It would really help most of us if DiscountASP would post problems occurring with the servers, WEB or EMAIL. In the last few months my sites have been down because of problems at discountASP and there was no way of getting information on the problem or when they would fixed.Every time this happenswe get phone calls from our customers and we don't have any answers for them. It makes us look like we don't know what we are doing and that we are not in control of their business web sites. I recommend that DiscountASP use this forum to notify it's users of issues and problems with a clear discription of the problem and estimated time of resolution. This would give us the information we need to support our customer base. Presently email is down on ALL ofour sites and I have no way of knowing when my customers will be getting their email back. Thanks for listening....
Again, same basic problem with DiscountASP...how many times do you guys need to hear this complaint before you actually become proactive and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. All email is down, either through POP, IMAP or the web app. There is NO NOTIFICATION that an ongoing, global problem is occuring in the admin panel, AGAIN, I have to hear about it from my customers and AGAIN DiscountASP is doing nothing to assist us in keeping our customers (read YOUR CUSTOMERS DISCOUNTASP). Mail is down, no status on why/when it may be up. How hard is this for you guys to do? Seriously, it is getting ridiculous now.
Here we are, six months later, and no comment by DASP regarding this issue. We have no mention of a plan to notify DASP customers of unexpected downtimes. Just like the time before that when DASP said something was in the works and now we know nothing is in the works, DASP has no plans of making its customers lives easier with some kind of downtime notification process. I think it is ridiculous and I find it very unprofessional that DASP doesn't care at all about this issue.
There are comments from us in other threads. Your stance seems to be that if we do not make notifications in the way that you would like us to make them, that we 'don't care at all' about the issue. That is not the case. We do have a system in pace for global outage notifications (there was a notice posted in Control Panel during the webmail outage last Friday), and incidentally, we worked on improving and refining the process earlier this week. mjp DiscountASP.NET <SUB><SUP>http://DiscountASP.NET
My stance is definately not that if you don't make notifications my way that you don't care at all. My stance is that some six or more months later, from the posting I have participated in, your response was yeah we need something like that and then nothing, nada, nil. I think you can agree that the lack of communication from DSAP on the issue suggests that nothing is being done, nothing is planned and so we will all go back to the non-functional status quo. This implies a we "don't care at all" about the issue attitude. Obviously you have listened and while the response time leaves much to be desired; moving forward I think the system you used on 9 Feb 2007 was effective. Did you see me complain about anything that day? No because I was informed on the Control Panel. I think you might have, prior to the outage, notifed people that you had a system in place for notification of problems and what that system was. I get some spam from you guys but nothing as informative as this email would have been. I look forward to even better outage alert system and appriciate your, although extremely slow, response to our needs. Frankly, I am pleased with the service and although GoDaddy is now a strong SQL/ASP competitor of yours, I plan on staying with DASP. However, a consistent frustration is your lack of communication with your customers. I think you guys could really improve in this area. Right now, you seem a little standoffish and defensive.
You seem to be complaining that while we did post a communication during the webmail outage - as you previously requested - we did not notify you beforehand that we would be doing so. I'm not really sure how to respond to that. Again, (non-critical) communication is a balancing act, and we have to find a level that serves users without irritating them. That's not easy when you have 25 users, let alone a thousand times that many. There is an opt-in mailing list for those who want to be notified of system changes and upgrades, you can join it here: https://my.discountasp.net/news.aspx (look for the 'Join the Opt-In Mail List' link in the right column). As for something like a webmail outage, the only reasonable notice is in Control Panel. We cannot send email to all users for an issue that does not affect all users. If there is a global or server-wide issue, we can use email notification. mjp DiscountASP.NET <SUB><SUP>http://DiscountASP.NET
I have worked 2 years to scrape for $20.00 per month paid subscribers, and have now finally gotten to a point of a small comfort zone. It takes me a month to net 30 subscribers. Today I lost 38 subscribers, tomorrow will be worse. Everything will be gone in a week. I don't care about technical jargon. Steps should have been taken. I am in Philadelphia for my mothers funeral, and now must hop a plane back to Tampa Bay BEFORE the funeral, to use my backups to salvage what I have left with a new ISP. I never should have signed up to a company who doesn't care enough to publish a customer support phone number. This REALLY SUCKS. ClickLoads.com, LiveLoads.com, TruckingPlanet.com, FreightCredit.com, Stepdecks.com, TruckingWebs.com Ron p.s. The billing department is working fine, just got billed over $500.00 this week.
Ron, I am sorry to hear about your mother. I am also sorry that you are planning to leave, considering that the problem has been effectively dealt with. Where I have to take issue with you though, is when you imply that a phone number would have made any difference in dealing with this issue. I understand the perception that many people have is any company that doesn't provide phone support is just cheap, and doesn't care about the quality of support. But the reality is quite the opposite. The decision to offer email only support is based on our experience in the hosting industry, going back the earliest days of its existence. Telephone support is not cost effective, and on any but the smallest of scales, inevitably leads to an overall degradation of technical support. There are a lot of reasons for that, which I won't go into here, but it has held true in all of our past experiences, and you can see examples of it right now at other hosting companies. Had there been a phone number to call during this outage you would have heard the same thing from the person on the other end of the phone that you could read on the status page, or here in the forum. If our senior network engineer had picked up your call, he would have told you the same thing that was posted, because for much of the time there simply were not any other answers to give. mjp DiscountASP.NET - Microsoft Gold Certified Partner - asp.netPRO Magazine 2007 Readers' Choice Award for Best Hosting Service - Visual Studio Magazine 2007 Readers' Choice Award for Best Hosting Service
Need help, we still cannot reach you guys tracert to Discountasp.net fails. Tried ns1.realtime.net and ns1.outserv.net. My local dns servers and ns.sun.com. None of them can locate www.DiscountAsp.net Can anyone out there see them. I was able to find the ip for this site and login in but can't login thru the control panel. Ed
I used Carneige Mellon Web service to perform a traceroute to our ns servers and it resolved correctly http://www.net.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/neto...traceroute&.submit=Submit+Query&.cgifields=op Results from: /usr/sbin/traceroute ns1.discountasp.net: traceroute to ns1.discountasp.net (209.200.166.3), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets further more If I perform a ping to our ns server and domain it did resolve correctly C:\>ping www.discountasp.net Pinging www.discountasp.net [64.79.161.6] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 64.79.161.6: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=53 Reply from 64.79.161.6: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=53 Reply from 64.79.161.6: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=53 Reply from 64.79.161.6: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=53 Ping statistics for 64.79.161.6: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 8ms, Maximum = 8ms, Average = 8ms C:\>ping ns1.discountasp.net Pinging ns1.discountasp.net [209.200.166.3] with 32 bytes of data: Unfortunately DNS updates can take a long time to fully propagate over the internet. This is the nature of the internet and being as big as it is. For emails you should be able to use IP address to connect to the mail server and webmail. Unfortunatelyl if you have an account that does not have a Unique IP address you will not be able to pullup your website using the shared IP address.
To MJP and DASP, You are missing the point in everyone?s frustration. The fact that we didn't know if anyone is working on the problem nor did we receive a response. I reported the issue to Tech Support at 9:15 AM CST and waited for almost 4 hours to get response. I understand that your Tech Support was down but how are we to know that DASP is working on the issue. Even a phone number that describes the current status of the network would be sufficient. I should have to wait 4 HOURS to find out that you're being attacked. We're not asking you to break the bank but how can you quantify a 4-hour response time as adequate/acceptable support. I know this would cost DASP more resources but why don't you survey your customers and better yet, provide an additional option for phone support. I would actually pay extra, per month, to talk to someone on the phone when I?m waiting 4 hours to receive a response.</o> </o> The simple fact is YOUR CUSTOMERS want to know ASAP what is going wrong with any disruption with their service (Website, Database, E-mail, and etc) when DASP first finds out. This would include if it were your upstream provider orDASP. A lot of my headaches could have been alleviated if I was able to explain what is going on withour website instead of looking like an idiot attempting to defend DASP (my choice for hosting) to management. Your supporters andcustomers, expect to deliver with minimal disruption in everyday business functions. </o> </o>We would hope that DASP would take this feedback and challenge your peers and DASP management (the one that makes decisions) and improve your communication with your customers and supporters. Richard
