To: all you out there with Rackshack servers

I know Rackshack has the price point down, but where do they fail?

I have heard complaints about there support, but has anyone had problems with there billing, network, or hardware?

Would you be willing to pay (a little) more if they were able to overcome there faults or are you willing to deal with the problems because of the price point?

Thanks

well man

it isnt as bad as you think

maybe before it was, but now things are better

the only problem in my eyes is... well... i dont mean to be rude or anything

But you know the guys that sit around waiting for trouble tickets to be sent in? so they can read them, and assist the user who sent in the trouble tickets? Well i just notice that some of the people that have those jobs, just really don't know as much as they should. Sometimes they have *no* clue what they are talking about, or atleast thats what it seems like. Or sometimes they handle things in a way they shouldnt. E.g. closing unresolved issues, closing telling you to deal with it... or if you send in a trouble ticket, asking about PLESK, they send you a ENSIM FAQ url and close the ticket.... wtf is that?

There are some really nice people at rackshack, and they *are* getting better. When the right person handles your situation (such as patrick) you are sure to get some good assitance.

patrick in my opinion is the best one there. True, i havent met a ll of them or anything, but patrick seems extremely knowledgeable, and i'm glad hes been aroudn to help me.

so rackshack i guess fails a little bit in support, but this has been discussed so many times im tired of seeing it

their network seems good so far, and their hardware (the latest ones) seem good so far....

the one bad thing is you get what u see
hardly any customization

you cant say mmmmmm i want a dual 1.4ghz, etc. sometimes i see people have NIGHTMARES with RS, and it kind of scares me, makes me hope it doesnt happen to me. So I guess maybe if you are lucky enough to have no problems, they are great. I'm one of those.

Past is past. now a days they are doin alright.

so yeah, overall, i think they are OK. :)

They need to get rid of ensim ;)

I agree with what you are saying, i've seen Rack shack improve by leaps and bounds in just the last few months i have been following them.

Yeah, I had that problem too with their troubletickets...

I wanted to know if Ensim could also be used for SMTP server without having to add an IP to the relay_hosts, they replied that plesk has a 30 minutes "free-for-ip" time...

LOL
see

Originally posted by clocker1996
sometimes i see people have NIGHTMARES with RS, and it kind of scares me, makes me hope it doesnt happen to me. So I guess maybe if you are lucky enough to have no problems, they are great. I'm one of those.

Past is past. now a days they are doin alright.

so yeah, overall, i think they are OK. :)

LOL

Okay, let me get this straight. You called RackShack and asked how much RAM was included with the server that you wanted to buy, and they tell you that nobody knows. Then the server came with a kernel that didn't even support all of the RAM that was included. Then you find out that the RAM in your server was bad. After they replaced the RAM, you find out that the processor was clocked incorrectly. You call that lucky enough to have no problems? Past is past, but that was yesterday! LOL

I'm sorry, but what RackShack fails at is testing their servers before selling them. Who knows how many people received misconfigured servers and don't know about it. At least you got lucky and they resolved all of the problems pretty quickly. I've read horror stories of servers being down for days before they'd even acknowledge that there was a serious problem.

For me, it's worth paying more for peace of mind, especially if I'm going to rely my business on my provider.

lol
well
i respect that
cus we are cool n **** :)

but
what i meant was... they are "OK" because they fixed my problems quickly, and it didnt turn out to be a nightmare like others (taking 48 hours - 72 hours) you know?

and yeah, it was kind of retarded that they didn't know abotu the ram. The ram in my server, ehh.. i wasnt so mad about that.. or anything, because I guess when you go through so many ram sticks, there are bound to be some bad ones. right?

When i said past is past dude, i meant like, before, i used to hear the worst things, and things were ten times worse then just a silly "we don't konw" or how the ram is bad.. etc
you know?

and as for the procesor being clocked wrong, i find that odd.

it seems like everyone who had their ram swapped, most likely has their processor clocked at 1194mhz... what is sad is a lot of people who buy RS servers are too newbie to even check...

so most of them won't even realize it.. how sad

newbie + dedicated server + control panel == webhost!

Sorry. But that is too damn funny. :D

I signed up about two weeks ago. Sign up was quick and painless. Box was available for logging in within seconds of completing the transaction. That's good.

So I set up my website. Installed Postfix, Webmin, htdig, mailman, etc. Setup imap. Everything is just 'so'. I do notice some odd errors in the dmesg/messages log. A memory.c error, to be specific. I administer 40+ web caches all over the world and have never seen this particular error before, but figure it is just a quirk of the hardware and current kernel. Fine, everything seems to work ok.

So, I send off my DNS change to NetSol so folks will begin to see our new and vastly improved website. That's when the trouble began. As soon as the box started seeing some load, and I started doing actual work (like importing old mailing lists into the new Mailman archives), I start seeing oopses appear in the log. Uh oh.

Then a Segmentation fault, followed by a freeze. Nothing replies except pings (no httpd, no smtpd, no ssh, no imap). Reboot request goes out. Back up in a few minutes.

By this time I'm worried...and it turned out to be well justified. Several crashes later, and the box refuses to even boot. I'm told the solution is a system restore (I suppose they assume I broke the box with some of my newfangled RPMs or something). Fine, I have relatively recent backups.

Post system restore (which I think they planned to bill me for, maybe they still do--though I won't certainly won't be paying it if they do). I restore some of my system, get mail running and a basic website. Crashes begin immediately. More trouble tickets (I've filed 13 of them to date). Exceedingly long delays on these trouble tickets. Sometimes 12 hours pass between ticket and action on the ticket.

Finally, I ran a badblocks on all disks, and found bad blocks on the swap (explaining the crashes) and the root partition. Disk was 'replaced', but badblocks continues to reveal errors in the exact same locations. This might be due to a bad master image, but I'm becoming more disenchanted by this 'bargain' every day.

Anyway, our server (a business server that I rely on for everything--mail, web, etc.) has been down for 5 days going on 6. I have written directly to Robert and 'michellem' this morning (the support manager) with no reply all day (it has been 12 hours).

I'm hopeful that a resolution will come quickly (oops, too late for that). If they get my box up by tomorrow, I might be forgiving. Otherwise I'm going to have to go elsewhere and fast. Anyone got similar pricing (even with less transfer, and smaller machines)?

Argh. "You get what you pay for", I guess...And clearly I did not pay for quality hardware or quality support.

One poster said:

"So I set up my website. Installed Postfix, Webmin, htdig, mailman, etc. Setup imap. Everything is just 'so'. I do notice some odd errors in the dmesg/messages log. A memory.c error, to be specific. I administer 40+ web caches all over the world and have never seen this particular error before, but figure it is just a quirk of the hardware and current kernel. Fine, everything seems to work ok. "

Don't any of these managed servers has all this stuff already installed for you? If so who?
Thanks,
Bradley

Don't any of these managed servers has all this stuff already installed for you? If so who?

Oh, yeah...RackShack has Sendmail installed...I just don't like Sendmail. So I built myself a Postfix RPM and installed it.

Some of the other stuff isn't really standard so is not included. But most everything was preinstalled--notice I said "setup imap", it is already installed and takes like ten seconds to setup. Besides, if you wanted 'easy' you'd get a Plesk or Ensim box, which most hosts will happily sell you.

RackShack doesn't claim to be a managed host. They do claim to sell working servers (or at least I think they probably do somewhere), and it hasn't been true in my personal experience. But I reckon my case is a fluke. I never expected any handholding...All I wanted was a box I could count on on a network that's reliable. If they get the box working, I'll never have to talk to them again.

Heck, my previous host has forgotten I even exist--I'm on one of their old nearly forgotten virtual servers and they don't even charge me for transfer overage anymore They also don't notice when services on the shared box stop working until I call, so it does have a downside--thus the reason for getting a dedicated box with RackShack, if they forget I exist it won't matter as long as the box keeps chugging along. Assuming they can get it working to start with. ;-)

On a related note:

Looks like the tech at RS has finished installing a new disk and is performing a badblocks test on my box now. This is very encouraging...Hopefully, I can stop complaining soon.

Originally posted by ToastyX


LOL

Okay, let me get this straight. You called RackShack and asked how much RAM was included with the server that you wanted to buy, and they tell you that nobody knows. Then the server came with a kernel that didn't even support all of the RAM that was included. Then you find out that the RAM in your server was bad. After they replaced the RAM, you find out that the processor was clocked incorrectly. You call that lucky enough to have no problems? Past is past, but that was yesterday! LOL

I'm sorry, but what RackShack fails at is testing their servers before selling them. Who knows how many people received misconfigured servers and don't know about it. At least you got lucky and they resolved all of the problems pretty quickly. I've read horror stories of servers being down for days before they'd even acknowledge that there was a serious problem.

For me, it's worth paying more for peace of mind, especially if I'm going to rely my business on my provider.

When you provide the proper information stating what your problems are, they are promptly fixed such as clocker's issues, the so-called 'nightmares' usually come from trouble tickets that start with "There's a problem, please fix it"

what if you dont know what the problem is ? i understand its not managed hosting , but if you're going to have this type of attitude , maybe you should pre-qualify your customers by having them take sys-admin test , if they pass , then they can purchase . If everyone knew what there problem was , you wouldnt have a job patrick =]

Originally posted by case
what if you dont know what the problem is ? i understand its not managed hosting , but if you're going to have this type of attitude , maybe you should pre-qualify your customers by having them take sys-admin test , if they pass , then they can purchase . If everyone knew what there problem was , you wouldnt have a job patrick =]

We dont have the attitude that they should know what the problem is, but they need to at least give us some information, sites, if they have any sites at all, what kind of load average it has in general, did they monitor it before it crashed to see what the load average was? Software they've installed themselves, etc.. Because all of that is the responsibility of the person renting the server. We can look through the logs, test it, etc.. but we have to have a jumping off point.

If you submit a ticket saying, "My server crashed, please fix it and tell me why it crashed", telling you why it crashed is only our responsibility if it crashed due to hardware or the network. But we get countless numbers of tickets literally screaming at us to tell them why it crashed and even though we dont offer software support, we'll still login, dig through the logs, stay logged in and stress test it for them, often times just to end up at the conclusion that it was being overloaded.

yep
i understand what you mean patrick
i get that too

its lame

He is pretty much summing up my experience with RackShack. Ensim never did work and worked worst if you tried to use it. I now have a couple new unmanaged colocated servers locally. Maybe I should thank Rackshack for making me find a different place.

If you submit a ticket saying, "My server crashed, please fix it and tell me why it crashed", telling you why it crashed is only our responsibility if it crashed due to hardware or the network. But we get countless numbers of tickets literally screaming at us to tell them why it crashed and even though we dont offer software support, we'll still login, dig through the logs, stay logged in and stress test it for them, often times just to end up at the conclusion that it was being overloaded.

Hey Patrick,

My server crashed, clearly due to hardware failure (kernel oopses, and freeze ups). It has been doing so for 7 days, daily. I've logged 13 trouble tickets so far. The last trouble ticket response ended with "Well, I guess I can't fix it. Tell me if you have any more trouble with your server."

I still have nothing but trouble with my server. Nothing is even running except mail. No load. No sites. And the d*** thing oopses every couple of hours, and freezes at random. I just don't get it...Of, course I still have trouble with the server--it is broken!

I've written directly to Robert and "michellem" (the support manager at RackShack), with no reply as of three days later. I don't ordinarily like to air the dirty laundry of companies I deal with, preferring to handle it via normal support mechanisms, but this has become ridiculous. I paid for a working server--I've been given a clearly broken server, and no one seems to have any inclination to fix it.

As I said earlier, I don't want hand holding, and don't need it (if I did I would be at a managed facility). You guys would have never heard from me if the server worked as it was supposed to. I don't need any 'support' to make my server do what I need it to. But I do need a server that doesn't crash every couple of hours when given work to do (I can keep it running for several hours with just mail, but as soon as real work comes along it freezes up and has to be rebooted).

Any chance you would go to the trouble to make sure this problem is fixed? (I'm RS-18794, and you can reach me via email at swelljoe at hotmail.com, Hotmail because I can't keep my mail server running for more than a few hours at a time because I might lose mail if I leave it running without watching it and backing up our mail spool periodically off-site).

Ok, I'm finished ranting...Or maybe I'm not quite finished ranting, but I'm not sure who I should be ranting to, since the Head Surfer and the 'support manager' ignore their email.

My overall impression of RachShack after having a server there for a month now is positive. The Intel hardware is nice and everything that is included a fantastic deal. The network has been fast and I haven't seen any network downtime since I've been there in the past 30 days. Overall I'm very happy.

Their one shortcoming as has already been said is their trouble ticket system. This might be improving (hard to say since I haven't used it that much) but I did get a bit frustrated when it took 3 weeks, 9 support tickets, time talking in the support chat, private emails, forum posts, and 2 long distance phone calls to Texas to get 5 RDNS PTR entries added for my IP's. (they don’t delegate authority over the IP’s so this is entirely in their control and up to them to add). It turned out there was a problem somewhere in their system, and once I finally reached the right person they looked into it and fixed it. But for the first two weeks I would enter a very detailed trouble ticket showing them the output from a host command querying their nameservers showing no RDNS info was found for the IP's, and they would reply to the ticket simply as "updated" and close it. So unable to reply I would have to start a new ticket, again asking specific questions and pointing out the exact command I was using to show that there was no RDNS info showing up, and would just get a reply like "re-added". This was very frustrating when it went on for 7 of the 9 tickets, until finally someone looked into it and recognized there was a problem and then proceeded to fix it. Overall though they provide a good service. You might have to budget an extra couple hours sometimes which can be frustrating, but hopefully they will continue to improve as they have been and this will soon be a problem of the past.