Faster Response Time on Support PLEASE

[BrandonSCSN]

I put in a request for a hostname change at 9 PM. Gets changed at 6 AM! Takes 9 hours?

Just put in another request for a cPanel license. Lets see how long this takes, its at 2 hours so far

-Brandon

[BrandonSCSN]

6 hrs so far

[BrandonSCSN]

7 hrs...

Maybe they will meet there typical 9 hr response time? Although on another VPS, my account information got lost in the sending, took them over 3 days to solve that.... (I.E., go in, resend account info)

[BrandonSCSN]

9 hrs...no response.

You going to make me wait an entire day UnixShell? 3 days?

[BrandonSCSN]

matta
Administrator

Last Activity: Today 05:05 PM
Offline

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Nice to see someones at least watching whats going on. Too bad no one is answering support tickets.

[BrandonSCSN]

The ticket number is 8601...just in case some staff want to check it out

[BrandonSCSN]

11 hrs...

Good response time here folks!

[BrandonSCSN]

12 hrs...

Half a day

Great....

[BrandonSCSN]

"Originally Submitted: 22 hours ago"

Ok, well they finished it after 22 hours.

Good to see some fast responses here

[chip]

Perhaps if you were looking for a premium support solution, you'd look into an actual TekTonic account. As per the "About" page (you *did* read that before purchasing, right?):

unixshell# is a service from TekTonic, one of the leading providers of Virtual Private Servers. Management noticed that many technically oriented customers were signing up who required little or no support and wanted a virtual server that was more capable of the duties a real dedicated server could perform.

...

If you are interested in a VPS, but require high quality support we recommend you consider TekTonic as your provider.

Notice that nobody else seems to be having issues with slow support. At least to me, you come across as a whining customer who is probably not worth the hassle to sell service to - but then I'm not a businessman. Were eight replies really necessary?

[deeperbydesign]

While I think that the number of posts about the slow support was a bit much, I tend to disagree with chip's post.

I think that support needs to be defined very clearly here. In my understanding (Matt, correct me if I am wrong), unixshell# is delivering a fantastically priced solution without the hand-holding. This is typically what is meant by "unmanaged" and service like this is aimed at able sysadmins. HOWEVER, that does not mean you get no support. To me support in the unixshell# sense of the word is more like customer service. That means response to outages, host VM crashes and upgrades/downgrades, etc. If unixshell# is trying to run a competent, professional business that attracts actual clients doing actual business on their VMS (and I think they are), then this sort of service is a must. Without that level of support/service/whatever unixshell# is only going to attract tinkerers and the few h4x0r kids that can live without IRC.

I've had my ups and downs since I've been here, having almost cancelled my account due to slow responses to problems at several points. But I've stuck it out because it is such a good idea and priced very competitively. And things have gotten much, much better over time.

That's my 2 cents.

[matta]

Yes you do get support and for major problems responses are generally very quick.

The problem I have with the original poster is the hostname change took 9 hours and as all current customers know a hostname change on our end is cosmetic only, users can change their hostname inside their VPS whenever they like themselves.

The other problem is the cPanel license request was a sales issue. Most companies sales departments are not even open on the weekends and very, very few have 24/7 sales. No general support person is allowed to assign software licenses so it needs to wait for someone with sales access (ie. Me, David, Kevin) and we do not work the night shift.

In short if his server had been down/slow I can see complaining about the response times (although night time support staff is more than capable of taking care of this). As I see it 9 hours for a cosmentic only change and 22 hours (across saturday night / sunday morning EST) for a sales request is not bad at all.

[dgirgis]

I agree with Chip and Matt.
Non-critical support actions should normally be handled during business hours. For example, say on Saturday 3pm EST I open a ticket to upgrade my VPS from 32MB of RAM to 64MB of RAM, I wouldn't expect anyone to work on this until Monday.
No let's say my screaming 32MB VPS won't boot, won't accept an OS load and needs to be reset somehow. I submit a 911 ticket (3pm EST) explaining the problem, I would expect the support person oncall/onduty to be able to push some buttons and get my VPS back in action.
There is a difference between the above two examples, one is an actual emergency and the other is not. I have seen quite a few requests on the board for 911 support that is not a 911 situation.

From the unixshell.com support page:
System Administrators ARE available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in event of emergencies.

Perhaps the word emergencies should be bolded?

Dave

[deeperbydesign]

[QUOTE=dgirgis]I agree with Chip and Matt.
Non-critical support actions should normally be handled during business hours. For example, say on Saturday 3pm EST I open a ticket to upgrade my VPS from 32MB of RAM to 64MB of RAM, I wouldn't expect anyone to work on this until Monday.
No let's say my screaming 32MB VPS won't boot, won't accept an OS load and needs to be reset somehow. I submit a 911 ticket (3pm EST) explaining the problem, I would expect the support person oncall/onduty to be able to push some buttons and get my VPS back in action.
There is a difference between the above two examples, one is an actual emergency and the other is not.[/QUOTE]

To clarify my point, I agree completely. My post was mainly to rebutt the common argument in the forums that "there is NO support, unixshell# is for leet script kiddies - screw your business." That is almost certainly not what chip meant here, but that argument has gotten to be like a broken record to me.

[dballant]

I use unixshell because I know what I am doing and don't need to pay for a huge administration or support team. I have had no issues on real support questions and find the forum the best place to post any issues.

Great product and service... Does what it says!!

[DJ_Max]

[QUOTE=dballant]I use unixshell because I know what I am doing and don't need to pay for a huge administration or support team. I have had no issues on real support questions and find the forum the best place to post any issues.

Great product and service... Does what it says!![/QUOTE]
I agree, I chose Unixshell because I wanted something to experiment with Ruby & Rails, along with other uncommon software. I also use Linux as my main desktop, and have managed servers, so I don't need support.

What I see here is a guy that can't do a mundane task like changing his own hostname, and wanting a sales response on a off day. Looks like he needs a fully managed plan.

Perhaps the word emergencies should be bolded?
Yeah, it should, but I doubt it will stop everyone from posting the same type of thread, seeing as people don't like to read, and want everything for nothing.

[BrandonSCSN]

As soon as someone responds to this problem:

http://unixshell.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2151

And gets back to my ticket with a SOLUTION, I would be more then happy to agree with the rest of you

Heh

[milegrin]

I signed up 4 days ago and have heard nothing but static :eek: on getting things up and running and no repsonse to any of the tickets raised... - so much for a 24hour turn around time.

So far I have been VERY dissapointed with teh level of service from unixshell. It is not only professional but curtious to at least reply to tickets or requests with a simple "waiting for hardware - ETA Dec 2007" or something along those lines. Maybe put up a notice when you sign up to say there is a delay of X-days and offer the option to continue or abort. Would save tons of bad publicity and aggrivated clients. :(

Maybe it is time for a refund and go elsewhere.... :mad:

[Imdsm]

[QUOTE=milegrin]I signed up 4 days ago and have heard nothing but static :eek: on getting things up and running and no repsonse to any of the tickets raised... - so much for a 24hour turn around time.

So far I have been VERY dissapointed with teh level of service from unixshell. It is not only professional but curtious to at least reply to tickets or requests with a simple "waiting for hardware - ETA Dec 2007" or something along those lines. Maybe put up a notice when you sign up to say there is a delay of X-days and offer the option to continue or abort. Would save tons of bad publicity and aggrivated clients. :(

Maybe it is time for a refund and go elsewhere.... :mad:[/QUOTE]

Maybe unixshell# feel they want a que of people who have paid to setup as other people leave?

[matta]

It is a rather viscious cycle actually. People submit tickets and complain when we don't respond on the forums "as it could allow people to get quicker answers" and when we post to the forums people complain about not getting personalized replies to tickets :)

The entire setup delay issue has been clogging up support, I apologize for that. Imagine how many people are putting 4+ posts here and then just imagine how many are also submitting duplicate tickets to both sales and support depts.

As far as alerting customers of delays, we have done this before and have done it now. Since 3 days ago the following has been at the top of the order form:


[color=orange]* Due to increased demand account setup times are estimated to be 3 to 6 days at this time.

[/color]