STRATO and the Customer-Support-Circle-of-Doom

Why is it so hard to find a good web hosting company?

About one year ago I announced that I moved hosting from WebFusion over to STRATO in the hopes for higher reliability. This was indeed the case for almost a year. I had no problems, until...

Three weeks ago my blog started to suffer problems, as is clear from my analytics data on one of the domains:



The traffic drops off from normal levels down to nothing in the space of about a week. I was away the start of the month (more on this in a later blog post) and thus wasn't checking the domain. Its only when I received an email from someone informing me about the fact my blog was down that I sat up and took notice.

I immediately tried to access the domains in Chrome but I got timeout for each one. I then tried to remote into my VM. Timeout there too. I then tried hard-resetting the machine from the Strato console, no luck there.

With no other options I decided to call my hosting provider STRATO. It turns out however that their call centres aren't open at the weekend *sigh* so I sent them a mail:

Hi

A visitor reported that my site was down: http://www.mikecann.co.uk/. I cant access it either. I have tried to remote into my VM but it wont connect. I have logged into the Strato backend and tried to reboot my machine. It says it has rebooted, but I still cant login or access my site.

Can you help please.

Mike

Two days later I get the following reply:

Dear Mr. Cann,

Thank you very much for your enquiry to which I am glad to respond.

I can see that the server is up and running , If you are using Plesk please check the domain setting in plesk. If you cannot reach plesk please  work through the following FAQ Article ID: 1360.

Your opinion about our Customer Service is very important to us! Please take some time for our questionnaire - so we can respond even better to your needs in the future. The completion of the form takes only about 3 minutes.

Link to the rating system: https://www.strato-mailcenter.com/quality?ident=bd391e7c-3c076f-13f18d-47938a-aaafba

With kind regards from Berlin,

Craig Laishley
STRATO Customer Care

Well clearly they hadn't actually read my mail and checked that the domain isn't up (this is the main domain associated with my account) they also haven't tried to login to the box else they would have encountered the same issue.

So after some email jousting back and forth and some experimentation with STRATO's non-functioning recovery console I get the following reply:

Dear Mr. Cann,

Thank you very much for your enquiry to which I am glad to respond.

I have taken your server out of the recovery mode for you .You server could also be slow as it is affected my some major maintenance
that is also going on at the moment on our windows servers, which could be causing your server to run slow at the moment  , I cannot give you a time frame when this will be completed as i do not have one myself.

Your opinion about our Customer Service is very important to us! Please take some time for our questionnaire - so we can respond even better to your needs in the future. The completion of the form takes only about 3 minutes.

Link to the rating system: https://www.strato-mailcenter.com/quality?ident=bd391e7c-39a316-13f846-44189a-8050db

With kind regards from Berlin,Craig Laishley
STRATO Customer Care

(Bold added by me)

Okay... I thought to myself... I have just been led round the houses for two days emailing back and forth when only just now they tell me they are having some major maintenance issues, why not tell me that from the start? In fact, more to the point,  why are you performing maintenance, without telling me, that has taken my box down for a week?

I decide at this point, its a good idea to give them a call and find out what is going on. Eventually I get put through to Lee. Lee at first tells me that he cannot give me the reason for the maintenance nor how long it will last. I get pretty insistent at this point that I should be told why the service that im paying for is not working. Eventually he relents and tells me it is to do with their licensing for windows.

Lee explains to me that when Microsoft license the Windows OS to hosting companies they create a child license from their master license. Strato as one of these hosting companies then creates further child licenses for its customers. Apparently something has gone wrong with the master license at Microsoft which has caused every single other license that has been created from it to become invalid.

Lee explained to me that every single Windows VM that STRATO hosts is down. Not only that, every single Windows VM in the world is down because of this master license issue. I was understandably dubious at this as I would have heard something in the tech-news or blogosphere. I decided however to give him the benefit of the doubt as he sounded honest and it took some persuading to get this information out of him that it must be true.

Before hanging up I pointed out to Lee that STRATO should have sent an email to its customers to inform them of the problem. At the very least there should have been a press release or something on their homepage to inform people of the outage. Lee agreed whole heartedly with this and suggested that I send in a complaint detailing all of what had happened thus far, so I do just that.

I get the following reply a day later:

Dear Mr. Cann,

Thank you very much for your enquiry to which I am glad to respond.

We're aware of the issue where users are unable to connect to their STRATO Windows Servers. Our technical teams has been notified and we expect this resolved by the end of the week. We have raise a credit amount of £10, and it will be paid to your credit card in the next few days.

I will contact you around noon to answer any questions you may have regarding this issue

We appreciate your patience, and apologize for the inconvenience caused.

Your opinion about our Customer Service is very important to us! Please take some time for our questionnaire - so we can respond even better to your needs in the future. The completion of the form takes only about 3 minutes.

Link to the rating system: https://www.strato-mailcenter.com/quality?ident=bd391e7c-a2fc8d-13fff2-44cee9-a53fb3

With kind regards from Berlin,

Seth Prince Dodoo
STRATO Customer Care

Okay so it will be ready by the end of the week. I decided to hang on and see what happened.

What happened? Exactly nothing, I was obviously a little angry at this point:

Hello,

So as its now the end of the week. You promised that my VM will be back up again but low and behold its still not up! Also have you decided not to reply to me any more?

I need a snapshot of my data so I can move my hosting from strato. I also would like the email address of your supervisor so I can speak to them about this.

Mike

Two days later I get the following:

Good Morning Mr. Cann,

Thank you very much for your enquiry to which I am glad to respond.

After looking at your contract, I have seen that your sever has been up and running since Saturday 13.10.2012.

If you would still like me to cancel the Server, this is not a problem. I would therefore need to you to confirm this for me in a reply to this e-mail.

If you do wish to keep your server, you will be able to start ordering your domains within the customer service area.

Once again, I would like to apologise in the setup delay that you experienced.

If there is anything else that I can do for you Mr Cann, please feel free to let me know!

I would therefore like to take this opportunity to wish you a pleasant and successful working day!

Your opinion about our Customer Service is very important to us! Please take some time for our questionnaire - so we can respond even better to your needs in the future. The completion of the form takes only about 3 minutes.

Link to the rating system: https://www.strato-mailcenter.com/quality?ident=bd391e7c-c8411a-140d93-40f3ee-9f18a5

With kind regards from Berlin,

Lee Anthony Welsh

WHAT?!??! Setup delay? Im not setting anything up! I have been with STRATO over a year! Its been up since Saturday, no it bloody hasnt! Its clearly not up now! WTF?

I realised that I was trapped in a customer-support-circle-of-doom.

Well that's about the point I decided this company really doesn't care about its customers so im going to move to another hosting provider.

So short of the long, my sites are now being hosted on 1&1 and everything seems to be fine and dandy. Sure it costs twice as much but hopefully that money will ensure a better level of service.

Oh one more thing, apparently STRATO have won awards for their customer service:



*sigh*

</rant>

Spring Cleaning & Updated Bio

I have been meaning to do this for a while, but never gotten round to it. Well more precisely other projects have always been more interesting so I pursued those instead ;) This Christmas however I decided it was about time that I finally did it.

Anyways I have finally given my bio on the About page abit of a spit shine. I originally wrote it based on my CV a long time ago and thought it deserved a little bit of love considering that it gets quite a few hits. Its all written in the third person, im not entirely sure why I decided to do it like that originally, oh well.

I have also rearranged some of my earlier work so best to give the archive a more accurate timeline.

Bye Bye IntenseDebate, Hello Disqus

Just a quick post. I have swapped over my commenting system from IntenseDebate over to Disqus. I really didnt like some things IntenseDebate did. It also seemed to get alot more spam which I had to manually approve / disapprove all the time.

Hopefully all the comments should have been preserved in the move over.

A Few Site Changes

As im not out tonight I thought I would do a little work on the site.

I have been meaning to add the retweet and facebook buttons for ages. I have also updates the flash header to make it a little prettier :)

What d'you think?

Fixing Old Posts & Uploading Videos

I just realised the other day when I was trying to show someone some of my old projects that half of my old posts are broken.Videos are missing, download links gone, images half broken. Basically the thing is a shambles.

I can only assume that things have gone whoops during the various moves this site has had over the years.

So over the course of the next week or so im going to go back through and fix all my old posts and make sure everything is working again. I would greatly appreciate it if you could drop me a comment or an email if you see any post that is still broken and ill take a look at it. Cheers!

I have started by uploading a load of my old videos to Youtube and Vimeo (stupid YT 10min limit).

If you are interested I have included them all below the jump:

Starting Afresh

The last few weeks my site had been playing up. I have been getting alot of spam comments and other issues. For that reason I have wiped my entire blog and started again using a fresh install and backed up data.

This may have caused some issues to do with missing files and attachments and the like, so if you see anything amiss then drop me a comment or an email mike.cann@gmail.com.

mikecann.co.uk moved.. again.. too!

Well as my previous post was about how I had moved my personal presence I thought I would mention the move of my virtual presence too.

For a while I have been hosting my sites on Slicehost, and things having been going okay. Slicehost however is a basic VPS that simply gives you root access and then you are expected to know what to do next. I spent a long time setting it up in the beginning following various tutorials. I learnt alot of Linux along the way but unfortunately I dont think im ever going to have the time to learn enough to maintain this box, especially now that I have 7 domains of my own and am hosting two by other people.

So I recently started looking for a better solution. Thats when my partner in crime olip.co.uk recommendation that I checkout Web Fusion, so I did and was mightily impressed. For a very similar price to Slicehost I get a much bigger box with much more features, and ofcourse the awesome Plesk 9.0 admin tool.

So the last few days I have been moving over, its gone pretty smooth but there have been a coupple of growing pains, which others may wish to learn from:

Shared Rather Than Exclusive Hosting

If you wish to be able to create new clients using Plesk then allow those clients to create domains you must remember to set your VPS as "shared" rather than "exclusive" right at the beginning before doing anything. I found out the hard way that if you make domains on an "Exclusive" IP VPS then you can no longer set that IP as "shared" and therefore clients cannot make domains. The solution I was forced to take was to ring support (which was generally helpful, ive seen worse *cough* BT *cough*) and they were able to sort it for me.

Mod_Rewrite and .htaccess

This blog is wordpress and I wanted the pretty perma-links that Wordpress is capable of so http://www.mikecann.co.uk/about/ rather than http://www.mikecann.co.uk/?page=about. To achieve this I tried many different things before I hit on the correct solution which was to use FTP to modify the permissions on the httpdocs folder to 777 then go to the perma-links section of the Wordpress settings and allow Wordpress to setup .htaccess for me! I then just went back and changed the permissions back to 750, simples!

New Comments System

Ive started testing out a new comments system on the blog.

Rather than using the standard comments system supplied by Wordpress I thought I would investigate a reccent popular solution called Intense Debate. Its by Automatic, you know, those clever chappies behind Wordpress, Askimet and Poll Daddy.

Anyways, im hoping it will be alot more user friendy and will encourage more comments! Let me know what you think ;)

The Case of The Transitional Doctype

I took a little break from my 'top secret' project (more on this coming soon) this evening to do some much needed repair work on one of my flash games portals www.worldsbestflashgames.com.

Top of my list was the fact that the index page doesn't render correctly in IE7. What makes it odd is the fact that the category pages which are essentially identical to the index page rendered fine.This is what it looked like:



Normally when you hear that there is an issue with a site on IE and not on FF or other browsers you automatically assume its CSS, and so did I. After stripping the site down to its bear bones however, comparing the index page against the category page I will still getting this oddness.

To cut a long story short I worked my way up from the bottom of the page to the top until I reaced the very top line:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

This line was the only line that differed in the index to the category page, which read:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">

So I took out the "Transitional" and low and behold it worked!



No idea what Transitional does, but I hope this helps someone else out in the future!

Domains so Many Domains!

Well I have just had my next (not so) bright idea. I have decided to enter the flash games portal business. I see it as a good way to compliment my flash games interest and passion.

I have just gone out and bought the following domains:

http://www.worldsbestflashgames.com
http://www.worldsbestpuzzle.com
http://www.worldsbestrpg.com
http://www.worldsbestshooter.com
http://www.worldsbestdressup.com
http://www.worldsbesttowerdefence.com

As you can see I have decided to go for a niche genre with each of the domains. For now they all point to the main domain http://www.worldsbestflashgames.com but hopefully I will give them all their own space soon.

As for their implementation I plan on using Worpress as the back-end with the Gallery mod for the Thematic theme (the same setup im using on http://www.artificialgames.co.uk).

Ill report back when its all setup and I actually have some games to play!

Panic over, nginx comes to the rescue

A while back I changed my hosting over from the worse than dismal streamline.net over to the much better slicehost service. Slicehost offer alot more power by giving your own server with root access. All well and good if you are knowing what you are doing in Linux, i dont, so I struggled for some time getting Apache and php and all the rest running nice.

Well all was fine and dandy for a while but suddenly a month or so back I started having alot of drop-outs and poor service. After much pain and forum posting I finally found out the route cause of the problem was that Apache was using too much memory and just bringing everything to a crawl on my 256meg slice. After much more pain I got the alternative nginx web server going, and touch wood everything seems to be running nice and smooth again, yey!

I would like to give a big thank you to this article which was invaluable: http://www.mensk.com/webmaster-toolbox/perfect-ubuntu-hardy-nginx-mysql5-php5-wordpress/

Artificial Games Redecorated

Well I think it was about time I gave www.artificialgames.co.uk abit of a spit shine. For this overhall I went for a minimalist theme by Chris Wallace. I decided to ditch the news updates and just keep it as a portfolio to my flash games and projects.

Domains..

Noticed yesterday that http://www.particleplayground.com was available so it got my thought train going. I wonder if...

The first step, as someone pointed out, was to buy the domain. So I am now the proud owner of http://www.particleplayground.com and http://www.particleplayground.co.uk, yey for me!

I probably wont do anything with them but you never know!

All-new look

Isnt it nice, an hours worth of customising the Blog Oh Blog theme and im happy. Hoping to do a flash banner at the top soon tho.

XNA Archive

I just realised some of my old XNAGPUParticles project videos have gone walkies. So I have reposted them on youtube. These are my old projects from my final year of uni, binary and source code can be found in the relevant post for each video.

http://www.mikecann.co.uk/?p=163
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxrg1YavBIg

http://www.mikecann.co.uk/?p=169
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wdIiCCAb9U

I have another reason for these old re-posts, something a little more flash orientated.. Stay tuned for more info ;)

ArtificialGames.co.uk & Site Changes

Well i have now finished moving about and have set up a home for Artificial Games.

I have also been forced to remove the comunity mixes from this site due to restriced hosting space, oh well i would preferr good hosting over infinate space.

Artificial-Studios 3

And so version 3 was born. Now in blog from thanks to wordpress it was much easyier to add new content and to maintain.

Link: www.artificial-studios.co.uk

Artificial-Studios 2

And then there was the second incarnation of Artificial-Studios. Although it was far more manageable than version 1.0 but it was still too complicated to add new content.

Link: www.artificial-studios.co.uk/ArtificialStudios2/

Artificial-Studios 1

In the beginning there was flash and flash was great, but flash soon betrayed its creator and became hard to maintain.

Link: www.artificial-studios.co.uk/ArtificialStudios1/Index.html

Martin-Kaye Case Tracker

This is my first commercial Rich Internet App written in flash. It was written for the legal firm Martin-Kaye as a front end for thier extensive database.

It allows clients to login and view thier currently active case's and view a myriad of infomation about each case. It also allows the client to add "activities" to individual cases for the firm to view.

It was written in flash 8 and uses amfphp to communicate with an MSSQL backend. It was designed to be used on multiple sites for multiple brokers so has been split into modules allowing for easy skinning accross multiple websites.

You can view it in action in several places:

Martin-Kaye Tracker
PMC Tracker
BespokeHip Tracker

Username: 1001, Password: 1001