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Critique Of Hosting Service That Doesn't Update Their Network Status ScreenCritique Of Hosting Service That Doesn't Update Their Network Status Screen
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Subjects > Computers > Internet
Why bother to have a network status page that they don't update This outage has been going on for several hours now, possibly 4 hours.
http://mojo.primarydns.com/vwserver/ is supposed to be the "ValueWeb?Create - Dedicated/Colocation?Create - Corp Support - Network Status" page.
Yet, at this point, despite several hours of admitted problems on their network, no one at Valueweb has bothered to update this page.
While I am sympathetic to their problems in maintaining their network, what I am not at all sympathetic about is the following:
I have just spent over 2 hours of time time trying to trouble shoot my servers, rebooting them, trying to figure out where the problem is, changing configs, etc. Plus wasting over 30 minutes of on hold time on my cell phone trying to get through to Valueweb to find out if they are having the problem instead of me.
All of this could have been prevented by Valueweb being honest and making a commitment to promptly update their network status screen when they become aware of a problem with an extended duration.
I am extremely unhappy about this waste of my time. In fact, that is an understatement.
In the past when I've noticed Valuweb not bothering to update the network status screen during problems, I've complained. And the response has been a flippant "Do you want me to waste time updating the network status, or do you want me to fix the probem...."
My point of complaining about the network status screen is that if they were honest about updating it, I wouldn't have called in, I would have waited for them to resolve the problem. I think many customers would rather check the network status screen, and have some patience, than see "everything is ok" and end up calling in about a problem they already know about and end up just contributing to the melt down of their switchboard. That would have done more to free them up to fix the problem. It sure would have freed me up to do something other than waste my time fooling around with the configs on my servers.....
ValueWeb?Create network operations should have a commitment to update the screen anytime there is an outage over 15 minutes. If they dont want to expose this info to the world, then they need to make a private members only status page. We deserve to know the truth so that we dont have to waste our time trying to trouble shooting problems that they are aware of. A private screen that would let us sign up for a SMS message to know when Valueweb believes the outage to be over would be an outstanding improvement to the current system.
Also, by having such a long sustained outage, it seems that they are liable to us according to the terms of network Service Level Agreement at
http://www.valueweb.com/dedicated/sla/network-sla.htm
However, I noticed they added a new disclaimer "Our Network SLA is not included with A La Carte support." Does this mean "unless you are willing to pay extra, don't expect any guarantees about our uptime or refunds if we fail"
That is not very nice. I do pay extra for such support, but I didn't realize it was mandatory for them to honor their SLA.
However the reality is that the guarantees under this network service level agreement are not automatic. Valueweb certainly should be aware of their outages and able to make automatic credits.... If you do experience a problem with their uptime, like today, and you contact tech support about it, you'll actually get no satisfaction from their agreement unless you take the time to call back during regular business hours and try to beg for a credit. The fact that you call in during the outage and tell tech support does not get you automatically marked to receive any such credits. You are forced to sit around and make your own documentation about outages that ValueWeb?Create is well aware of.
I hate to air this laundry in a public forum, overall I've appreciated Valueweb's service, but all of the problems I've listed here are ongoing and very frustrating when they occur. Taking a bottom up approach of complaining through tech support about their problems seems to get no where. Hopefully this message will be seen by someone outside tech support so that a fix can be made from the top down.
BTW, it seems they've finally fixed the problem that was blocking access to our servers.
This is posted online at http://forum.valuewebdedicated.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=340
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