Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : FDCServers, Poor/Unhelpful response to outages

[gordonrp]

Ticket #333500

Used the server since Dec/16/2010. I use it as a 2nd location backup for some of my personal sites. Everything has generally been OK except that they deployed the server originally with the incorrect partitioning and a failing hard drive (ticket 259999). Pingdom has reported the occasional network outages (to their switch and to my server) a few times, but nothing of a real concern as this is just a backup machine.

Now:

• Machine not responding to ping
• opened reboot ticket, rebooted, advised to wait 20 minutes for it to come up
• machine not up, asked for free KVM access. FDC advise I will have to pay for KVM access or provide them with our root login info
• asked again for free KVM access to keep with data compliance policies, shouldn't have to give them root login info. Why can't they just check the console for errors?

Now I've been advised that ticket has been changed to sales and that I will need to wait 24 hours for a response.


Should I pay for KVM? Sure, if that's what I agreed when signing up then fine. However any other reasonable provider would:

• provide free KVM
  OR
• check the console output to see if there are any hardware or FSCK errors (without requiring root login). From there we could decide if paying for a KVM was needed, or if they just needed to press ENTER to accept the fsck. It seems that walking over to a server and plugging in a console is just too much effort.

Because of the generally unhelpful attitude, and no sense of urgency to help when a server is down I've asked them to cancel the machine and send a refund of today's payment. They probably won't refund the payment and I wont lose any sleep over that, just as I wont use their services again.

Network: 6/10 (various outages in 8 months, usually less than a two minutes though)
Hardware: 7/10 (older with no KVM integrated, but get what you pay for)
Support: 3/10

0.02

EDIT: just got a refund from them, so the sales/billing people seem quick and reasonable. My thoughts about poor support response to outages and being generally unhelpful remain the same.

[PNH-Madih]

FDC Servers are quick in response but their support is not much satisfied, they gave me a box with no partition when I told them about that, they replied it is unmanaged box, wondering setup is their responsibility or mine.

Meanwhile I hired a third party company to setup the partition.

[parky1]

If your going to use FDC the best option is to go through zenex5ive they have excellent support and the prices are generally cheaper.

[FastServ]

A provider can put your server into single user mode at any time so I don't see what the big deal over giving them root is.

[gordonrp]

Originally Posted by FastServ

They can simply reboot your server into single user mode at any time and access all your files, so I don't see what the big deal over giving them root is.

root is not required for fsck nor to check for any errors on the screen.