Non-caring attitude toward YOUR customers

[Dave]

This thread made me laugh... There is ALWAYS a risk with any type of upgrade on any computer... That's just the way it is with these things... Backups are essintial because computers crash.

I tell newbies that all the time wherever I go..

I have often wondered if the talking computer on Star Trek ever crashed.. It always seemed to just do what it was told... Bug free... LOL

[w3it]

Once again, I apologize.

...and thats why I think these public forums are MUCH better at getting your attention than the private trouble tickets. Certainly no apology apparent privately.

[w3it]

Oh if it were only that simple. Lets look at the material world.

If I were you, I would start by reading what the thread is discussing first.

I wish you every luck with your new host.

I'm sure you do.


Regards

[w3it]

I think its admirable to have posted the above explanation and apology. However, if you had sent those last two paragraphs to the person who submitted the ticket, instead of whats below, this topic may not even be here.






Please, lets not be too hard on the person(s) about backups. I remember what happened to the original forum here.

Well said!


Regards

[w3it]

Another customer finally did submit a trouble ticket regarding these address books, these were not recoverable and will likely be the same for any other account that is missing their address book. I do apologize for this once again, we've never had a cPanel upgrade actually delete data like this nor would we have proceeded to upgrade all servers had any problems occurred during our testing.

Well I guess that makes my account quite special. Another "error" seems to be that I can see a lot more databases than I should be able to in phpMyAdmin... just thought you might like to know that as I dare say I'm not the only one.


Regards

[w3it]

[QUOTE=Dave]This thread made me laugh... There is ALWAYS a risk with any type of upgrade on any computer... That's just the way it is with these things... Backups are essintial because computers crash.

So in your laughable condition, are you saying Dathorn and cPanel should take greater care in their relative backup procedures whilst upgrading? After all, that is what this "humourous" thread is about.

I tell newbies that all the time wherever I go..

Is that a fact. I bet they just cant wait for your next visit.

I have often wondered if the talking computer on Star Trek ever crashed.. It always seemed to just do what it was told... Bug free... LOL

Ok... well good luck with that.

I dont know. Us pain in the a* customers who make complaints! What is the world coming to. We'll be asking for our money back soon. Not that we'll get it of course. That seems to certainly be the only guarantee!


Regards

[AndrewT]

Regarding the Horde address book issue, I just finished working with the 3rd customer to submit a ticket on this and was able to recover his entries. So if you are experiencing this issue please submit a trouble ticket with the e-mail address that is having problems along with the password for it.

[Pedja]

I gess Andrew, as he is in such position, is quite non sympathetical for customer problems. If he is, he will surely quit the job soon. As I am working in similar environment, I understand him and I do not take his ocasinaly short, cold an uninformative responces personally.

However, I also had problems with Dathorn updates not just once. Each time there were lost data, and in some occasions unrecoverable. Naturaly, I got upset each time.

I newer take seriously anyone on this forum who says "you had to do backup", referring to Dathorn service. It is wide known fact that cpanel backup does not work. It is not usable, except for saving plain web site contents (which you can do using ftp). Problem is that, there is no way to backup account settings and customisations which are unacessable by customers in any other way except cpanel itself (which cannot backup them).

Right now I have problem with two cpanel accounts. Cpanel counts bandwidth usage in wrong manner, showing much more bandwidth spent than it is. Andrew said that is is known bug and that they have to reset that account and restore it. As I learned from previous experience, first I asked is, would it keep all account settings intact, and he responded that it is not guaranteed and that I have to make backup. Catch 22, I cannot make backup. All I can do is write down all settings so I can enter them again when he resets account. Those two are most important cpanel accounts I have. I cannot affford any glitch with them.

My guess is that proper customer serrvice should consider that any change stuff makes must not cause lost of data. If that is possible, data must be saved before the change, so if something goes wrong, they must be able to restore it no matter what they should do. by data, I do not mean web site and database contents, I mean ALL data including cpanel settings.

[AndrewT]

Pedja, we've since found a similar bandwidth issue with other users and more than likely your problem is the same. AWStats does not properly count search engine spidering bandwidth, using a robots.txt to prevent this spidering should even it out.

[Pedja]

Pedja, we've since found a similar bandwidth issue with other users and more than likely your problem is the same. AWStats does not properly count search engine spidering bandwidth, using a robots.txt to prevent this spidering should even it out.

I do not know, never got such info from Dathorn support, alhrough problem stayed unresolved.

It is not clear to me, does this mean I have to use robots.txt to block search engines indexing my site to get proper bandwidth measurements?

[AndrewT]

I do not know, never got such info from Dathorn support, alhrough problem stayed unresolved.

It is not clear to me, does this mean I have to use robots.txt to block search engines indexing my site to get proper bandwidth measurements?

This discussion does not fully belong here. If you wish, open a support ticket and we can discuss it, make sure you request that I address it personally. But the basic situation is that AWStats does not record search engine bandwidth properly. You can leave your site as is and just realize that the extra bandwidth is from search engines or you can block them using a robots.txt file and the amounts will be more accurate.

[Nnyan]

Now as a sysadmin I understand the issue about user's maintaining backups. I learned a long time ago from a close unix friend that if you don't have three copies of something you don't have any.

But the issue here is a server upgrade which was performed by the host. In those cases doing testing is really just looking for obvious show stoppers since you can not test for everything. In our production environments we do significant testing but never consider that to be enough. We always do a complete backup (verified) prior to any changes.

To use a bad analogy this is like the tire manf. some years back that decided the the low risk of law suits from faulty tires was less expensive then a complete recall. The thing is you never know when your testing will miss a big issue that affects a big number of your customers/users.

[classictoysnyc.com]

My account was recently suspended without sufficent warning.

Within a two hour window of time, this is what Dathorn did to me:

a. cut off my domain in the midst of a heavy marketing campaing,
b. shut down mail servers,
c. prevented us from using our normal back up and restore routines which have been in place for over a year,
d. interupted 80 + eBay auctions,
e. all within a 2 hour period prompted an immediate and unplanned domain move

The warning came in the form of a trouble ticket I opened - no email warning, no phone call - no nothing.

If any of you have had this type of experience with Dathorn and have documentation, I urge you to contact me.

[ChrisTech]

So what were you doing? Obviously you were doing something that would of caused the "cuttoff" to occurr. Mass emailing? High sql usage? What?

[thewave]

So what were you doing? Obviously you were doing something that would of caused the "cuttoff" to occurr. Mass emailing? High sql usage? What?

Why are you asking? It seems he is more troubled by the manner of notification, or lack there of, than the suspension.