Unhappy with recent service

[oomta]

I felt I should be quite forward with my concern, as I want to see if I'm the only person experiencing issues.

This relates to the "seoul" server.

Recently, I've been VERY unhappy with the service at Rochen. I must admit that their response time is excellent, but this is not the only factor that qualifies a successful business.

In the last few months, this server has gone down twice... I believe it has gone down a total of 2-3 times since I have been a customer...

I can NOT have my clients websites and all our E-Mails, including our own, constantly suffering as a result of server glitches. We do maintain our own servers external from Rochen and have not had a single issue thus far.
By the way, one of those servers that has been running efficiently is with GoDaddy, a company that receives no end of trouble when it comes to complaints.

Also, some of our DNS zone files have had IP addresses resetting for NO reason at all (this has happened twice to date).
It's not very nice when you have to call your clients and explain to them that your hosting IP addresses suddenly reset for no apparent reason, thus disallowing them to view their mail and sites.

Also, cPanel was upgraded without any E-Mail communication,.. not that this is a bad thing, I support keeping software up to date, to patch security issues and what not... but it would be nice to know via E-Mail if youo are to be affected, rather than just surprise everybody unexpectedly.

I have not said a word up until this point. Right now, I can't access ANY of my websites, my E-Mail, my client sites, etc. They are ALL down. I have had 5 clients call me up already.

I can accept that a server can have issues... but a server is not meant to have frequent issues... but recently, 4 issues back to back, I felt I should raise this as a concern.

This is not a slam against the customer service response time... I agree that response time is generally very fast.

But actual service and performance of servers? This is a different story.

Any thoughts and opinions are welcome.

 

[Chris]

Thank you for your post and feedback. I wanted to take the time to drop you a quick reply.

At the time of your above post we were experiencing an unprecedented issue in our Dallas data center. This impacted not only on the Seoul server but other servers as well. As I have noted within an announcement in the customer section of the forums, this was the first such issue of this nature since we moved into our current Dallas facility in September 2006. Prior to this incident we had maintained 100% core network uptime in Dallas.

This is the first time in almost 4 years that such an event has occurred. The network has been completely stable again since Friday and we do not expect any further issues. Even with this unprecedented issue we still expect uptime for August 2010 to be over 99.6% for the network as a whole and for the Seoul server itself. If you login to the My Rochen Portal or check this post, within the customer section of the forums, you can find a full Reason for Outage (RFO) report detailing exactly what happened, in what we hope is an open and transparent way. We have tired to set out all the facts.

Rochen is committed to providing the highest quality of service possible. We invest in the very best network equipment and architect our network in a meshed way that makes it redundant beyond the standards of most other providers, I think the fact we have gone this long without a core network outage speaks for itself. We invest in the very best server hardware (e.g. 15K SAS vs. 7.2K SATA hard disks like most hosts) and own it all outright ourselves, not simply leasing servers from another provider. We also invest in lots of added value services that are provided to customers at no extra cost, such as twice-daily backups using the Rochen Vault Managed Backup Service. There are many other things I could list.

Many months Seoul has maintained solid 100% uptime and looking at our own internal monitoring graphs going back to January of this year average uptime has been over 99.9%. You need to remember though that the Seoul server is a shared hosting server and can therefore occasionally suffer from events like another user creating a load spike that we then have to step in and address. If you’re comparing Seoul with one of your own servers, then you’re not comparing Apples with Apples unfortunately. Rochen does offer high availability managed cluster solutions but these obviously come at a significant price difference. I think we provide exceptional value with our shared hosting offering that rivals most other providers, but it would be untruthful of me if I said there will never be issues on a shared server as some events are outside of our control.

With regards to the specific IP address issue you mention above. This is not something I have seen reports from other customers on. However, if you are still having a problem or experience a repeat of this issue please open a technical support ticket via the My Rochen Portal so we can fully investigate for you. It’s not possible for me to say what the problem might be here from your above forum post, but we are happy to work with you through a support ticket to try and get to the bottom of this.

I am the CEO here at Rochen, and you’re welcome to contact me directly if you wish to discuss any of the above further. My email is: [email protected] and direct phone extension: 214-716-5055 Ext. 191.

Thank you again for your feedback – we appreciate comments whether they are negative or positive - and thank you for your business.

- Chris