DNS and General Support

[oCatacoo]

Okay, now I bought hosting, and since I am moving a domain or two or three I ask for a transfer and a restore they take a few days to actually do the restore and then I start pointing domains to it and notice that the dns is slow to resolve so they look into it and a week later the domains pointed still have subdomains that dont resolve.

I call and talk to support and feel as though either the techs aren't up to par for thier positions or maybe they just think that I am plain dumb. I don't actually know because it seems one time you can call in and speak with someone and they seem to understand but the next time when something happens or just the next time a situation the same arises you call and then you get someone on the line who tells you to make out a ticket for the same situattion previously handled in a phone call.
This ticket system itself needs some serious attention because when you do get a reply it may be so obvious that the tech did not either fully read the ticket or just wants to prolong the wait to an answer by asking an obvious question

Example:
Description of Issue: Trying to send email from user@catcodesigns.net to user@dailystruggles.org and keep getting back bounced emails.

The tech then replys

Hello.

When you are sending from the webmail e-mail account, is this from within a mail client or from webmail?

Regards,

To me this is an obvious one email mean email I did not mention webmail so that should mean all email.

I have many other examples of the same kind of idiocracy when it comes to technical support.

Another thing to note is that even if support does help you with an issue don't blindly trust that they are doing the correct thing.

Example: Contact security about a receiving spoofed email
the Tech replying says that he created an spf record for the domain
only to find out in fact he has not set it up functionally

So if a tech say that he has done something double check and do not rely that the tech staff will steer you the best path.

Even the ticket system itself is not wholly reliable when you submit a ticket reply sometimes they do not reopen the ticket they do not look at tickets on hold only open and if you do not check that the ticket (by logging into the ticket system) then you may be in for a long wait.

I say that there are many things that you must look at when it comes to what you are getting. They pride themselves with this outstanding customer service but if you get a support that is innefficient or unknowledgable then it may be an issue if you ever have to use it.

They are quick with the reply WE ARE Sorry For The Inconvenience but many times it is just nice to get an issue solved

[GatorDHanna]

Thanks for your review and for your feedback. I found the tickets you mentioned and will send them to one of our support supervisors to review with the employees who worked with you on the tickets.

First contact resolution is our goal. It saves us time and money and our customers time. Anything short of first contact resolution is a failure to some extent, especially if customers had to contact us via the phone or live chat and then submit a ticket. With all of this in mind, I apologize that we were unable to provide you with a quality, first contact resolution for some of your issues.

The disparity of skill levels between some of our agents is something we’re also working on eliminating. We have totally redone our training and quality assurance programs in the last year and these are helping to increase overall quality, but unfortunately not all of our agents are at the level we’d like them to be.

These reasons aren't excuses or justifications for poor service, but simply an explanation of why you experienced what you experienced.

HostGator's support and customer service is essentially in a position where we're pretty good overall, but not as good as we could or should be. We’ve been working very hard on improving things over the past year or two and we’re continuing to get better as time goes on and as our processes and procedures get better, but we aren’t quite “there” yet.

Are there any issues you have at the moment that need extra attention? If so, let me know the ticket IDs and I will get them escalated for you.

[oCatacoo]

Thank you Douglas for your insight into this matter. But just as you said it is sad that initial contact can not resolve apparent simple issues. It is in my experience that your staff overall have a decent approach but that is not what someone needs when they call into support. One calling in would be seeking an experienced approach for the technical issue they are having they are not looking for an excuse to an issue they are looking for they resolution. As i have stated in many cases even a response to a ticket looked like it was just an attempt (poor) to get a ticket off the cue. Because as I have stated many times the tech who answered the ticket did not read the whole ticket in turn asking again a question previously answered in the same ticket.

Thank you for a response to my issues I only would like to mention one issue that I keep seeing with the ticket system itself:

When replying to a ticket and it is received and posted by Hostgator sometimes the tickets remain "On Hold" instead of re-opening the ticket putting it in an "OPEN" State

[GatorFord]

Just to re-assure you, our absolute number 1 priority right now is getting first contact resolution numbers increased. For us that means that improving the training and standard operating procedures is of utmost importance. Our training program has so much information that is given to new hires that it's often a bit of information overload especially considering the initial chat training course is only 2 weeks.

With that being said, one of the most critical steps we are taking is performing weekly training and refresher conference meetings for every department where we discuss the most recent common issues, and train employees on a different subject every week. For instance some of the most recent meetings among admins covered in depth MySQL, Ruby on Rails, SiteBuilder, Sitestudio, etc. The Chat meetings are doing similar meetings and are having one this Thursday that specifically covers everything about DNS and what they need to do.

Basically, we're trying to constantly grow each individual employee so that you as the customer have a better experience, and they as an employee are more empowered to assist you and are also on a clear defined career path here at HostGator.

When replying to a ticket and it is received and posted by Hostgator sometimes the tickets remain "On Hold" instead of re-opening the ticket putting it in an "OPEN" State

By default any ticket we reply to moves from Open to On Hold (i.e. we're waiting for you to reply back). It's still technically always going to be open, just waiting for you replies. If I'm missing something here let me know a ticket ID where you saw this and I can pull its full audit log. Thank you.

[oCatacoo]

Ticket BBO-8629864 from July 23,2009 discusses the issue exactltly and it happened again for EHD-12422703 on Sept 6, 2009 so even though someone may reply to a ticket it may not always take it the system to re open the ticket even though it can be seen in the ticket system it shows the status on-hold This has happened with other tickets on my older account mainly.

But Either way if someone sends in a reply to a ticket and it does not change the state then it does not get put into the cue to be looked at (examined) for further work.

I have seen this happen only when sending the reply from a email client(which is how I process most mail) and the give away I have noted it does not send a reply when this happens even though the message is in the ticket system.

I am aware that software sometimes glitches but to be informed of this and not discover why it is happening IN A TICKET shows that something is not right

[GatorFord]

Hello,

I've reviewed this ticket JCA-8287050 and we did receive your update to it which opened the ticket and it was Received on: 2009-07-23 16:37:58 and was shortly thereafter placed on hold for some reason.

The audit logs verify that an employee did place this ticket On Hold manually, and he is currently not scheduled for today. I am going to check with him on Friday when he is back in the office and see why exactly this happened.

I supervise this employee directly and I'm almost 100% sure he accidentally put this on hold and I am extremely sorry that this caused you an additional delay.

The other ticket EHD-12422703 another employee did the exact same thing and upon my conversation with him he was confused and believed that you did not need any additional support. I've marked some internal notes on your account so that this does not happen in the future. Again, my apologies about this and let me know if there is anything else I can do to assist.

[oCatacoo]

Well the same has been happening from your support team where they answer a question and the answer does not answer the question BGC-12480177 is yet another ticket that addresses issue from the same server. The answers given do not regard the previous techs answers in fact it totally ignores them as answers.
Now even after this account has been active for a while the account is still experiencing glitches.
I don't know about anyone else but I do not run unstable systems and with all of the issues I have experienced I would be lead that maybe they are all connected somehow on a machine level.

[oCatacoo]

Well when I have contacted support I seem to get answers but not actually answering the primary question
why would there be differences between a like environment?
One server has a great working system and when moved kur--plut things just seem to error without a cause.
I mention the ticket above and will explain that a password suddenly works its way loose and runs away this makes absolutely no sense to me and I am stuck with the question of moving because of such unexplainable issues.
This ticket has also been answered by several admins at the gator host but to no avail. I have had the ticket open for a few days and still get responses back like well the issue x seems to have no problem when the actual issue was issue m as addressed earlier in the same ticket.
Is there anything that I can do ???? besides move

[GatorFord]

I've checked the open tickets in question and it appears Carl has responded to your issue in regards to the questions you were having about cPanel's password synchronization. cPanel stores it's passwords for FTP in a special hash file and it is possible that this did not get updated when the actual account password was reset which would have caused the cPanel login to work but the FTP password not to work. We have manually synchronized this with the ftpupdate script which is made for this purpose and should correct this. Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns. Thank you.

[oCatacoo]

Thanks for responding Ford what you say is true.
But what happened I log in using ftp on the 12th and 9 days later I try to log in using the same password as before and nothing "connection refused bad password" happened to me and a tech in which the tech then set the password again.
I understand the process as I have been told it many times over the last few days..
So how did the password just stop working when it had before?

[GatorFord]

As far as my understanding of the issue is correct, your password was reset originally in conjunction with an ongoing chat by one of our technicians to attempt to resolve your initial issue. At this point we can reset the cPanel and FTP password for your account and synchronize it so you can connect properly if you are still unable to do so. Looking at the history of the ticket it appears this has already been performed. If you are still unable to login please update the ticket you have open with us so we can get this reset for you. Thank you.