Thursday at 11pm my server with ServerHost goes down. Jeff says he will take a look at it. Friday morning, the server is still down, several reboot requests have gone to the data center from Bob. Saturday, the server is still down, more reboot requests. I am continously on the phone with Bob and I mention that it could be a hardware issue.

By Saturday late evening Bob and Jeff seem to think that the motherboard has died. I was told it would be up by Sunday morning. Sunday 1pm, server is still down. I get on the phone and call ServerHost, everytime I've gotten Bob. Apparently Jeff couldn't find a motherboard, he will have one by Monday and the server will be online. Monday 6pm, the server is still down, I get on the phone with Bob and ask him what is going on. Jeff still hasn't found a motherboard, apparently one has been ordered and will be put in by Tuesday.

This is the worst customer support I have come across in the several years that I have been running websites. Bob isn't in Atlanta, he has no idea what Jeff is doing, so I am repeatedly told. Jeff has ICQ, e-mail, access to a phone and cell phone, has he used any of these to let me know what is going on? None, I hear from Jeff once on Thursday, Saturday and Monday.

I let Jeff know that I will be posting my experience on this forum
and he tells me 'If you do not want the server any longer, let
us know." He would rather lose a customer than deal with support in an efficient or timely fashion.

For the last four days ServerHost gave me the complete run around and the server is still not up. I feel like I've been very patient with ServerHost, considering I've sat here pinging the server for hours upon hours and haven't gotten a response yet. There's no excuse for not being able to send an e-mail, log onto ICQ, or phone a client. The scariest part is that Jeff doesn't even seem to care, I don't know what he spends his time doing, but I can't honeslty say I think much of his time was spent worrying about whether my server was online or not. Wonder if he would care if I just decided to pay my bill whenever I wished.

Hope I haven't stepped over my bounds here, I'm sure the moderators will let me know if I have. I hope Jeff can understand my frustration with the support Serverhost has given me. I chose ServerHost because I thought they would be able to provide a reliable service, especially in the support area. Sorry for the long post.

Thanks,
Ravi

I am sure "jkehe" will respond to this as he regularly posts on WHT.

BTW, your thread is well written.

I hope this is resolved in a timely manner, I would not have thought they would have risked damaging their reputation in such a way as they obviously have here.

Ravi,

I can imagine the impact this kind of downtime will have on your business... I am sorry to hear this and hope things are sorted out fast.

Please keep us posted on how things go..

Good Luck

Balaji

The most disturbing part about this whole situation isn't that it's taking them a long time to get things sorted out, it's the manner in which they are doing so. Yesterday I received two e-mails from Jeff, after I had been told twice that he would be contacting me via phone by Bob. This is the first e-mail I received in its entirety:


"We ordered a replacement motherboard. It should be here tomorrow morning."

The other is the one asking me to let him know if we want to leave his company. After the server has been down for 5 days, it's a little bit worrying that I can't get anymore than a 11 word response from Jeff. Having not heard from him at all today, it would probably be correct to assume the server will be down for the better part of the day.

Ravi

Sounds very similiar to my experience while back with Jeff with the hard drive in a server I had gotten from him before I started colo'ing... had to wait on a hard drive to be shipped. Even though Atanta is home to dozens and dozens of hardware distributors. I know he doesn't live in Atlanta but while there checking out the server it would have been easy to get one.

Worst case would be to go to Bestbuy and pay a few bucks more and get a replacement hard drive.. or in your case motherboard. But instead of thinking about your and your business, you must wait on shipping to bring one then it will be another day for him to get there and replace it.

But don't be surprised if you get another email with him telling you that Fed-Ex or UPS made a mistake or the supplier made a mistake. Jeff NEVER makes a mistake and will never apologize for your inconvience. You're supposed to thank him for letting you be his customer. When discovering why my server kept crashing, he said he found a faulty hard drive and of course I was upset about it being down a lot and me expressing that, he said to me in these exact words "well if anything you should be grateful that i found the problem early on".

Sorry for your troubles.

Originally posted by rastoma
"well if anything you should be grateful that i found the problem early on".

You are twisting what I said. I told you that it was good that we found that your server had a hardware problem before you started moving sites to it, so that we could try to resolve the problem and you would have a stable server. Everyone has problems with servers and hardware; surprisingly enough, our failure rate is very low. My thought is that you had found what you thought was a better deal somewhere else after signing up with us, and decided that it wasn't worth your time to excuse us having to replace a bad component, despite my offers to waive upgrade fees, etc.

I can understand where you are coming from, rastoma. Moreso, you appear to be running a webhosting business, uptime is critical in your case. Luckily, there are only a few high traffic websites on the server I have.

Nonetheless, the issue has been resolved. I did speak with Jeff over ICQ shortly after the server came back online ( came back online 30 minutes ago ). Jeff did apologize, and I will be receiving compensation for the downtime. More importantly, he did mention that there was a communication breakdown as I didn't hear most of the reasoning behind the 5 days downtime until I spoke with Jeff a while ago.

My intentions on this forum were never to bash ServerHost, there was a possibility of the company lacking in support but I'm satisfied with the end result. The motherboard issue caught them at a bad time, but a company should always be prepared because what you think won't happen / can't happen, will happen. Now that things are up and running, I hope they will continue like that for a long time. I'm also confident that in the future support handlings from ServerHost will go a little more smoothly than they did in this case.

Thanks,
Ravi

Sorry to hear, Ravi, I hope you get everything back in order soon!