How is discountasp.net staffed?

Can anybody give me an idea of how regular and database support is staffed here?

I logged a problem late last night with the fact that I am having database access problems. My userid is correct and my password is correct. It has not changed at all. All I did was a database restore (see my other post) which said it worked fine. This happened once before - they had to reset permissions. My last ticket update said they would have a DBA look at it.

But since that time (going on 8+ hours) my site has been down because of this issue. I am actively looking for another ASP.NET hosting company because of this. 8 hour turnaround time on website/database support is business killer with online businesses.

Is there really 24/7 support available on the hosting and the database side? I cannot believe this is taking this long.

Patrick

 

I am curious as to why there is not staff on 24/7 that can solve all issues ? Shouldn't there be a way for customers to really get 24/7 support for any issue ? If you escalate it to somebody that is not there that is not really much of an escalation. My issue was put on hold.

Patrick

 

Don't update my ticket asking for an update?

So....
If my website and/or database is down and it cannot be resolved with whatever staff (definitely not senior) is onsite my problem will wait until they get in and take a look at it. However I will not be told this in the ticket - that nobody is there to look at my issue and that it will wait for hours until somebody will be in to look at it.

And during this time if my website is down don't update my ticket asking for a resolution or a status of the person who is looking at it?

 

Was my ticket updated with the sentence:

"I have escalate your issue to our DBA, they will reply to you soon."

Without a DBA actually being onsite?

 

Patrick,

What Bruce is saying is replying to the ticket or sending a new ticket on an existing issue can delay the response. That's the way the helpdesk system works. You don't have to follow that advice, you can reply as many times as you'd like. It just isn't in your best interest to do so.

The overnight support staff can solve 99% of the problems that are reported during their shifts. I don't know of any web host (or other businesses for that matter) that maintain a full staff 24 hours a day that mirrors the staff available during normal business hours. It just isn't done, for a variety of reasons.

I understand that when you have a problem that support cannot address in the middle of the night, you don't really care about how the business is run, you just want your problem fixed. But every support department is run the same way, you have most of your staff available when most of the contact comes in.

Support and admins are available 24 hours a day, that's necessary, and it goes without saying. But it just isn't feasible or cost effective to have other more specialized members of the staff on duty around the clock. I think you would have a very difficult time finding a host that could guarantee you access to a DBA every minute of every day. You might find one who will say they can provide that, but I think you would find that in reality, it isn't the case.

 

I have to echo Patrick's concerns here. If you're going to advertise 24x7 support, you should have 24x7 support. And I don't consider "support" to mean that you have someone there to flag the ticket as "escalated" and essentially put it on hold until someone knowledgable shows up in the morning. "24x7 support" means someone is there 24x7 who actually knows how to resolve issues. Otherwise I could start up a "24x7 Support Service" just by having some software monitor an inbox and send back a canned "Your request has been escalated" message, then show up to respond every couple of days or so...

Thereason this irks me is that I was doing an update that required some intervention by support to change an IIS setting, and I wanted to make it happen during off-hours- which I thought was possible due to the 24x7 support claim - but it ended up not happening until the next morning. You guys should just be more upfront as to what times things can actually get done.

 

I work in IT just like a lot of us do. If there is an issue that cannot be resolved by somebody onsite it is escalated and someone is paged or called. Somebody does not have to be onsite 24/7, but they should be available. This is just good business.

 

You can't ask someone to work for 8 or 10 hours a day and then tell them they also have to be on call 24 hours a day. Okay, I take that back - you can do that, but the end result is that person will be burned out in six months and go find another job.

Finding qualified admin-level people and putting together a competent and capable staff in general is a difficult task. In order to completely cover every possible issue every minute of every day would require three separate competent and capable staffs. I can tell you that even in a large city like Los Angeles, making that happen would be next to impossible. If you did dedicate yourself to seeking out and hiring that second and third staff, the cost would be enormous, and that cost would have to be reflected in the cost of the end product.

Many hosts that advertise 24/7/365 support outsource the work. So when you call at 3 a.m. Los Angeles time, you speak to "Bob" in India or the Philippines, and maybe "Bob" can solve your problem, maybe not. If "Bob" has root access to the servers, he may make your problem worse. I saw this happen on almost a daily basis at the host I worked for before coming to DiscountASP. That's not a slam against tech workers in India or elsewhere, it's just a fact of life when a large, important part of your staff is located thousands of miles from where your business really functions.

 

I totally understand why your support is set up the way it is and really don't have a problem with that. I just think it should be spelled out a little better. Maybe on your support pages say "this is what we can do 24x7" and "this is what will have to wait until normal business hours". That way we know what to expect.

 

mjp,

Can I please ask a favor? As the DBA is resolving these issue can the cause, effect and resolution be logged someplace - possibly in the KB. That way next time it happens the onsite staff could take care of it instead of the DBA? I don't know how complicated my past two database issues were, but neither of them were resolved in a rapid manner. This latest one was 12+ hours from notification to resolution. I am sure it would really help your current and future business if you can find a way to insure that no ticket ever takes that long.

I am surprised that you don't have some kind of ticket turnaround time promise. Based on the severity of the ticket (which we also do NOT get to pick.Improvement is needed here) it would be a good idea to guarantee that it will take no longer than x amount of time. This is very common in IT and in the hosting industry. A SEV1 (Website/Database Down, server error) gets a 30m guarantee, etc. Because you have no SLA and because we cannot select the priority my ticket is flagged as no less and no more important than any other ticket. But I bet issue came and went during my 12 hour ticket that probably did not cause the ticket initiators website to be completely unavailable.

I do understand your points about staffing. But there has to be a better way than this. There are several posts in these forums about poor turnaround time- just like there are several posts about good turnaround time. Please please take some action to improve in this area.

Patrick

 

Jamie,

It wouldn't really be feasible to compile a list of every possible issue and then unequivocally state how long each will take to resolve. It would be interesting to attempt to compile the list, but it wouldn't be very wise to publish it, considering that no other host on earth exposes such a list. We all have the same support issues, and for the most part we all handle them the same way, with the same strengths and weaknesses.

The bottom line is if you want to be able to pick up the phone and speak to someone who can solve any possible problem with a hosting account (essentially an admin-level support person), you are going to pay a considerable amount of money for the service. Honestly, I don't even know if such a service exists. It may on a cost-per-call basis. But it certainly doesn't, and couldn't, at an inexpensive shared hosting company.

Patrick,

We do add things that can be of use to a good number of our users to the KB, and there is also a private KB that staff has access to that goes into more detail on some more obscure problems. If your issue is one that would be beneficial to add to the internal or public KB, we will certainly do so. All of these issues are discussed in two weekly meetings, and our aim is to make as much information available to as much of the staff as possible.

If I can do a little flag waving here...I honestly think DiscountASP has the most efficient and painstaking support system and staff that I have ever worked with (I have worked for four different hosting companies over the past 10+ years). I'm not going to claim that it's perfect, that would be ridiculous. But it is the best I've seen, and I think they do a great job supporting our users. Everyone cares about what they do, and that in itself is unusual. You can take that with a grain of salt, since I work here, but I really believe it, because I see it every day.

 

Thanks for the response.

Your support system is good, but I have personally seen better and worse. I know of at least one other hosting company I am where there ticket response time can be measured in minutes. And quite often under 5. They are not staffed large at all, but they are very good about communication. That is another issue at play here. My ticket up was updated to say "I have escalated... and someone will reply soon". And that was the only update for hours. Now if he had said that the DBA would not be in for 6 hours and you will get an updated then it would have been equally frustrating. But at least I'd have a clue as to what was going on with my issue.

Out of curiosity what will now happen in the future so my tickets do not take 12 hours to get a response ? What is going to be different next time this happens? That is not meant to be challenging, but this is an issue (communication, response time) that really should not be left as unaddressed. Otherwise what will prevent it from happening to me or another customer again?

Thanks,
Patrick

 

A 5 minute response time is all well and good, but it's a meaningless number. Your point here as I understand it isn't that you didn't get a timely response, it's that you didn't get resolution to your problem as quickly as you would have liked.

The other host - the one with the 5 minute response time - would not have a DBA working on your problem within 5 minutes in the middle of the night. I can guarantee that, and I don't even know which host you are referring to. If an entire database server was down you might get a 5 minute response.

What will be different next time you need a database-specific response? I can't say, there are a million variables in a question like that. If you send your ticket at the moment the DBA is in helpdesk refreshing the ticket list, you may have an answer in 30 seconds. If you want me to say that we are going to change something in our procedure to ensure that no database issue will persist for more than X minutes or hours, I can't do that.

The nature of this business, hosting tens of thousands of sites, is to respond in an emergency fashion to things that are an emergency for many users. An emergency for one user is a very bad thing when you are that user, granted, but instant, personalized, "I'll take care of that for you right away Patrick!" kind of service comes at a steep cost, as I mentioned earlier.

 

This is unfortunate but tells me a lot about my worth as a customer.

Thanks,
Patrick

 

But I'm telling you the truth, and a shared host that says that they will tend to your specific problem 24/7/365 is not telling you the truth. It's easy to make statements and claims on a web site. And it is easy to provide a response to every incoming email within a few minutes. It is more difficult to deal with specific issues that crop up, sometimes requiring significant amounts of time to investigate and remedy. That's the way it is.

I will reiterate that everyone here cares about their work, and that work is 100% customer oriented. Everything we do, and certainly everything support and billing do, is in response to customer need. So the customers are everything. But we cannot be everything to every customer. It is only realistic to expect to be perfect for most people but fall short for some. That's unfortunate, but it's the nature of the business. That's why there are high cost, specialized hosts out there, to meet needs that shared hosting cannot.

 

Patrick,

We responded to you at 10:51 a.m. with a suggestion to help avoid this problem in the future, but the message bounced (mailbox is full: retry timeout exceeded).

 

Thanks Eric. I can definitely see how multiple tickets can jam up the system, but the FIFO change doesn't make sense to me. Then again, I haven't worked a support desk, so maybe it makes more sense logistically from support side.


On another note, what kind of ticket volume does the staff have to handle? I'd imagine there are a lot of "little" things that some users decide to create a ticket for, rather than searching the KB or forums to find the answer first (thus bogging down the staff).

 

Come on now, you seriously expect us to believe the you can't look at the time the original request was sent in and base the FIFO status on the original ticket creation?!?!?! That's absurd. So if we come across information in troubleshooting a problem, we should abstain from posting it, because we'll be bumped out of position???? I personally haven't had any issues with really slow support, but from a 3rd party looking at this thread and the "don't keep adding to your ticket" comment, it looks likethe support staffjust doesn't want to be contacted. Either the comment was wrong, orsomeone there needs to make a code adjustment. Posting additional information or requesting an update should NEVER "not be in your best interest."

 

They didn't mention the Gnomes.
For my DASP accounts support tickets are resolved so quickly I know there must be Gnomes there.

 

I work for a support department...actually, I support the support department where I work for my day job. We call it 'following the sun', which essentially means that there is always someone awake and able to work the tickets that come in. I can understand that Discount Asp.net may not have the staff available for that, but perhaps you might consider partnering with another hosting company in England to be able to do 'follow the sun'. Just a thought. It would be a benefit for both of you, and makes great sense if I was running the show.

In any case, I've found the support to be fine for my needs so far. But I also haven't had any real issues either.

Keep up the great work guys!

Wayne