After ThePlanet silently changed their “managed server contracts” to unmanaged servers (as they call it today) and left my production server offline for 50 hours with some pretty nasty responses I left ThePlanet for a good reason.

So I took real unmanaged servers (at a way better price) at Softlayer and hired a so called “ServerManagementCompany” for taking care of the machine.

ServerSupportGuys had pretty good comments in the forums and they have a $120 per month charge – promising a 5 minute response SLA according to their homepage

Well, fact is that I just came home from a weekend party and found my production system being DOWN ... not even responding to ping.

Of course this happens while I run a survey

and pay costly promotion for it

Softlayers monitoring system logged the downtime for over 12 hours Server Support Guys were mailed automatically a couple times.

This means they were notified multiple times via email that the server CANNOT EVEN BE PINGED.

Nobody did anything… until I power-cycled the server and it went back up again!

I had a hard time contacting them initially, because

• the phone system blocked my call cause I didn’t send caller id with the call
• when I re-called them from another line I was just at the voicebox – got a “this is the voicebox of server support guys”
• the CRM system just has this MYSQL error on the server

Finally I managed to contact them via email.

And it really SUCKS to get 5 minutes promised and then just to hear 12 hours later

No sorry, no excuse. Just business as usual?

Then I got this response in yet another ticket

WTF – just checkout this apache load tracking image – says EVERYTHING

(FLAT LINE due to lack of data … 12 hour outage)

WTF – I paid you because you promised you have the means to DETECT such issues… even “free” monitoring services and the NOC ping service from Softlayer detected it

As you can see from their sales blurb they promise

• Pro Active Service Monitoring & Response Services LOL
• Disaster Recovery Planning & Response
• Industry Leading 5 Minute Response Time SLA

MEGA-LOL ... this is just a mess and false promises

Just look at their sales pitch below

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At this point it is time to note that I was asked THREE (or more) times by various SSG admins for

• the real SSH port (it was changed due to security reasons, but nobody took note of it obviously)
• was even asked to mail my root password (it was communicated in setup, but obviously nobody / somebody did not have access to it, when he needed it )

So obviously they DO have some real chaos there at SSG.

I ignored the previous problems, due to some very nice people there, very helpful with other things,

but after all I’m paying them to keep my systems up when I’m sleeping… and they failed big time!

Or is this the kind of service you expect from above product description?

Couple people on WHT responded withing minutes with

The same thing happened to me with ServerSupportGuys. Good concept… poor service.

DO NOT go with these guys. They are kids regarding unprofessional client overloading

I tell you, I’m really pi**ed off !

Also, I got a 2nd server with Touchsupport and they were doing quite ok,

except leaving the other server down for aprox 1 hour, notified by NOC, but also only reacted when I MYSELF mailed them.

So I am not really sure if I want to hand the 2nd server over to the other company,

which I would do in a second if they hadn’t have problems as well just a few days after their contract started.

But then, TouchSupport reacted in an hour at least and credited me two months free of charge for their service…

I wonder how SSG will respond to this, when it’s finally sorted out.

Maybe their final explanation is that my account is unpaid so they have no reason to react? (I read that on WHT a couple times when pissed SSG clients bitched about their service)

anyways….

Is this the kind of “server management” YOU would pay for?

Which server management company can you recommend?