High Ticket Load

[Daniel]

Hello everyone,

As of right now we're experiencing a high ticket load.

We're looking at a delay of 3-5 hours for a reply to non-critical tickets, and a delay with critical tickets.

We apologize for the increased reply times, and are working hard to minimize the current load.

We will be working on critical tickets first, followed by non-critical tickets oldest to newest.

Thanks for your understanding.

[Fred]

Hi,

Is this situation still occuring ?

I have a upcp problem right now which i have to wait many hours between each replies... and it's a bit frustrating to receive a one line reply that doesn't help at all... #CEY-35573-688

thanks for letting us know that you have a high ticket load. It doesn,t solve my problem but at least i know there's for sure more urgent than my case... :)

[winger]

Hello everyone,

As of right now we're experiencing a high ticket load.

We're looking at a delay of 3-5 hours for a reply to non-critical tickets, and a delay with critical tickets.

We apologize for the increased reply times, and are working hard to minimize the current load.

We will be working on critical tickets first, followed by non-critical tickets oldest to newest.

Thanks for your understanding.

how can we flag a ticket as critical? or are you looking each one to check?

[Jon]

http://www.powervps.com/support.php#supported

Depending on which system you are in, HSPC or the legacy system, there are different ways to do this:

On the new helpdesk ( if you are a HSPC customer ) you can open tickets with severity levels ( which is what the above URL references ).

On the old helpdesk, to mark a ticket as urgent simply put the word "URGENT" with no quotes somewhere in the subject line.

Please make sure not to abuse this, per the above URL:

A Severity 1 ticket should only be used when a server is completely down. It is not intended for situations where email not working, or for example when a single website is inaccessable. Tickets submitted with an inappropriate severity level will be reassigned to a more appropriate one.

If your ticket is reassigned to a different level, it will get bumped to the bottom of the queue and could increase your response time.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

[AllenB]

Hello,

Thank you for the information and keeping us updated.

Best wishes.

[Rob472]

I have been waiting almost 48 hours to get my hacked vps repaired and still no one is working on it. I am freakin disgusted with your support right now.

[DavidP]

Rob472, please provide a ticket ID so we can verify your complaint.

[Rob472]

[Abuse #FJU-25014-181]: hacked vps


and
[PVPS Support #CFI-67418-688]: VPS Hacked


I was very patient at first but if you read the latest reply you will see I am starting to lose my cool. If you read over the tickets and look at the timestamps then you should see why.

[DavidP]

Rob472: Your server has been rebuilt. I do apologize for the delay.

l810c: If you ask 3 questions and get a 1 line answer, please provide me with the ticket ID and the technician's (s') name(s) in an email to contact management. I do keep customer feedback on individual technicians in mind during reviews.

[sudhakar]

Ticket id is CDL-49790-919

Hi Our VPS was rebooted by you about 12noon IST today, since then we had email server problem; some of our customers complaints that they are able to send mails but NOT able to RECEIVE mails. We tested by sending many emails but none of them are received to their email boxes. We tried restarting of various services like exim, Pop etc many times but of no use. we tried on our own for about 12hrs and kept a ticket as URGENT. Email service is also very important for us as it is basically a BUSINESS COMMUNICATION media for us. which is NOT working. I understand that this is not as important as the server is down but still.. since as we use the server for email purpose only.. for us email-not-working is as equal as server down. please help us.

Support says that this is a non-urgent issue. we are helpless.

Regards

[vps-vince]

I have to agree with sudhaker regarding the importance of email down to be escalated to critical status.

It may not have been so important in the past millenium, but definately is now and we all must treat it as such or lose both customers and be seen as naive in real World business issues.

- Vince

[ricardo]

Only as a comment !!!

When I enter a new ticket ,I dont like the severity option (1, 2 or 3) !!
I never know which one I should use.

The best is to have something lik "URGENTE","Normal" and "Low"

[Daniel]

Only as a comment !!!

When I enter a new ticket ,I dont like the severity option (1, 2 or 3) !!
I never know which one I should use.

The best is to have something lik "URGENTE","Normal" and "Low"
Hello,

This is a standard system. Per http://www.powervps.com/support.php


Below is a guide to the approximate response times for support requests opened through our online help desk:

* Severity 1 = 15 minute response time
* Severity 2 = 4 hour response time
* Severity 3 = 24 hour response time
* Non-urgent = "When we can get to it"

A Severity 1 ticket should only be used when a server is completely down. It is not intended for situations where email not working, or for example when a single website is inaccessable. Tickets submitted with an inappropriate severity level will be reassigned to a more appropriate one.

[meavic]

I've got to agree with vps-vince, and I'm sure most other VPS users will. Complete email failure has got to be treated as a severity 1 problem.

Email is now the single most important form of communication for anyone in our industry. When it goes down we lose business.

[Robert]

If email is absolutely mission critical for you... I would personally suggest having access to it from multiple locations. Setup another service that can handle receiving mail for you if your primary mail server is down and setup your MX accordingly weighting delivery priority.

There is always at least one service someone considers "mission critical" for them. We can't make one policy that is going to work for everyone. If you make an exception for one, you have to for everyone. As much as we would like to say for person XX, this is OK, but not for person YY. It's impossible to train new staff all of those dependencies.

So if email is that critically urgent... I would suggest adding a little more redundancy to how you have your mail setup.

[vps-vince]

If email is absolutely mission critical for you... I would personally suggest having access to it from multiple locations.
... ...
So if email is that critically urgent... I would suggest adding a little more redundancy to how you have your mail setup.

Hi Robert,
Any suggestions or pointers/links to how we can set this up would be appreciated. I remember many folks here asking previously but cannot remember a solution ever been posted.

I think (hope) you will agree that for many businesses today, email is critical, and also if their Website is down. It is a fact that more businesses rely on ecommerce now, and their dependancey is increasing every day.

* Severity 1 = 15 minute response time
* Severity 2 = 4 hour response time
* Severity 3 = 24 hour response time
* Non-urgent = "When we can get to it"

For all our benefit to try and bring this to a close with clarity, what 'severity level' would you suggest we use for:

1. email down
2. Website down

Many thanks,

- Vince

[SlAiD]

Hi,

Is this situation still occuring ?

I have a upcp problem right now which i have to wait many hours between each replies... and it's a bit frustrating to receive a one line reply that doesn't help at all... #CEY-35573-688

thanks for letting us know that you have a high ticket load. It doesn,t solve my problem but at least i know there's for sure more urgent than my case... :)


Whell, this is just my opinion but latest tickets are not "proactive" as they are.

They ask questions that they can see for themselfes, and this can trustate you and anyone.

Good for me that I dont have any serious problem and that I can debug and solve allmost anything after 4 years boring support techs. :)


SL

[meavic]

SlAiD I agree with you. Back in the 'old' days - which probably wasn't that long ago if I looked back through my records - if there was a problem it would be solved and the root cause would be fixed as well. The five why's? (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/01/22.html) that Joel Spolksy talks about would be followed and it would be very unfortunate to get the same problem again.

Lately, and it's probably due to increased workload due to the guys here being so damn successful :), that dealing with support tickets is just firefighting. Hence why I've now had the same problem three times in as many days and each time I bang my head against the same brick wall as I get told the same thing over and over, and then someone just restarts the service. It's not until the customer get's cheesed off that someone actually says 'Hey, why, why, why, why and why?" - those magical five why's.

And again, it's email related (keeping on topic). My problem is my qmail and Courier-IMAP services keep halting. Yes, they can be restarted, but thirty minutes later they'll stop again. If we're talking about levels at which we 'the customers' can assign to a problem then I'd be happy if both server down and email down fell into URGENT category but you guys there employed some filtering process where an URGENT server down scenario gets followed up quicker than an URGENT email down one.

At the moment I'm posting my email problem tickets without an urgent tag (doing as I'm told), so they're falling into the same pool as some tickets that are a lot less important. ( Much like my questions a few weeks ago about upgrading to MySQL 4 and PHP 5! ) I'm assuming you guys filter the tickets to a certain degree, or watch new ones as they come in.