Better Communication!

[roach6390]

Frankly, I'm getting sick of this. You guys need to get some way to communicate with your customers. Paying customers at least. Paying customers should NOT have to go to the forums every day to check if the server is apparently going to be moved for some queer reason.

It's a wonderful thing called E-MAIL. It was invented way way long ago. You see, with e-mail, you are allowed to send electronic messages to other people. It is brilliant! And a cool add-on to this marvelous invention is the MAILING LIST!!! Using one of these contraptions, you can just type in one message and send it to multiple people!

This way, your paying customers can just be informed of crazy actions that may cause downtime or such to their website, so they will STOP LOSING MONEY. For example, maybe some guy has a paid hosting account on your hosting service. He is a web developer. Some dude from the next town over needs a website done, and he's willing to shell out $600. When I... er... that someone gives him the link to his site, WHAT IS THE CUSTOMER GONNA THINK WHEN THE SITE DOES NOT EXIST? He probably packs his bags and heads to the next developer.

:thefinger

 

[Cynical]

A mailing list is a great idea, but useless when the entire site goes down like it did today. Also, what would the emails say? That the server is down? You can pretty much tell that when your site, cPanel, and/or FTP fails to load.

 

[roach6390]

It could say WHY the server is down, when it could possibly be back up, and a hell of a lot more information that could be very useful.

To my customers, which do you think sounds better?:
1) My site is not working... check back every once in a while.
2) My site's host is current transferring files, and will be back up in several hours.

 

[dest581]

In the case of unexpected outages, something along the lines of the following would be nice:

Hello hostee,

The server *ipaddress* went down today at *time*. The was an unexpected event, and we expect it to return at *time*.

We apologize for the inconvenience

He also meant warnings about expected downtimes, too.

 

[echo_unlimited]

It could say WHY the server is down, when it could possibly be back up, and a hell of a lot more information that could be very useful.

To my customers, which do you think sounds better?:
1) My site is not working... check back every once in a while.
2) My site's host is current transferring files, and will be back up in several hours.

I agree, 100%.
The thing is though, I couldn't even come onto these forums when the server was down today, because even these forums were down.
An email would be very much appreciated; stating why my site is down e.g. why the server is down!

 

[roach6390]

And frankly, I don't want to be part of a forum. I just want hosting!

 

[Cynical]

I agree, 100%.
The thing is though, I couldn't even come onto these forums when the server was down today, because even these forums were down.
An email would be very much appreciated; stating why my site is down e.g. why the server is down!

Yes, but as I'm sure you've noticed, the forums are nearly never down, even when hosting is.

 

[Alejandro]

Ok, if you don't want to get yourself banned calm down ok? We had no control over the server going down today!! Ok? So, there's not much we can do as all the Mail Lists are in that server. We do send massive emails! However, we send them whenever we think it's really necesary...

 

[Colin]

The problem with this is that the server does go down (like earlier today) for unexpected reasons that we don't even know why. In this case what would you like us to tell you? "The server went down at blah blah blah time and we don't know why nor when it will be back up" Not to mention that if the server is down how are we supposed to send out emails?

 

[roach6390]

Separately hosted mailing list.... there are tons of free hosts for that. And I'm only talking about paid hosting... which is like what, 10 accounts?

 

[Alejandro]

It's more than 10 Accounts? Do you have paid hosting, I don't see you as a VIP?

Edit: Ok, sorry, you are VIP. We're sorry for the server going down, but it was nothing we controlled.

 

[echo_unlimited]

More to the point:

It would be nice to know that you're trying to fix it.
It's not a complaint for me, it's just a simple suggestion.

 

[Alejandro]

We are!

 

[markcausa]

A mailing list is a great idea, but useless when the entire site goes down like it did today. Also, what would the emails say? That the server is down? You can pretty much tell that when your site, cPanel, and/or FTP fails to load.

They're called backups. Most hosts have them!

 

[Corey]

Looking through the E-mail addresses, 90% of the paid customer's E-mail is located on this server. So if the server is down, not only can we not send an E-mail from x10 but none of the paid customers would receive this E-mail until the server came back up.

If the server is down, trust that we are working on it. Most issues we have to rely on the Datacenter to resolve. I have the site uptime monitor linked to my cell phone. The second the x10 server goes down, I know and there is a call into the DC.

Regarding scheduled downtime, we rarely have it. Server moves should be 99% transparent and should not interrupt your service.

On another note, I'm looking at moving back to The Planet. They seem to be much more reliable and have better staff than the current DCs we've been at. We will also be restructuring a lot of things at x10 in the coming weeks. I think a few of these changes will address your concerns.

-Corey

 

[markcausa]

Looking through the E-mail addresses, 90% of the paid customer's E-mail is located on this server. So if the server is down, not only can we not send an E-mail from x10 but none of the paid customers would receive this E-mail until the server came back up.

And if they were using email backup like many hosting customers do, like from dnsmadeeasy.com?

As far as moving to the Planet - Do it! That's where I lease my servers from for the past year and they're great!!!

 

[Ferinos]

All servers go down. I looked around at paid hosting, for a lot more than you will pay here for any package, and trust me, here it is a LOT cheaper even without a free domain name, and the uptime is 99.9% I believe, or just 99%. Either way, it is online 99.9% of the time. The paid hosts I looked into aid the same. Customer reviews reported, and this is a lot of reviews, that server uptime was around 50% for several months, then it picked up to around 85%. Trust me, this is one of the best hosting deals you will get, when the servers go offline, it's never more than 6 hours, knock on wood, (to my knowledge so far that is,) so just relax, if your cutomer who had you design his website sees it is down, if he knows anything about the internet he should know that it will happen whoever designs his site.

 

[Brandon]

All servers go down. I looked around at paid hosting, for a lot more than you will pay here for any package, and trust me, here it is a LOT cheaper even without a free domain name, and the uptime is 99.9% I believe, or just 99%. Either way, it is online 99.9% of the time. The paid hosts I looked into aid the same. Customer reviews reported, and this is a lot of reviews, that server uptime was around 50% for several months, then it picked up to around 85%. Trust me, this is one of the best hosting deals you will get, when the servers go offline, it's never more than 6 hours, knock on wood, (to my knowledge so far that is,) so just relax, if your cutomer who had you design his website sees it is down, if he knows anything about the internet he should know that it will happen whoever designs his site.

This topic is locked, as its old


btw because of this, we got another new paid server, so the problems are fixed