Help Us, Help You.
- Posted by Mike on September 21st, 2007 filed in Technical
Hey everyone, I’m Mike, and I’m relatively new around PowWeb. I was brought on a few months ago, to manage the Tier2 and Tier3 technical support groups, and finally feel like I’m starting to make headway with things. There’s a lot to learn, and a lot of faces to remember, but I’m getting there.
Your good friend Joshua asked me to write a guest blog post for the PowWeb Blog, and after deliberating (for what seemed like forever), I finally thought of a topic which I thought would be beneficial: Help us, help you.
What does that mean? Simple. We realize that when you call us, write to us, or chat with us, you have a reason for doing so. Usually there’s something wrong with your website. We also realize that a good portion of your PowWeb hosted websites are your bread and butter. We’d like to help resolve your issue as fast as possible, but sometimes that’s hard to do.
Here’s some suggestions that’ll help us help you, and help you faster.
When you call, write, or chat with us, have the following information ready before you contact us:
- Your username or domain name - this will be one of the first things our support people will ask you for.
- The answer to your security question (If you haven’t set a security question yet, you should do so, a.s.a.p - Set your security question here - if you’re unable to answer the security question you set, support won’t be able to authenticate who you are, and won’t be able to help you.
- The specific URL of where the error is occuring - Providing this will help us get right to the point, and find the issue. Provide the exact URL, instead of saying “Go to the site, click on this, click on that, load this” etc will help greatly.
- Some basic specs of your computer - obviously we don’t need to know every spec of your machine, but knowing that you’re running a copy of Norton, Avast! anti-virus, and a handful of others may help us instantly know why you can’t get to your site.
- A detailed description of what your issue is - the more details you can give us, the better.
- A list of things you’ve already tried to resolve your issue - letting us know what you’ve already tried will help greatly. That’ll mean that we (most likely) won’t bother trying things that you’ve already determined don’t fix the issue.
Having these things ready when you contact us will help greatly reduce the amount of time you’re speaking with a support person on the phone or via chat. Letting them know specific details about what the issue is, and what you’ve tried will help us “cut to the chase”, so to speak.
The most important thing I can stress is: try to remain calm.
Usually, if there’s a large problem with the entire network, by the time you call, we already know about it, and we’re working on fixing it. If the Tier1 agent can’t fix the issue, don’t worry, we’ve got Tier2 and even Tier3 that can, and will.
September 21st, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Thanks for the communication in blog fashion — its appreciated.
While I don’t want to sound totally negative, I have several sites hosted on Powweb as well as several with others. One of my serious issues has been that of the powweb mysql servers; they have been sluggish to non-responsive more times that I can count for a very long time.
Each time I called or write support on the issue they act as if the situation is something new, want to evaluate other areas of my site from photos being displayed, etc. I work with them andt eventually they let me know that the server issue is being worked on. Mind you … this has continued for over a year. I have been patient as often time the information is not critical and expect that Powweb can see the logs. That said, this very regular downtime should not be happening. A little honest communication and what is being done to correct this would be a bit more helpful. (PS. I’ve asked to be moved to different mysql server yet that never seems an option — are they all suffering downtime or slowdowns?)
September 21st, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Hey RichC, thanks for the comment. By no means should you worry about sounding negative. Feel free to speak your mind, no one will judge you.
I understand that there’s an issue with MySQL performance, on PowWeb. In fact, based on my own experiences with other hosts, it’s not just limited to PowWeb.
There’s a lot of factors that go into “slowness” with MySQL driven websites. The first of which is the load on the MySQL server. This is generally the issue with PowWeb, as we have a lot of customers who either don’t code things properly (putting unnecessary strain on the MySQL server), or use database rich applications, such as WordPress, Joomla, osCommerce, etc.
While we do everything we can to ensure that we keep things running smoothly, sometimes something slips through the cracks, and a poorly written site (or a site with too much traffic) gets by our monitoring, and slows down the whole server, for everyone else.
Since I’ve been brought onto the team, we’ve dedicated an entire team of people to putting a stop to these “abusers” (for lack of a better word.) This has helped dramatically, but it’s still not a perfect situation.
As for the techs that you’re speaking with who act as though the situation is new, unfortunately I don’t have much control over that. At a Tier1 level, the techs report to someone different, and have their own management structure. All of my Tier2 and Tier3 techs know the indepth details of MySQL slowness, how to deal with it, and how to shut down any accounts that are causing problems. I can’t speak the same words about Tier1, as I really have little to do with that part of our support group, but will bring it up with the management team for Tier1.
As for being moved to another MySQL server, it’s not quite that simple. Moving MySQL connections across servers generally causes more problems, which outweigh the good.
We’ve done quite a bit, in terms of improving the MySQL situation. The biggest of which was the upgrade to MySQL 5, just last month. Now that we have MySQL 5 in place, we can more strictly limit the amount of connections coming from a specific account, within PowWeb, per server. With that limitation in place, we can safely start adding more hardware to the MySQL farm, without worrying about doing more harm than good. This is the next step on our gameplan, to add more MySQL servers, and spread out the user load. While I can’t say, for sure, when exactly that’ll be, I can say that we’re working as fast as we can, and as hard as we can to improve things.
The truth is, we value your business, and we hate when your site’s down, just as much as you do. We’d prefer a perfect world where things just magically work 100% of the time. I’m sure if we had zillions of dollars to spend, and charged a zillion dollars a month for hosting, it might be easier to make these things happen faster, and not think twice about them. But that’d be in a perfect world.
While I appreciate your plight, the only thing I can say is to keep calling in, or e-mailing in, or chatting with our techs where there’s a slowness problem. Provide as much information as you can, and stay on them, until they get someone to look into the situation. At a Tier1 level, they can’t do much, other than go ask someone on our dedicated team to look into it, and shut down anyone causing problems.
I hope this (rambling) helps explain things a bit better, and that things start getting better on a global front in the upcoming months.
Again, we appreciate your business, and your patience.
-Mike
October 10th, 2007 at 9:49 am
Mike,
You forgot to mention that before contacting support, you also need to have saved up about a week’s worth of additional patience as you are about to embark on possibly the most infuriating and ineffective journey of your life.
Once through to front line phone support you are treated to a reception by a cheerful sounding yet surprisingly dim phone monkey who manages to repeatedly select random words from your description of the problem, drop them into a pot full of other words and randomly select from this to invent a brand new issue you didn’t know you had - that can feature anywhere from 0 to 4 of the words he started with.
You can also go for regrettable option number 2 - online chat - here you are treated to a reception from a person who has a randomly assigned stereotypical american name and a wealth of phrases in an overly used copy & paste database. This tool enables them to effectively irritate you with impersonal responses, some of which completely irrelevant to the enquiry until you give up the will to live. These people I was informed by one of them are based in India…
Sort out your tech support!!!
It is all very well having different tiers of support but your front line support is incapable of passing on the correct description of the issue to tier 2.
The tier 2 tech responds via email claiming nothing is wrong (as indeed it isn’t - they aren’t looking at the right issue). You then respond to the email correcting them and someone else gets given the ticket who starts you off from scratch again!
1. Get rid of your front line support people - they are useless and serve no purpose - it would save you a lot of money in both wages and lost custom.
2. Get some support continuity going on! I would be happier waiting a bit longer to get an issue resolved because 1 or 2 techs are dealing with my problem instead of it taking longer because I am having to explain myself again and again.
3. Get rid of the online chat - they are even more useless than the phone support (if that is possible)
Please listen to the customers on this, your support is dire and it ruins the whole powweb experience. The post phone call surveys are fun though - I like thinking up new ways of telling you how terrible the support is. I wonder if you actually read any of them?
James
October 11th, 2007 at 9:48 am
[…] response to my last post, someone asked, via the comments, what the deal was with MySQL on PowWeb. It’s also been […]
October 19th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Hi Mike,
Thanks for introducing yourself. I wish you luck and I wish there was a way to reach you directly when we have an outage that requires Tier 2 & 3 or engineering to address.
I agree with the previous posters here when they describe the worthless Tier 1 support chat, phone support and online form reporting. Its painful when there is a system wide server problem and the only responses from tech support are “sorry for the inconvenience” and then I’m advised, “well when more customers report this outage, it will be escalated”.
I used to be a big cheerleader for Powweb but since the sell out to mega corp, Powweb has just sunk lower and lower in reliability. As you must know by now, tech support is awful when staff/volunteers are in India, Philippines and Canada. The communication between countries and the people is poor.
I closed 2 Powweb accounts today which leaves me only one more to migrate in December.
If you are still with Powweb Mike,
Good luck