Reality Check

[vonbrocklin]

This is NOT an attack on Matrix, just some honest concerns from somebody who has been around the block a few times:

I am an application developer with a large list of long-term clients. I currently have 20+ shared accounts spread across the Web, from MaximumASP to iNNERHOST to viaNetworks to ActiveHost etc. I have the occasional trouble, but 99.5% of the time everything WORKS and I have yet to experience a total disaster after 8 years in this business. My goal was to move all of my client sites to Matrix to consolidate and save money.

But after 2 months I am still afraid to move ANY of my client sites. It seems like new problems pop up every day: Psoft breaks things. IIS errors. ASP.NET stops working. W2K machines not working. PHP gets downgraded without warning. And now this incident with ramjet, who apparently lost ALL of his plans, domains and websites in an instant. I would be DEAD if that was me and I lost 20 client sites. I understand that much of this is beyond the control of Matrix, but my clients flat out DON'T CARE about the reasons.

So honestly, how many of you are using Matrix for clients that truly MATTER to you? Do you trust Matrix with your most valuable clients? Do the problems on this board represent a small percentage compared to the many success stories that never get told? I can't afford to lose long-term development clients, and trust me, many of my clients would not tolerate some of the problems that have popped up in the two months I have spent getting a feel for this system.

All that said, I really DO like Matrix and appreciate the openess on these forums. I want this to work. I just am not convinced at all that I am ready to trust them with my livelihood.

[vonbrocklin]

Also: if you are wondering why I do not have a dedicated server it is because I cannot afford the multiple dedis I would need to support MSSQL, ASP.NET, PHP on Linux etc. I am also not a server admin or a security expert and would prefer to leave these elements of my business to somebody else.

[ramjet]

just for the record i'm not yet sure i wasn't hacked (Matrix are getting me the logs) - but my gut tells me i've hit a bug in H-Sphere somehow.I don't really feel Matrix are the problem but rather H-Sphere. I'm not even sure they get any sleep there!
We'll see, but I feel we couldn't be getting better support for a product with so many problems. H-Sphere's support for its customers seems a little pathetic, judging from the Psoft forum.
Still, when its all ironed out I think the combination of H-Sphere and Matrix will be fantastic.
Watch this space - my 2 cents.

[BCS]

Same feelings here. I'm trying to be patient and really want our company to have a working relationship with Vortech/Matrix.

We've been in this business since 1997 - not exactly new kids on the block. Virtual Unix is our "bread and butter" with a client base of 1600+.

NT/Windows has become a secondary startup based on customer requests. Due to changes with our current Windows service provider we have 80+ that we need to move to new machines. While researching solutions, Matrixreseller came out a winner hands-down based on forum comments and talking to the sales department by phone.

We moved a few sites over to get some feedback. At first they were impressed with all the features. Then the problems with ASP and MS SQL started showing up. At one point, we were told, "right now is deal with it.. We are doing the best we can" ... not something we would tell our end customers, but it appeared
that tempers were a bit high so we "dealt"
.http://www.matrixreseller.com/forum/...=&threadid=281

In short, our "dealing with it" resulted in a customer leaving - they were setting a site up for one of thier clients and as vonbrocklin pointed out, clients don't care why things don't work and will not tolerate repeated problems. They simply go elsewhere ... At this point we're very leary about moving anyone else over for fear similar results. I'm well aware of Windows/Microsoft reliability issues, bur the problems of late are not the norm.

All the features (and recent additions) are great. But without some basic feature reliability it's like having a BMW with a blown engine ... ya look great and have lots of buttons to push, but you not going to get past the driveway.

Thing is - just before seeing this thread, I was out looking at other windows reseller plans because of the current problems. We have a deadline to make all moves in the next few months. Hoping that most of the problems are resolved before that time.

ADMIN, please don't take this personally ... we're (at least 2 of us) trying to be honest with some valid concerns. I too, appreciate the openess on the board and some of the great assistance from your support staff. But like Vortech, losing customers is not something we look forward to.

[hohios]

That's a reply to
http://www.matrixreseller.com/forum/...y&threadid=388 thread, but i post it here "Matrix Customers only"

Access databases work fine on all our servers as long as you setup your ODBC or system less DSN right.

I don't think so. These last days, I'm having an everyday [ODBC error]. My scripts are ok, cause I've used to other host in the past and guess what... NEVER an ODBC error with other host.
Please make something, fixxx that IIS sh*t or throw it in the... recycle bin.
I'm an ASP programmer, this make me ODBC tight over. How can I produce ASP pages with a server that stuck on some ASP applications? And what about my clients? They expect to see preety good dynamic pages, but no luck! Every 1 or 2 days they see an IIS response: [ODBC error} too many clients
Maybe Psoft must stop windows support and you install a "command Matrix" control Panel. That's a greate server control panel for hosts....
I'm dissapointed...

[Scroller]

Maybe you wanna try using DSNLess connections. I have a couple of sites running on NT10 and NT9, all using DSNLess connections to generate all the dynamic pages. No problem @ all, and it's really easy to move the sites around on different host since you dun have in configure system DSN. Just keep the configuration on a separate file and do a include as and when you need to access the db. Hope this helps!

Originally posted by hohios
That's a reply to
http://www.matrixreseller.com/forum/...y&threadid=388 thread, but i post it here "Matrix Customers only"

I don't think so. These last days, I'm having an everyday [ODBC error]. My scripts are ok, cause I've used to other host in the past and guess what... NEVER an ODBC error with other host.
Please make something, fixxx that IIS sh*t or throw it in the... recycle bin.
I'm an ASP programmer, this make me ODBC tight over. How can I produce ASP pages with a server that stuck on some ASP applications? And what about my clients? They expect to see preety good dynamic pages, but no luck! Every 1 or 2 days they see an IIS response: [ODBC error} too many clients
Maybe Psoft must stop windows support and you install a "command Matrix" control Panel. That's a greate server control panel for hosts....
I'm dissapointed...

[hohios]

Ok, other scripts include a DSN-less string... But what about my or your customers?

[vonbrocklin]

Can you start a NEW thread about your DSN problems? No offense, but I am more interested in replies like the one from BCS. There are plenty of threads dealing with specific problems and solutions :-) I am more interested in the big long-term picture. I would also be very interested to hear honest replies from anybody at Matrix on the numbers of problems that appear to pop up regularly here. Is this the norm around here due to H-Sphere? Or have the last 2 months been particularly rough?

Hello,
The honest answer is that I personally feel that Hsphere was not prepared for their control panel to handle a large number of clients even though they never tell you that. A number of the problems we are having point to this oversight in the development of the control panel. As of this moment we are by far the largest hsphere reseller they have. So guess what we are stress testing the system for them in a sense. Were we aware this was the case when we started using Hsphere.... No.
The last two months in particular have been extremely taxing on both us and you. We are doing the best we can to handle problems and isues that shouldn't be problems or issues. One example. Last nght I start getting disk full errors on the mail machine. The reason is because I setup the mail machine with 3 gigis of space for /usr/hsphere and the remaining 40 gigs of space for /var like their website says to do. Whats funny (not really) is that they keep all the mail in /usr/hsphere not /var/hsphere. Simple oversites on their part cause us to have problems and or Downtime. While they are good at fixing the problem these should not be problems at all.
I am happy to hear you enjoy working with our company but agree that if your are not able to move important customers over to matrix then neither one of us will make any money.
I know that we are working to make these problems dissapear. Even my unix servers are exhibiting some strange behavior and every time I think I have foud the problem and corrected it then it comes back in a different form.
I can assure you that we will not rest ( and I mean this literally, we are averagin 17 hours days around here dealing with these problems the last few weeks.) unitl we have a reliable, fast service that you can count on. I think a large number of concerns have been addressed lately and we are still working to correct all of them.

Perhaps admin can post as well since he mainly deals with Psoft and can update us on any further issues that are being corrected.

[admin]

Well here goes...

We are the lagest reseller host for H-Sphere thats our number one problem. No one has ever put a load on H-Sphere like you guys here have..

We have been able to find more bugs in there system then just about all the other co. out there using it because we have so many users.. This means our system have had a few problems but they are also the first to be fixed.

Here is some thing i have been talking to the owner of Psoft about and why we are getting so many problems..

iseletsk: yes.
iseletsk: (kind of)
iseletsk: the code for loading resellers configuration is not optimized.
iseletsk: and we have to load it each time reseller's client comes in.
iseletsk: We catch all the data - but resellers data is not cached properly.
iseletsk: as the result - it simply kills everything - all we do, is load reseller configuration, unload it, and load it again.
vortechhosting: How hard is that to get made in to the CP not to do that any more?
iseletsk: It is not a simple task, it is completly posible.
iseletsk: It is just the fact that the caching is very easy to make wrong - and it is too important, as it can bring in all the kinds of wierd problems
iseletsk: (main problem is to differentiate between the object that doesn't exist, and the object that doesn't exist in the cache, but exists globally).
vortechhosting: Ok, what do you think 3 to 6 months for some thing like that? We can sell the shit out of H-Sphere when its working right but our forums are going nuts with pissed of customers just makes things really bad..
iseletsk: don't name numbers like that. We figured out what was going on only this week, it should not take a month
iseletsk: I also spoke with the developers - they are willing to work weekends - that should speed up things as well.
iseletsk: I know, the way you are selling is amazing.

They now know what the problem is with the CP slowing down and eating its self.


As hostnet said we are trying very very hard to work with psoft to get this CP to be one of the best around..

[admin]

Ok that had to do with the CP problems as for the windows problems we are getting them a little more stable now..

ASP still seems to be having problems from time to time.. I think we fixed it on one server but I really don't like the fix so i am trying to find a better way..

Our problem is IIS/inetinfo runs as a service and ASP runs with in that and the dllhost.exe there is no service for just ASP that we can keep an eye. As you have seen asp will fail but html, php and ever thing else keeps working thats why I hate asp..

asp.net we can keep an eye on as its run by its own service. We are adding 3 more NT server to try and spred the load even more.

As for the ODBC problem this tends to happen on any busy NT server from time to time. It just seems to be happening of a few servers here more offten then it should. We can fix it if you report the domains to us as well..

[vonbrocklin]

Thanks for the answers. So perhaps a bigger question:

How committed are you to H-Sphere and PSoft? At what point do you pull the plug and move on? When I first started with Matrix I was also looking at Weberz.com. I noticed that he recently dropped H-Sphere completely due to ongoing problems and PSoft's inability to take care of the bugs before adding new "features." I don't know Tracy (Weberz) personally but he has an excellent technical rep and clearly wants nothing to do with PSoft any longer. Like I said, I want this to work, but Psoft makes me nervous as hell. As a company with ongoing server problems, complaining customers etc., I would have to imagine that Vortech is a little nervous too. How long until you give up and try for something more stable?

p.s. Do the new forums for CPANEL, ensim etc. point to a new focus?

[Garreg]

Although I’ve used a different name on WebHostingTalk for a number of years now, from reading most of the posts and having spoken to Brad there on numerous occasions (yes we have chatted before you knew me as Garreg) I felt the move to Vortech / Matrix would be a better solution than what I may have experienced in the past. So I have to agree, whilst not wishing to turn this into a ‘bash’ Matrix session, to say I’m disappointed is an understatement.

Although the majority of problems that I have personally experienced may not directly be attributable to Matrix, as someone paying for the service no matter who’s at fault the butt must stop with the ones accepting that money. For instance, If I purchased a new car and that kept breaking down, my main point of contact for all issues, repairs and compensation is the dealer who sold the car to me. The manufacturer may be ultimately at fault with defective parts or what ever – but it is the service, customer support and relationship with the dealer that is important and most importantly with whom I raise my issues and concerns. The latter example cuts both ways / Matrix -> Resellers and Reseller -> clients. My clients aren’t interested in Psoft, they couldn’t careless about Vortech, they’re only interested in their site, their business and whether they’re getting value more money.

I’ve been in this game long enough to have learned that most people with put up with almost anything – providing you do two things. One is being honest and two letting them know when things aren’t going right.
I don’t have a major problem with number one around here – but if I ‘m honest myself, I don’t feel 100% comfortable either – edited and closed threads, private emails being sent etc… have made me feel uncomfortable with building an open ‘working’ relationship.
Number two is where I feel the system fails – miserably, because when’s things go wrong the only way we find out is by either submitting a TT or posting in this forum. With all of the ‘bells and whistles’ that H-Sphere is proclaimed to have it beats me why a simple email to all Resellers can’t be sent out to explain the circumstances and before anyone say’s “ah but we don’t have the time – dealing with TT’s / answering forum posts / fixing the problem” – rubbish! How much time would be saved if just one email went out telling every one of the problems? We could then pass on that information to our customers and probably not enter TT’s or forum posts – because we ‘know’ there’s a problem and it’s being dealt with – everyone’s happy(ish).

To answer one of vonbrocklin’s questions – no I don’t trust the system and I’m certainly not willing to transfer any of my bigger clients over to it. I’m here because this is my business, this is how I make my living – and at present I’m not only loosing money, but turning it down. Two weeks ago one of my larger clients who frequently refer business to me asked about my hosting www.teambentley.com www.djsasha.com (to name just a few) for who they have designed the web sites. This client has an excellent customer base and 99.9% of the time passes them to me for the actual hosting, they, like so many of my clients don’t just do their business via the net, they expect and often demand that we have regular ‘face to face’ meetings to discuss business – they consider this an important factor in building a relationship in an often ‘faceless’ world. I’ve therefore spent and invested a lot of time and money into developing these relationships - not something I’m readily going to risk loosing by introducing them to the service so far experienced.

I sincerely like the concept of H-Sphere and welcome the dedication provided by Vortech, but I’m really unsure if I want to be paying money out to be a ‘guinea pig’ for the largest customer of Psoft. Many will say, well why not move on, look for another host……. Well that thought has crossed my mind as well. Why haven’t I? Well I genuinely believe that this has the makings of a sound / reliable, value for money service and I’m happy to stick around for a little longer to see if things settle down, if they don’t, then despite what I may believe, the needs of my customers may be the final deciding factor, as they say “the competition is only a click away!” – for all of us.

[mresell]

I have the same concerns as everyone else, but I must be missing something. The other main stream control panels I have seen are limited or unstable w/ bad support. Cpanel for example is full of problems w/ bad non-existent support. Ensim and plesk are ok, but not great features. I think psoft is very active w/ customer support compared to what is out there. Also I think pulling the plug on something that effects that many people can have really awful consequences the other way. I looked at weberz and talked w/ the owner many times. He may be the greatest guy in the world, but I had my doubts for several reasons. Just because they are dropping hsphere isn't necessarily a good thing or one that will fix anything. Am I right to think that the majority of problems going on are on the windows side more so than unix?

[vonbrocklin]

I realize that pulling the plug on H-Sphere could have BAD effects, and this is why I asked. If I do decide to stick around here, I want to make sure that Matrix is committed to working things out as opposed to being on the brink of bailing on PSoft and moving everything to another control panel.