Something to Consider

[-GH0ST-]

Greetings all. As a member I feel I should point something out to the other members here.

I've used x10's services in the past and I must say, that for a "free" hosting service, x10 is arguably one of if not the best out there on the market today. Okay, great, but what about when the servers go down? The short answer is, it's free people. FREE!

Where does anyone get the idea they can complain about free? I don't get it. Call me old fashioned but never look a gift horse in the mouth? Everyone's happy until there's an issue and then oh boy, let's piss and moan about a free service, it makes no sense. That's kinda like walking down the road, looking down to find a dime and then complaining because it wasn't a quarter. You're still going to pick it up, so quit complaining already.

Instead of complaining, perhaps you guys should be like, "hey, x10 is awesome because they give us free hosting!" It would be totally different if they spammed you, treated you like a number instead of a person or how about just ignored you time and time again. Then maybe yea, I'd be pissed, but in the end, it's a free service, grow up people and be thankful for what you have. Keep in mind they ask only one thing and that is to log into your forum account once every 31 days, that's it. You're not even required to bloody well post! Check it out. The part you should be interested in is under section 7, Inactivity. So you see, they're not asking you to fill out polls, give up your first born or even sign up with some other service. Nope, nada, ain't gonna happen. Kinda nice huh?

For fear of sounding pious, I'll simply say this; Thanks x10hosting for providing a truly quality product for (pause for effect) free! We do appreciate it, or at least I do, keep up the hard work.

/rant

 

[LibertyScape]

Sure I appreciate this being a free host and that they work on it and don't make us fill out polls or anything. But I also think that they don't really try to fix the problem right away. The posts I've been seeing are "Upgrade to premium". Nothing like "It will be back up soon". I love x10hosting... When it works.

 

[leafypiggy]

"We don't really try to fix the problem right away?"

Where do you get your information?

We work tirelessly to fix issues. I've known Corey and Bryon to not sleep for days while doing major conversions, etc.

Saying we don't do anything to fix it right away is bull.

 

[LibertyScape]

First of all, I said I don't think you do. How hard can it be to fix one little issue?

 

[leafypiggy]

Again, where are you getting your information? We have no clue as to the size of this issue. It could be little, it could be much bigger.

Read the news and announcements for more information.

We're working with the Datacenter as we speak.


http://x10hosting.com/forums/news-announcements/159909-stoli-issue.html#post824282

 

[-GH0ST-]

Sure I appreciate this being a free host and that they work on it and don't make us fill out polls or anything. But I also think that they don't really try to fix the problem right away. The posts I've been seeing are "Upgrade to premium". Nothing like "It will be back up soon". I love x10hosting... When it works.

Ya know, I don't even work for them, much less know any of them but I have to say, your comment really irks me. I'm curious, have you never worked in the technology field? If you had, you'd understand that downtime is inevitable, you cannot escape it, par for the course really.

I've been in the tech field now since 98' and I can tell ya, it's no picnic and folks complaining about something that you work hard on never helps. Got a complaint? Great! Feel free to voice it, but you'd better have a suggestion and or fix to go along with it, otherwise it's just pissin' an moanin' and that's never helpful nor is it productive.

Don't think for a moment these guys an gals don't work their asses off on all aspects of their hosting service. I've been reading through the requests for help and I can tell you, these folks work to help us all.

It's also obvious what the concern was regarding the up-sell comment. Obviously you didn't read the entire post. The admin that was posting that was doing so because the OP's were complaining about downtime on a free server. Since their main complaints were regarding downtime, a quick fix is indeed to upgrade to premium. So that admin offered that option, noting more, nothing less. It too is par for the course and he/she was only being helpful. Try to understand, there's far more than just one angle to look at here.

 

[stpvoice]

Ya know, I don't even work for them, much less know any of them but I have to say, your comment really irks me. I'm curious, have you never worked in the technology field? If you had, you'd understand that downtime is inevitable, you cannot escape it, par for the course really.

I've been in the tech field now since 98' and I can tell ya, it's no picnic and folks complaining about something that you work hard on never helps. Got a complaint? Great! Feel free to voice it, but you'd better have a suggestion and or fix to go along with it, otherwise it's just pissin' an moanin' and that's never helpful nor is it productive.

Don't think for a moment these guys an gals don't work their asses off on all aspects of their hosting service. I've been reading through the requests for help and I can tell you, these folks work to help us all.

It's also obvious what the concern was regarding the up-sell comment. Obviously you didn't read the entire post. The admin that was posting that was doing so because the OP's were complaining about downtime on a free server. Since their main complaints were regarding downtime, a quick fix is indeed to upgrade to premium. So that admin offered that option, noting more, nothing less. It too is par for the course and he/she was only being helpful. Try to understand, there's far more than just one angle to look at here.

Now you are the sort of person that I would happily spend all day giving support to.

 

[-GH0ST-]

Now you are the sort of person that I would happily spend all day giving support to.

And the good news is that you'll never have to with me ha. Thanks mate, I know what it's like to be on the "other side" you've got my support. We techs need to stick together

 

[CoolFinalFan]

Greetings all. As a member I feel I should point something out to the other members here.

I've used x10's services in the past and I must say, that for a "free" hosting service, x10 is arguably one of if not the best out there on the market today. Okay, great, but what about when the servers go down? The short answer is, it's free people. FREE!

Where does anyone get the idea they can complain about free? I don't get it. Call me old fashioned but never look a gift horse in the mouth? Everyone's happy until there's an issue and then oh boy, let's piss and moan about a free service, it makes no sense. That's kinda like walking down the road, looking down to find a dime and then complaining because it wasn't a quarter. You're still going to pick it up, so quit complaining already.

Instead of complaining, perhaps you guys should be like, "hey, x10 is awesome because they give us free hosting!" It would be totally different if they spammed you, treated you like a number instead of a person or how about just ignored you time and time again. Then maybe yea, I'd be pissed, but in the end, it's a free service, grow up people and be thankful for what you have. Keep in mind they ask only one thing and that is to log into your forum account once every 31 days, that's it. You're not even required to bloody well post! Check it out. The part you should be interested in is under section 7, Inactivity. So you see, they're not asking you to fill out polls, give up your first born or even sign up with some other service. Nope, nada, ain't gonna happen. Kinda nice huh?

For fear of sounding pious, I'll simply say this; Thanks x10hosting for providing a truly quality product for (pause for effect) free! We do appreciate it, or at least I do, keep up the hard work.

/rant

I totally agree, still say x10Hosting is probably the #1 Free Hosting out there!!

 

[Brandon]

And the good news is that you'll never have to with me ha. Thanks mate, I know what it's like to be on the "other side" you've got my support. We techs need to stick together

We are the other side!

 

[leafypiggy]

We're building a religion.

/thread

 

[Interscopia]

The techs are technically "All Sides"

They keep the walls up on this madhouse.

 

[Smith6612]

They keep the walls up on this madhouse.

Duct Tape here, PuTTY there, rm this, what else should we do to build up the wall?

 

[ilovewhu86]

Everyone's happy until there's an issue and then oh boy, let's piss and moan about a free service, it makes no sense. That's kinda like walking down the road, looking down to find a dime and then complaining because it wasn't a quarter. You're still going to pick it up, so quit complaining already.

I don't think it's so much piss and moan about a free service, sometimes comments like the one I am making here are done in an effort to hopefully contribute to help making an already great service even better. Occasionally things do go wrong and even with a free service people still have an expectation. But the problem is just what are people's expectations?

I currently have a problem. In fact quite a few people have the same problem. My support request was escalated - great service until I saw that the ticket has a priority of Low. Now that is where my expectation would have been that at least the priority would have been something higher than Low. So for most of the day the issue appears to have gone into an abyss when (if I am led to believe the previous fix was the solution) a fix could be made quite easily in a few minutes. In the meantime other people continue to report the same problem and are not given the information that the problem has been escalated.

This is not a rant. This is just an effort (as this forum description says) to "Tell us what we can do in order to serve you better here.

So as the title of your topic says Something to Consider, my suggestion is that when tickets are escalated and the problem is known to be impacting severely more than 1 person (and the fix is apparently known) to at least make the priority of the escalated ticket something other than Low.

 

[Livewire]

Low is what they all get escalated as because if they're being escalated, they all go to staff anyways. There's not really a level when it's getting sent to staff - if it's getting sent to them, it's bad.

 

[ilovewhu86]

Low is what they all get escalated as because if they're being escalated, they all go to staff anyways. There's not really a level when it's getting sent to staff - if it's getting sent to them, it's bad.

Probably true but I still feel that it would be better if the priority on something that was having a severe impact on people (or "Bad" as you say) would be better with a priority that did not say Low. It's a question of managing expectation or perception. Additionally staff can then reply to people raising the same incident that the issue has been escalated with whatever the priority is. It wouldn't look great if they say "The incident has already been escalated with a Low priority" would it?

 

[leafypiggy]

If they all the bad ones get sent to staff with a priority of "low" then they're all equally bad. Those tickets are answered in the order that they come in. No tickets have a higher priority than any other tickets - unless they're in there first, in which case they'll be seen and replied to first.

 

[Anna]

You can see it like this: if it is escalated, the forum support thread has been upgraded to status important, hence all escalated tickets are in fact important. We could, for the sake of things, make all escalated tickets to go with the level important or something like that, they'd still ALL get the same level once escalated...

It would not work allowing users to set their own level of ticket, everyone would set them to emergency if they could, as to each user their ticket will always be more important then tickets that does not affect them at all.

Escalated tickets are mainly dealt with by me, and I take them kind of in order of arrival, but I do check the problems and take the most important ones first when I am low on time to spend on them due to work or other obligations outside of x10. On the other hand I often do the easier ones first (~5 minute fixes) before digging into the ones I know will take longer to sort out.

Escalated tickets are normally answered within a 12-48 hour window. Mostly the server wide issues gets alerted to staff without the tickets being escalated, server wide issues rarely call for an per account/user answer.

 

[ilovewhu86]

Thanks for the response and info Anna.

I wasn't for one minute suggesting that we suggest or even set the Priority. As you rightly say everyone would set them to emergency. But as it is support staff who do the escalation I would have thought that they would be able to gauge an initial priority level.

I was merely saying that the perception of an escalated ticket being a Low Priority was poor in terms of managing both expectation and perception.

My own issue is my first escalated ticket so it will be interesting to see how long it actually takes for the issue to be fixed - particularly as I was led to believe it was something that takes a matter of minutes.

But I must stress that I have always felt and continue to feel that X10 supplies a great service. My response is truly only to make a suggestion for making an improvement to the management of expectation and perception.

 

[descalzo]

To be blunt, your complaint should not have been escalated.

When something is a server wide problem, we try to contact an Admin directly by various means.

Escalation is the slow way to do it. It should be for problems that affect your account, not the entire server(s). Problems with add on domains, the nameserver information for your account, etc.