The company I work for has a virtual private server with webfusion.. Friday the 15th October every single website we have went down, and this is what followed.
I cannot be bothered to type our paragraphs of the exact arrogance and stupidity of their support staff and engineers.. so I have summarised it below in bullet points of events, but rest assured throughout each person spoken to has been useless and have been on hold for up to 20 minutes at a time.
Log of phone calls and contact throughout this entire time support ticket was being continuously updated by myself, and rarely by webfusion.
Day 1 – Friday :
- Check out control panel and see apache is not running, unable to restart.. notice engineers have done an update at 1am
- Call up and told to restart the container (which we have already tried) told that they will restart the server so to try again in 10 minutes
- 10 minutes later login to see that they have also just simply restarted the container (not the entire server) nothing changed
- Call back and told there appears to be some corruption on the system files (following their update!) after explaining am told that it will be passed to engineers to fix.
- Call back 2 hours later.. told engineers still working on it, login to plesk and logs show that it has not even been accessed
- 2 hours later, call back and told the same thing again and that it will be back up by the weekend. Login at 5pm and see that still no access from engineers in the logs
Day 2 – Saturday :
- Called up.. was assured engineers were working on the issue as we speak
- Called up again and told the same
Day 3 – Sunday :
- Called up.. told engineers working on it again (even though a few months ago we were informed engineers do not work at weekends?)
Day 4 – Monday :
- Called up and told engineers have got to reset the entire server as it cannot be fixed any other way.. and that we will have to re-upload all files and backup databases, told them this was implausible as it was them that caused the problem and they need to fix it.. informed they would do.
- called again and told engineers were working on it, asked them to send a copy of our terms of contract to my email address and promised this would be done
- Called again and told that there was no way around it and that a reset is the only way to fix it.. again asked for the terms of contract, and again promised it would be sent now
- Went with this decision to reset the server out of the sense of urgency but asked them to make sure they back up ALL web files and databases, told them we could get in to files ok to backup, but not into databases so we was unable to backup databases. Was told they would do this and would also backup the files for us too and put them both in /old folder when it was done. This was all re-iterated in the support ticket.
- Had previously asked for this to be done by 2pm, rang up at 2pm and was told they were doing it now..
- rang up at 3pm and told they were doing it, once again asked for the contract to be sent and this time told it was not possible and just told to get it off the T’s & C’s on the website.. asked to speak to a manager and told there was non available.
- rang up at 4pm and told they were working on it
- rang up at 5pm and told it would be done by morning (5 hours to move some folders and backup database??)
Day 5 – Tuesday
- Logged in and noticed that server had been reset at last, (but unable to login as had a new password) although we had not been informed that this had been done! Only by chance we noticed for our self.
- Rang up to get password and also asked why we had not been informed.. told that it was not done until 5.30 last night and engineers hadn’t updated ticket to inform us
- Logged in and found that NONE of our website files had been backed up into the /old folder as requested.. although the databases had been.
- Rang up to ask why they hadn’t done this as promised, put on hold for 15 minutes then told to read the update on the ticket (which had just been updated) this was just a paragraph of complete fabrication with over explained simple terms about them being unable to get into the www folders due to them being corrupt, we know this was a lie as we could see them ourselves before they did the reset.
The new server after being reset is also missing a second IP address that we had before, and they had not even bothered to fill out the few fields after resetting to enter the domain name and default IP.
5 days later we are now left to upload ALL our files again from our own personal backups (taking twice as long) reset all domains back up and upload databases accordingly due to their error in the first place.
A simple Google search for webfusion support also finds similar results to mine! On the good side at least I have a case study now when talking to clients about the importance of customer service!
UPDATE : Received a phone call from customer services management with apology and promises of a better future.. see here
