PLEASE NOTE BEFORE READING THIS THAT THE ISSUE HAS BEEN SUCCESSFULLY RESOLVED

I have been using Rackshack's dedicated cobalt raq system for a few months.

In early August I transferred a large site from ***** to Rackshack. I ran some small sites on Rackshack first and everything seemed fine so I went ahead and started moving some of my more important sites over one-by-one.

I had a DNS issue that was finally resolved with the help of a user on this forum, but which took about 3 weeks to get to the bottom of. Rackshack was extremely unhelpful with this problem. They continually told me that they knew what the problem was, that they had fixed it, and that in 24 hours the DNS changes would propogate and my domain would be fine. But after three weeks of nights in the support chat and on the phone I finally gave up and asked for help here. My problem was resolved quickly through the use of these forums.

The fact that Rackshack tech support didn't know how to fix my problem is not the issue. It was tricky and outside the realm of their responsibility and/or experience. My frustration is that I was continually told that they KNEW what the problem was and that they had fixed it. Yet as far as I can tell, no one actually investigated the problem at all.

So the end result was that my important site acted funny for a few weeks. Some users could get in and others couldn't, but I survived the mess that was created and was ready to move on.

About a week after everything settled down I decided to order new RAM for my server. I ordered an upgrade from 256 MB of RAM to 512 MB of RAM. My order was processed and I was notified that the order would be executed within 48 hours (as I recall, may have been 24 hours but I'm trying to err in Rackshack's favor).

A couple days later I looked at the ticket and it had been closed with a comment that the work had been performed and the customer had been charged.

I went and looked at my RAQ and it still had 256 MB of RAM. I went to the support chat and talked to a tech rep who said he made note of the problem and would make sure my RAM was upgraded the next day.

Every day for the following week I went into the support chat or called on the phone to ask why my RAM wasn't upgraded. Every day I was told that it was an oversight, that a note had been made of my request, and that the problem would be rectified the following day.

Finally, yesterday, I noticed that my server was down. I watched it for about an hour and didn't see it coming back up. So I went to Rackshack's chat program and asked what was going on.

I was told that my RAM was being upgraded and my server would be back up in 15 minutes. An hour later I checked again.

Over the next several hours I asked repeatedly "Are you sure my server is down for a RAM upgrade?" and I was told definitiveely "Yes, that is why it is down". I was continually told to check back in 15 minutes and it would be back up and running.

After about 8 hours of this I finally was told that the hard drive in my server failed. I asked if it failed after the RAM was installed. I was told that there was no RAM being installed. So I asked when did my server go down and why didn't anyone tell me this the first 20 times I called/chatted. Then someone else came into the chat program and told me that the RAM was in fact installed. My server was taken down for a RAM upgrade and would not come back up. So they were going to bring the Raq in from the colo to the office to check on it.

Finally at 9:00 last night I spoke to a technician, who told me that the drive was toast, that there was nothing he could do, and that my machine would be set back up with a fresh drive. Rackshack does not make any backups of their servers and does not offer an option to do so.

I asked Rackshack to please keep the drive and send it to me so that I can try to recover the lost data. I waited for the server to be brought back up so I could start trying to sort out the nightmare that I was experiencing but finally went to sleep depressed at about midnight when the server still wasn't up.

I logged into my machine this morning, a completely fresh install, and I saw that the RAM was STILL 256 MB. So the RAM had not actually been installed. Clearly, everything their support reps told me on the phone or in chat was uninformed speculation.

I finally gave up on sitting in chat purgatory and called their VP of technical support. Robert listened to me and told me that he would get to the bottom of it and call me back within an hour.

Robert never called me back.

I will keep everyone informed of how things progress.

Jim

You don't always get what you want...but you DO get what you pay for. :)
This is a really depressing story. Goes right along with the rest of my day. I hope everything works out for you.

>>> but you DO get what you pay for <<<

:sickface:
That phrase is often complete BS!

In the real world, you often get much more than you pay for or much less than you pay for.

Haven't you ever paid for the top of the line and still been screwed? Spending more money to spend more money is just waste.

My advice to the original person: At $99, consider getting two servers with two different companies. Cover your bases against any type of failure. Consider it insurance against what happened.

Sorry to see what happend.

Well, unfortunately, all I can say -- good luck trying to resolve this. :( I had similar problems with them last week, although not as bad -- I didn't lose all of the data (described in detail here: http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19822 ) -- and even though their CEO and VP of technical support are aware of it, there have been zero effort on their part to do anything about it. Well, actually, negative effort, as they accused me of refusing to give them the admin password to the box (which they already knew anyway as it was never changed from the inital account setup).

I'm glad there's a place like this for people to speak up. Even if I never see the $450 I paid for the defective server they refuse to refund, there's hope that this will drive enough business away from RackShack so that they'll eventually decide to improve their poor support. Although seeing as their CEO and VP of tech support aren't very concerned about all this, I doubt it'll happen any time soon...

Damn that sucks :( I was condidering a box there, now I am not quite sure as I have heard 2 horror stories from them. Sounds like you cant depend on there support, just do it yourself if you can manage or look for support elsewhere. I was in there IRC chan just idling seeing what was going on, saw the same "Were having someone fix it" or "Were sending someone out there" etc. To witch allot of people seemed to be left hanging. But for the price I guess you cant expect much.

The problem with the servers hard disk i have heard on other boards could be a hardware problem, but this hasn't been confirmed.

I would still get a server with them Will5404 though. I have seen a lot worse support and the prices were an influence on us when we looked at them.

My advice, if you need support, don't use RS. It's sad, but it's also true. Lucky for me, I require very little support so my service from them has been great. For the price, it's a good deal.

Originally posted by will5404
I was in there IRC chan just idling seeing what was going on, saw the same "Were having someone fix it" or "Were sending someone out there" etc. To witch allot of people seemed to be left hanging. But for the price I guess you cant expect much.

what is their irc server address?

Originally posted by jbourke

I finally gave up on sitting in chat purgatory and called their VP of technical support. Robert listened to me and told me that he would get to the bottom of it and call me back within an hour.

Robert never called me back.

I will keep everyone informed of how things progress.

Jim

very F'ed that their vp didnt even call back

When my server @ RS kept turning my non-APOP to APOP accounts, I called and the guy started swearing beause he didnt know what was up, and then he said that he rebooted the server and it will work again - then quickly said by and hung up (few days ago)...is it me or is that a completly f'd professional way of handling things... and it didnt even fix the problem.

Lol.... Like I said, if you are looking for support, you are not going to be happy with RS.

Originally posted by Reg
Lol.... Like I said, if you are looking for support, you are not going to be happy with RS. :agree:

Mr. Bourke,

While it is true I did not personally call you back, as I had several other major issues that popped up this afternoon, I did ask our system administrator to call you with an update to your hard drive issue. I thought, obviously erroneously, that you would rather discuss the issue with the person actually doing the work. I look on it as taking the car to the dealer for service and being told there is a major engine problem. I would rather talk to the mechanic who actually diagnosed the problem and did the work than to the service manager of the dealership. For this assumption I offer my apologies.

The System Admin did call you back and left a message for you with the information that you requested and a call back number. Since we did not hear from you again until tonight, we assumed (again a bad idea) that you were satisfied with the answers up to that point in time.

In referring to the notes in the account, we did not go out to upgrade your ram, because the upgrade request had not been forwarded from the Customer Service department to the group that does the upgrades. This is the reason the techs kept telling you it would be done within 24 hours and why our System Administrator also thought we were upgrading the memory, as that is our normal turnaround time, once the account has been charged. This is an internal issue that I will address, but not one for which you should have been penalized.

However, when you reported it down, we brought it back to diagnose the problem. Our first thought was that we might have had a bad memory stick. We replaced the sticks with a 256 Meg chip we knew was good. The system still did not come up. At that point, we were able to diagnose that the hard drive had totally crashed. We first tried to do what we could to recover the hard drive, but, after trying for several hours, when that was not possible, we set the hard drive aside and put in a new one, and returned your raq to the colo. The server was returned to the colo and back up and running at 2:21 AM on the 4th of September, 8 hours after the trouble was first reported. We spent a great deal of time today trying to recover the hard drive for you, as we knew how important it was, since, as you told me, you had never for several years made any type of backup of your data. Unfortunately that was not possible, and that is why I had our System Administrator call you to explain all of this.

Again, I apologize for not personally returning your call but having the person who was working closest with the problem return your call. At the same time, since we did not hear back from you, until your e-mail to me at 8:05 this evening and then at 8:30 this evening when you told me about this post, we assumed that you were satisfied with our answers to you at that time.

I will personally call you tomorrow morning to further discuss these issues. I do not disagree that you have raised some important issues and I do appreciate you bringing them to my attention. As the saying goes, “I cannot fix what I do not know is broken”.

Sincerely Yours,
Robert Pennington
VP Technical Support
RackShack.Net

Originally posted by askmesurfer
The System Admin did call you back and left a message for you with the information that you requested and a call back number.

I never heard from your system administrator. I gave you my cel phone number. No one called it.

You told me you were personally going to call me within an hour. Instead, no one called me. There is a significant difference between what you promised and what transpired. If you or anyone else had actually called me, I would not have posted here.

We spent a great deal of time today trying to recover the hard drive for you, as we knew how important it was, since, as you told me, you had never for several years made any type of backup of your data.

I never told you that I had never made a backup of the site.

The issue was that I had just moved the server from ***** last month. I was very fortunate that I still had a backup from that time, which I've used to restore my site. I've just put in about 16 hours of work to get that backup restored and configured on the cobalt I am now using.

When I spoke to you I explained that I wanted the disk saved so that I could send it to a data recovery shop. That is because at the time that I spoke to you I didn't think that I still had a backup of the ***** server left. It turns out that I did, which is lucky for me. If I hadn't kept that backup, then the entire 6 year history of my webzine would be stored solely on that corrupted hard drive.

But in the end my backup policies are not of interest to the people on this forum. Rackshack.net's backup policies are. I think it is very important for people here to know that Rackshack.net does not back up their servers, even when performing maintenance work. THAT information is relevant to the people here.

The backup policy is not a problem by itself as far as I am concerned. I'm perfectly willing to handle all my own backups. But if you aren't going to reliably predict for me when you are going to perform maintenance on my server, then it becomes impossible for me to keep a regular backup, even now that I am prepared for the responsibility. All of the things I mentioned in my post go together. The constant brush-offs, you not calling me back, the lost data, all coupled with "RAM was/wasn't installed" confusion, left me with no recourse but to post here.


I will personally call you tomorrow morning to further discuss these issues.

Ok. Great.

Jim

I should note that my server now has 512 MB of RAM. The upgrade was performed this evening.

Jim

In my opinion the missing ram is what happens in a hosting company. With a large company this and will happen once in a while as we are all just human.

Rackshack are not at all responsible for taking backup of your data even though it is harder to do for you since you didn't know when they would upgrade your server. But I would also expect that a person with 6 years of work had several backups...maybe that's just me?

At the end you have the right to complain when you have experienced these kind of problems and I hope you get everything running smoothly again.

:confused:

Jim,

I apologize if you did not receive my voice message, it may be possible that I either misread or misdialed your number, I received an automated message upon pick up to leave a message and so I did, then I promptly emailed you to fill you in on the situation, the first reply I sent to you bounced back, so I then took the email and re-sent it to another address I had seen you send email from, but I certainly didnt mean for you to think that we did not care or want to work on your problem, I actually spent a couple hours just trying different things to mount the harddrive in another machine here in the office, but unfortunately amidst many bad super block and bad magic number errors there wasn't much I could do to recover it.

--

Regards,

Patrick

Originally posted by Patrick-EV1

I apologize if you did not receive my voice message, it may be possible that I either misread or misdialed your number, I received an automated message upon pick up to leave a message and so I did, then I promptly emailed you to fill you in on the situation, the first reply I sent to you bounced back, so I then took the email and re-sent it to another address I had seen you send email from, but I certainly didnt mean for you to think that we did not care or want to work on your problem, I actually spent a couple hours just trying different things to mount the harddrive in another machine here in the office, but unfortunately amidst many bad super block and bad magic number errors there wasn't much I could do to recover it.

Patrick,

I'll call you today so we can update my contact information. Something must be incorrect somewhere because I did not get any emails or voice messages from you on any of the accounts or phones that I use. I'm not sure what could have happened, but I do believe you when you say that you tried your best to contact me.

Your apology is accepted. Thank you very much for politely responding to my comments.

Jim

I have received excellent service from Rackshack since posting my message.

I am very grateful to Robert Marsh (Rackshack CEO) for personally involving himself in my issue and following through to restore my confidence in his organization. He has really shown the kind of customer service that is needed to make a frustrated customer a happy one again.

As far as I am concerned the slate is cleared completely and I will be very pleased to use additional services from them in the future. Patrick's message and Robert's comments proved to me that, though mistakes were made, responsible and mature people are at the controls at Rackshack.

Jim

Patrick-EV1 wrote
"I apologize if you did not receive my voice message, it may be possible that I either misread or misdialed your number"


perfect one for 1001 excuses for bad support. :D


askmesurfer wrote:
Sincerely Yours,
Robert Pennington
VP Technical Support
RackShack.Net


i think your url etc are not allowed in posts they should be in signatures <<<< am i right mods. ;)

askmesurfer wrote:
In referring to the notes in the account, we did not go out to upgrade your ram, because the upgrade request had not been forwarded from the Customer Service department to the group that does the upgrades. This is the reason the techs kept telling you it would be done within 24 hours and why our System Administrator also thought we were upgrading the memory, as that is our normal turnaround time, once the account has been charged. This is an internal issue that I will address, but not one for which you should have been penalized.

may be rackshake have big business these days but that doesn't menas you will keep telling customer for 3 weeks that it will be done. We are web hosts here 3 hrs dealy for us is night mare and here we are having 3 weeks in issue.


In my opinion the missing ram is what happens in a hosting company. With a large company this and will happen once in a while as we are all just human.


No it should not happen. Not for 3 weeks. 3 weeks = 21 days = 504 hrs = 30240 minutes. What do you think you are doing fashion designing business here ?. :mad:


WZS wrote:
Rackshack are not at all responsible for taking backup of your data even though it is harder to do for you since you didn't know when they would upgrade your server. But I would also expect that a person with 6 years of work had several backups...maybe that's just me?


Any good and experience company should take backups before performing any maintence jobs specially when they don't provide any backup solutions. Ok this is not there responsibility but as for customer saferside they should do it. now don't tell me they can not do this in $99 but they should provide an option to the client and i know they will be happy to pay for it rather then keeping there data on toster. ;)

jbourke wrote:
I am very grateful to Robert Marsh (Rackshack CEO) for personally involving himself in my issue and following through to restore my confidence in his organization


yeah, they have to because now there are public and they have to improve there image. ;)

after these posts i am happy that my decision was right not to choose rackshake because of there policies and additional services they provide. However the price $99 and 300 GB traffic is just mind blowing.
;)

I'm glad i read all these about Rackshack.net because i was ready to sign for a RaQ4
Now i'm running away from Rackshack.net. When i will be at 5-100miles away i will post the next reply
I'm thinking to join for a RaQ3 at Tera-Byte which is EXCELLENT and with awesome support (once i got a reply within 3minutes) as i know from my experience from shared hosting for 2 years now

Quality of Service and support are two different things. Like I have stated, I have been using RS for a while and have had no problems. Mainly because I fix most of my problems without having to bug support. The servers are fast and are connected to the net well. My server (and a few others that I have tested) ping slightly faster than Tera-byte (4webspace.com) on some occasions, but mainly run about the same. If you are like me and can handle most of your problems (or know how to get help for them), then RS wouldn't be a bad host. I do, however, feel that RS needs to work on their support. But all and all, for $99, I can live without too much of it. Especially since I'm not reselling my space.

I am pretty amazed at all of this. We have had a server with Rackshack since July and have found their tech support excellent.

I was sorry to here about the problems above - that is a horror situation but I think possibly it was a freak hardware fault.

Just to highlight our horror story - and might I add that Rachshack came to the rescue in this case.

We transferred some low traffic sites to our new raq to test it for a few weeks. It had 128MB ram, raq4i. After installing webalizer and Mysql we tested away and then moved three high profile sites to the server. After 2 weeks, becuase of the nature of the sites in question, the server became very busy and Mysql killed it for 4 hours one day.

I returned from my fulltime job and went to the chat room on the rachshack.net site and the technical representatives there did everything humanly possible to resolve the issue. They promised to upgrade the RAM immediately for us at 11pm that evening and true to their word, they did. The server was upgraded.

The sites were fine for a further two weeks, but then traffic was booming into the server, the log files were huge. The server went down again. I went into the chat room again and this time one of the technical reps went through fixing ang optimizing the server specifically for the sites on it. (Not a lot of web hosts would even have an immediate rep to email in this situation). We have had no problems since and the traffic continues to increase daily.

I think that rackshack are excellent value for money, they are constantly there to help. I have not found a host that has techs in a java chat room on a Sunday morning at 9am GMT?? It does make life a little easier if you have something to hang onto when you go to them with an issue. Do some research on the issue and then ask their advice on your findings.

I know that accidents can happen, my own hard-drive went down about 2 months ago on my local machine and it is soooo frustrating when it happens becuase it takes a long time to get it back to the way it was before.

The reason we chose Rackshack was becuase of their service and support, and this is the reason we are still with them.

The first day we rang, it was 9am on a Sunday morning "Hello, Rackshack, How can we help you".

It has been like that all the way .. a very helpful bunch.
I think that along with the horror stories there can be "glory stories too".

Maeve