Opening my email this morning, a couple messages jumped out at me:
- PulsedMedia is doing some electrical maintenance in their Helsinki, Finland datacenter. The hours are listed, what the expected impact will be, and a request to contact them if you’re seeing issues after the maintenance is complete.
- A notice from Vultr reminding me that maintenance had been scheduled for today and it was now complete. I looked back, and sure enough, 9 days ago Vultr sent me an email with dates and times. They didn’t anticipate any interruption – just a head’s-up that there’s work going on.
These are signs of quality providers.
Let’s compare with other experiences:
- Your node isn’t responding, so you open a ticket. No response after a couple hours, and then you see a thread on LET. Everyone is saying “is ExampleHost’s Timbuktu data center down?” Eventually it starts responding again and the thread peters out. What happened? No one ever knows.
- Your node isn’t responding, so you open a ticket. This time you get a quick response: the provider had to do some network maintenance and it should be back up soon. Any prior notice? Sorry.
Good providers plan ahead for maintenance and schedule it for times that will have the lowest impact on their customers. They also communicate these plans ahead of time, including dates, times, likely impact, and what to do if you’re still having problems afterwards.
And what if something goes bump in the night? Good providers communicate what happened, how they fixed it, and why it won’t happen again. Sketchy providers are evasive or use general language (“technical issue”). Good providers have the confidence to admit that everyone has issues. Sketchy providers lack confidence and try to project an air of super-competence.
Looking back, I realized that all the good providers I’ve used over the years have been very good on communication about outages, whether planned or not. If you’re not periodically getting emails from your provider about outages, maybe that’s a bad sign.
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I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308
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Yes, but pulsedmedia could do something though, because after this outage my seedbox is still not working (502 – Bad Gateway) and support does not write back. They probably have a lot of such cases, because usually support answered up to a maximum of 2 hours if there was a problem. Now there is silence…
Same here, nothing works from ~36 hours and no reply from support so far.
Same here. Everything down since the maintenance window and no reply to the ticket I opened ~32h ago.
my storage sever is not working either. the disk array (/dev/vda) is not mounted since last reboot two days ago, I have only user account so I can’t do anything…
I was wondering if after two days of problems I could write a ticket or if the owner would charge me extra for bothering him (from what I have read he like used to do it), but since others have already written and there is no answer it seems we have typical lowend host situation. I was really excepting little more :(.
So you’re all saying I picked a bad example…😬
:D.
Mine is back already but 4 days without any contact has been quite stresful ;).