Hi,
Ok, so in the past I have posted negative posts on this forum and done alot of shouting when my vps went down, noone was communicating with me and other issues, very much fuelled by my clients shouting at me because "their iphone has disconnected from their email" which is usually the first thing to 'alert' them almost instantly that the server is down... the age of constant connections wherever we go hey!
I shout when things go wrong and it's affecting my business but I have always said, I will equally give credit where it's due.
Last week I purchased a new dedicated server (the one offered by Mark to existing customers), dual drives, raid, and in MK datacentre, spent Thursday and Friday setting it all up, upgrading to suphp etc,making sure its exactly as the semi was. Friday night support went dead, emails were not answered, online chat long waiting times and after whinging abit I remembered it was new years day, so understandable!
I had recently been looking at other server/vps providers and had many chasing after me. However, I stayed with Eukhost partly because of the dedicated offer, but mainly because of the customer support, they are humans, like all of us, sometimes get things wrong, but the main thing is they thrive to improve those things. You hear people say on the forums they had a bad experience with online chat, yes sometimes you get the ones where its a big long few minutes then two word answer and you think 'arghh' - but overall there are some GREAT people at Eukhost who do thrive to give good support.
I was considering putting the migration off until next weekend, but then Saturday morning I got an email from Cristiano in dedicated support. Once given the go ahead he migrated all my websites, he even spotted that I'd set up several things on the dedicated and changed the way he was going to migrate so the settings were not wiped out (which has happened in the past - you spend hours setting up, then the migration resets everything) - This was very important, I was impressed.
2 hours later he emailed me and asked me to check all accounts, there was various kinks, he ironed them out, then migrated my old ip's to the new server, changed all the website ip's back to the old ip's and the new server was instantly alive.
There was some dns problems, mainly in the dns zones, sites going to default page etc and brute force cphulk wasn't connecting to mysql, but he solved all that. He stayed actively on email all the way through the process, until about 7-8pm. That man works long days! And today he's been trying to sort the ip port scan problem we have with opendns.
During the last 8-9 months since moving from shared hosting elsewhere, to semi dedicated with eukhost and to the dedicated server, I have learnt a massive amount about servers etc. Part of this is forced learning when things went wrong and I spent hours on the net, at the time at the expense of not getting paid work done, but I think I've come to realise that it really helps when running a hosting service if you have some good knowledge of how things work and then, together with customer support from Eukhost things can be resolved faster. You also have more understanding of what Euk do when they change settings. I think if I was to make a suggestion, I would say customer support need to be more open, especially with more advanced customers like us (vps, semi and dedi) what they actually do to 'make things work', then next time, we can solve it ourselves, it lightens the load on the support teams. Sometimes in the past we were not told what was done to correct a problem, so have to raise another ticket later if it occurs again.
I am very happy to go into 2010 with a dedicated server and as mark said to me, it's a great upgrade. Hopefully this is our road ahead for zero downtime and I can begin attracting more customers
Zero downtime means less time spent dealing with server issues and more doing paid work and attracting new clients! (Happy clients!)
I would like to say a VERY big thank you to Cristiano for his awesome support yesterday and for the smooth migration with no downtime. He is a pleasure to deal with. High Five to you Cristiano, top man.
Equally I would like to say big thanks to Alex P (Senior Sys Admin) who set up my dedicated, Mark (CMO) for his support while making the decision to go ahead with the dedicated (and for reserving a spare one for the future!) and all the other guys on the dedicated team.
I would also like to say thanks to the vps team for their support while I've been a vps customer, Alan V, Scott M, Mike K, Sam R etc!
Hope my vps has gone to a good home, it's been very reliable the last 2 months with 99.7% uptime.
Here's to 2010!
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