VPS down questions

[matzah]

This is more of a frustration question than anything else.

My VPS has been down since 130p eastern, and I logged a case at that time.

The responses from the "dream team" have been vague and distant with no technical information or any time frame available.

I am sure that this is not the 1st time a VPS has gone down that Jag manages, shouldnt there be some better infomration available other than responses like:
* Please wait
* check this thread (one showing they are aware its down and being worked)
* sorry for the inconvenience
* We are continously monitoring the server. Please wait

Where is it OK to draw the line between asking for help and being so frustrated that I want to leave Jag?

[JPC-Zishan]

Please PM your ticket number to any Manager or me and we will get back to you.

[jason]

Any time a server goes down the initial response will be vague. It usually takes at least a few minutes to a few hours to determine the cause of the problem and the best course of action to resolve it. Even then it is often little more than a guessing game and often the first thing you try doesn't work.

Don't be afraid to ask for more technical answers in your tickets. Providing support is like walking a tightrope. You need to provide clients with enough information to be helpful but not so much that it becomes overwhelming. In a bulk hosting environement client range from "barely able to turn on the computer" to highly technical and it is often difficult to gauge that from a ticket. Case in point: last week I was having trouble with my VPS. I am a pretty technical person, but not knowing much about Interworx I was having trouble diagnosing the problem. I opened a ticket and after a couple hours I got a pretty simple reply: "there was a configuration problem, we have fixed it." I wanted to know what the problem was so that I could watch out for it in the future, so I asked "can you explain, specifically, what was misconfigured?" About 15 minutes later I got a reply and momentarily felt stupid because the misconfiguration was my fault and, despite looking at the file in question several times, I completely missed it!

--Jason

[matzah]

Sorry for the delay in responding, spent much of the day putting out fires from yesteday's (approx) 11 hour outage.

Any time a server goes down the initial response will be vague. It usually takes at least a few minutes to a few hours to determine the cause of the problem and the best course of action to resolve it. Even then it is often little more than a guessing game and often the first thing you try doesn't work.

Don't be afraid to ask for more technical answers in your tickets. Providing support is like walking a tightrope. You need to provide clients with enough information to be helpful but not so much that it becomes overwhelming. In a bulk hosting environement client range from "barely able to turn on the computer" to highly technical and it is often difficult to gauge that from a ticket. Case in point: last week I was having trouble with my VPS. I am a pretty technical person, but not knowing much about Interworx I was having trouble diagnosing the problem. I opened a ticket and after a couple hours I got a pretty simple reply: "there was a configuration problem, we have fixed it." I wanted to know what the problem was so that I could watch out for it in the future, so I asked "can you explain, specifically, what was misconfigured?" About 15 minutes later I got a reply and momentarily felt stupid because the misconfiguration was my fault and, despite looking at the file in question several times, I completely missed it!
--Jason

I understand about different levels of understanding, but in my situation, I was asking for some specific problem details, and they were just not being provided.

And another sad not to tag on here, and the PM which will come next, is I received this response to a secondary issue which came up after the server was back on line.

Response from Jag: Can't say for sure that why it happened

Please PM your ticket number to any Manager or me and we will get back to you.

I will do just that here in a minute

[the_ancient]

you have to remember most of these guys are used to people that cant even understand how to set up a email account using cpanel so providing real technical info would confuse them, You deal with this from every host.

[matzah]

You have a valid point, but when I ask specific technical questions, and am on a VPS account, they should be able to "step it up a level" and respond to specific technical questions.

Just my 2 cents

[Frank Broughton]

Tech support people are a special cat. Just be glad they communicate at all. So what if they only read every fifth word and only the first sentence... haha

and so what if some of us talk to our computers....

Easy solution - only one sentence per ticket and most definitely only one item per ticket.

[matzah]

Been there, done that.

I have been in customer facing technical support roles for some 17 years, and have been accused of not reading the complete issue before jumping to conclusions.

I am also very careful to put only one issue per case/ticket... as we know you need to keep the numbers up to prove workload LOL