my public_html, but one level higher). In there I have directories for each of my sites as well as a "common" directory where I keep things that I use on multiple sites. This system has worked well for me, and since it is outside of the public_html directroy it elimintes the risk of private information (such as DB passwords) being leaked to the web. I'd recommend using something similar for your sites.

If you provide some more info about the structure of your sites (either here or in a PM), I'd be happy to recommend a more specific setup for your needs.

--Jason