[Closed] Good and bad experience..

[abstraktMedia]

Ok..not that bad...

Here was the problem..

I had a customer who acc. deleted one of his "important" databases and didn't made backup....That's his fault...

My fault was that I also didn't made a backup in a week or so so I couldn't help him...

Then I contacted support 24 hours ago and they said it will be resolved in a "few hours"..Ofcourse I passed that info to the customer and he was calmed...but it's been almost 24 hours from that and the customer was getting rude....

Then I contacted tech@hostgator.com via MSN and got the guy who couldn't even speak proper english(english is not my first language also but hello!?? I had problems decoding one sentence....)...and it was frustrating...Ater he said "hi!what's the problem" I described my problem and waited 15 minutes and then wrote "hello??anyone there!?" and I got back "Yes!How can I help?What's the problem!??"....now when I look back it was very funny but in that time it was frustrating...ofcourse he couldn't help...

Than again 5 hours later I contacted Live Support and talked to Sam....

I don't know if he's working directly for Gator or is working for outsource company but that was a shine example of how the support should look like...

So this time my thanx doesn't go to Gator but directly to Sam.....way to go man....respect...

[ReGigi]

Dude, the instant messenger support is a complete joke. They should just take it away altogether.

I just asked the simplest question and got told to email support.

Here is the last bit of that convo, directly pasted:

GigiWench: ok, what exact function does this messaging service serve?
GigiWench: I mean, you are never actually able to help
GigiWench: even on the tiniest items
GigiWench: what a waste of time
gatorsupport3: for server end issue we cannot get it done on chat it self as there are couple more chats to be taken care of for some issues we have to forward you to our email suppor

(no, I didn't truncate that. )

This after waiting for an hour for him to look at the problem and then reply, "email support." Why did he even pretend that he would have a clue and ask for my domain?

They are slightly less than useless.

[vandora]

I tend to agree... I've tried two times and both times, was told to email support after going around and around. :roll: It seemed wonderful to have messenger support, but I've learned to just email support, instead of wasting time.

[GatorBrent]

I moved this to suport since it's not really a review of your experience with us as an incident.

Are you still having a problem? What's the ticket number? I'll see what the holdup is.


as for chat support....

Chat is great for questions. Every day we get a dozen plus compliments from it. However not all issues can be resolved instantly nor does chat support have access to everything such as billing.

If your having a major problem that can't be answered from a few questions opening a ticket is best. Otherwise youll be stuck explaining yourself to every person in the company what the problem is. Tickets allow for complex issues to be escalated to someone that can fix the problem.


There's a few new things we just started trying with chat to improve support. If chat can't handle the issue they should request for a ticket to be opened and then will attemt to find an admin that can handle it / update you if possible.

[ReGigi]

How about you teach them to just answer up front when they can't actually do anything instead of pretending they are going to look at it and wasting our time?

(That and English might be nice. Today's response was "please cooperate me". WTF?)

[abstraktMedia]

UPDATE

Here's the answer I got today...

I've checked and double checked and there doesn't seem to be a good backup for this site from an earlier date. I'm sorry.. please let me know if there's anything else we can do to assist you.

So much about daily backups..... :roll:

First I told my customer it wil be recovered in a "few hours"(as Gator said) and now I have to tell him he can forget about his database and his data! It was his mailing list and he'll be pissed off because he just lost all his emails...

From scale of 1- 10 I give here Gator 4(for this problem...otherwise gator rules ) and even that is on account of Sam and his support..otherwise it would be 2.....

So what's with the daily backups...what does that mean!???

[Stef]

So what's with the daily backups...what does that mean!???

It means there are mirrored disks in the servers. If a disk crashes, they'll have a "backup disk" to take over.
Of course if your customer deletes his data, it will also be deleted on the mirror disk, and you can't get it back.
So, there are no backups that can be restored...
"Real" daily backups on a backupmedium that can be used for restores are on top of my Hostgator wishlist :? (next to ssh access).

Bye,
Stef.

[GatorJustin]

Just an update. We are now offering 2 forms of backup protection.

Real time RAID backup on all servers (but as Stef mentioned this will not help if you delete files)

Weekly off-site backups. All files on all servers are backup up onto another server each week, so if you delete files, we can get them back, but they will be older versions.

I hope this helps clarify things.

[abstraktMedia]

Hi and thanx for the answers....

I decided to make my own PHP script for cron job of backing up databases..so I just put the script in skeleton directory and add a cron job for every new cusotomer and for the old ones....

Should make life easier....

This issue can be closed now....