Min 8hrs Downtime For Refund

[Brangwyn]

Actually I and probably many others do fully understand Vixen. But its important to note that we weren't the ones the set the expectaions regarding refunds that was done by Matrix.

I have no problem in the slightest being held accountable for my customers, however as I said I also would need to see some form of evidence showing what problems my customer was causing, unfortunately in most environments this evidence collecting is done retrospectively which also introduces an element of doubt into whether it was the actual cause of the problem or just a site that happens to curently be causing problems post outage.

With mail servers its a little easier to track down "spammers" as this is proactively logged, unfortunately with something such as windows hosting there is a considerable overhead involved in maintaing resource logs, and even further overhead required to do it properly e.g running all sites in isolation.

If Matrix invested (though I personally don't really think its required) time and money into resource management and reporting on their servers and provide resellers with the information they need to be able to be proactive in communicating potential issues to their customers then I'd be very very happy to do so.

[Scroller]

Originally posted by admin
I have also got some other ideas running around in my head I should get time tomorrow to post some of them here for some feedback.

Hi Brad, any new updates on this? It will be great if we can see some new ideas to go around this problem. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one still feeling a chill thinking that it only becomes an issue if you guys go down for more than 8hrs a day. This is definitely a new in the industry. I also particular like the idea Vixen rasied about billing whoever is responsible, that should make the culprit feel the pain. But we will need crystal clear rules on how this shall be implemented.

Anyway, if the new rule is concrete and to stay, then I very much expect a formal annoucement ... like an email to all customer, news on the website (taking out the 99.9% thingy) ... everything. Announcing it at the forum itself seems pretty lacking, considering that active user of this forum only form a very small percentage of the large number customers matrix is actually having.

Thank you Garreg for answering my question, it's nice that someone has the patience and time to read and actually respond to a question.

In terms of all of this I hope admin finds a solution, Matrix has done great in the past but this is just somewhat ridiculous. I understand your position, sure it's reseller X's customer that caused the downtime. But does reseller Y care? No, they only care because their server is down. If we had the power to check and see if our customers were causing problems then sure it's our fault but right now Matrix is the only ones that come close to being able to do that. Thus it only makes sense for reseller Y to demand action from Matrix, not reseller X.

Also, like Scroller, if our uptime has disappeared I expect Matrix would make the appropriate announcements and corrections to their website.


Thank you

[Vixen]

Originally posted by resellme

In terms of all of this I hope admin finds a solution, Matrix has done great in the past but this is just somewhat ridiculous. I understand your position, sure it's reseller X's customer that caused the downtime. But does reseller Y care? No, they only care because their server is down. If we had the power to check and see if our customers were causing problems then sure it's our fault but right now Matrix is the only ones that come close to being able to do that. Thus it only makes sense for reseller Y to demand action from Matrix, not reseller X.

I understand SOME of your logic here since we are the only people that can actually fix any problems that require a hands on approach. We never said anything about not fixing anything. Where your logic doesn't hold water is, WHY should we be expected to pay everyone for downtime credits when it wasn't even something we did?? If you want to have customers, take responsibility for them. We take responsibility for all of you. If you spam or whatever, it comes back on US. However we are not willing to take responsibility for YOUR customers. They belong to you, not us. And that is what I don't think anyone is getting.

<b><rant>Ok, if its all that upsetting, go to another host, pay 2x or 3x more, for supposedly the same level of service, but I have a feeling you will be back, because you will be paying several times more and having the same issues. I know for a fact that Brad, Craig, Mike, Alan, Lindsey, and Kim(I know I might be forgetting someone here) all want 100% uptime and to never have to deal with downtime, but get real it happens. In fact, they probably want no downtime far more than we do, because if the servers were perfect, they could sit back, kick their feet up, and watch the money come rolling in; things don't just happen like that though. If you EVER find the perfect host, let me know, but please don't tell anyone else, or they will have growing pains and then only serve up crap.</rant></b>

[Scroller]

I'm trying to look at it from a different perspective ...

First of all, help me to understand this. All the while I understood that the 99.9% uptime gurantee is on NETWORK, when (and which idiot) starting quoting SLA to demand for refund on server/email/cp downtime? Or did Matrix became a little too friendly and started issuing credits for those as well? Cos if you guys did, then you must have be burnt pretty hard by the recent NT and CP problems and I understand your frustration? If my assumptions are right, perhaps enforcing the "network uptime" part should do the trick? I really dun see how Matrix's network can go down at any point?

Then ... like what landiserve mentioned, I really dun see how such problem will go away even with another hoster. Matrix must suceed and remain the #1 Host ... continue to have more customers ... only with that and all the $$$ can Matrix continue to provide even better services to their customers ... then my question how is Matrix gonna do that if it's not going to provide 99.9% uptime gurantee when everyone else is doing that? Worst .. a 8hrs rule is for sure gonna scare potential customers away. Am I right to say that?

Brad ... dun mind me saying this ... isn't this exactly your fear and explains why you've not quite announced this publicly? Can you imagine the kind of sarcastic remarks you will get at WHT?

Before someone start shooting me down again ... I just want to make one thing very clear. I love Matrix !!! After spending years with horrible local providers where I come from, this is heaven ...

BTW, you might want to know that the links of the matrixreseller site doesn't quite work for Opera.

WHY should we be expected to pay everyone for downtime credits when it wasn't even something we did??

It's not what you did; it's what you didn't do. I doubt you will argue that it is the sole responsibility of Matrix to ensure the servers are up an running; Matrix is in fact the only one who can physically do this. This holds even if it means ensuring some random person’s code isn't eating the machine. I would be more than happy help and suspend clients who were chewing up resources, but I simply have no way of doing that. This leaves the issue completely in your hands.

In any case, I'm sure admin will find a solution

Kind regards

[Vixen]

So, we are suppose to basically watch over all of our customers and all of ya'lls customers too?? Geeeeeeeeez I want to have a business like that. All the money and no responsibility for my customers. It must be grand.

You still have not told me WHY we should be coming out of our pocket for downtime credits if it wasn't caused by our customer?? Why shouldn't the reseller, who is in fact the person's host, be responsible for paying??

[Scroller]

Originally posted by Vixen
You still have not told me WHY we should be coming out of our pocket for downtime credits if it wasn't caused by our customer?? Why shouldn't the reseller, who is in fact the person's host, be responsible for paying??

I dun think anyone is saying you shouldn't implement a policy whereby the reseller pays for his customer's bad code/practice which is causing downtime ... in fact I think a few of us, including myself is encouraging that. Please don't blame the resellers that the rules are making you pay for other people's faults, if you do remember, you did set the rule, we are merely following it.

[vonbrocklin]

For the record, I could care less about the new policy because I have never bothered to try and collect on any downtime. But the idea of having resellers pay OTHER resellers for downtime is flat out insane. Unless of course we are provided with some "Magic Software" that lets us moniter server loads, internal processes, etc. And even then, problems are often caused COLLECTIVELY:

Customer X might bring down the server, but if Customers Y and Z weren't there, maybe Customer X would have been just fine.

Except in very specific instances it is virtually IMPOSSIBLE to point the blame to a single customer. This is the nature of "shared" hosting. I understand Vixen's point and don't have a good solution off the top of my head, but trying to pinpoint blame for problems on a shared server and then force that reseller to pay other resellers is not the answer. Unless of course you want to provide business for a fleet of lawyers arguing over whose fault something was and who will pay.

I am sincerely hoping that this is Vixen trying to make a point, and not a serious policy under consideration.

EDIT: Case in point. Even though he is sitting right in front of the physical server, with access to every monitoring system known to man, admin has not been able to figure out who is causing the recent problems on NT8.

Frankly, I am not too fond of the idea of me paying for me customers bad code, I mean I know it is bad, and it sometimes takes other down, but are we all to be in such fear that our monthly bill will be $400 because of downtime credits that have been blamed on us? I mean, I don't have that many customers, and I only have one that might even have a problem, but I would prefer the first time something like this happens to a reseller to be a very stern warning(then maybe a "fine", or "downtime DEBIT"). Not even sure what all to say here, but as long as we are all doing our responsiblity and taking care of our clients, and their problems, their should be no bad customer code. Becuase normally bad code comes from one thing not working, and making a "work around" to fix it, and the workaround is mucked up, or simply a bad script froma website (hotscripts has several of these!). as far as pre-made scripts that cause problems go, it might not be a bad idea to start a thread with a list of web apps that suck, and not to run, at least until they get fixed, I know to some this might sound bad, but it can save a lot of time, and possibly downtime.

[Scroller]

EXACTLY! That's why I was saying ... it's fine if you think that's the best solution ... but you're gonna have CRYSTAL CLEAR rules on how it will be implemented.

While I was trying to sleep last nite ... I just couldn't stop thinking ... how the **** this can ever be possible. If anyone can actually come up with some kind of super sophiscated system to do this, this guy must be a genius and will for surely be really rich one day. *sigh*

[jmbeach]

Maybe I missed the boat on this one, but is there any Vortech employee that can specifically name a customer of a reseller (or a reseller for that matter) that has been specifically responsible for downtime? If this information is at all readily available, should it not be the first line of defense to make that reseller aware?

I would venture to guess that the last thing any of us (your resellers) want to do is to have customers that are the direct root of downtime. Now me, I don't resell any of the space I purchase from you. I control all the web pages and apps that I host for my clients. In fact, none of them will even get CP access for the very fact that I don't want them mucking around.

Now I may fall out of favor on this one, but is it possible that you offer TOO MANY components and features? Is it possible that these components begging to work together could be causing much of the conflict? Or does it still lie with our bad code?

Frankly I would love it if at the first sign my code was causing server faults, that you would let me know so I could fix it right away. I want to be a good community citizen here, and I'm confident we all respect the community that you have given us access to.

If our clients need to shape up, let us know who, or give us the tools to find out ourselves. Heck, it even gives your resellers that much more incentive to help their clients fix the problems... it's more potential revenue for us from our clients to fix code.

It's a win-win.

[admin]

http://www.friendlyhelp.com

AND it was the resellers site. They have been taken down NT8 we have kicked them off now..

I find resellers users EVERY single day doing this they should not.

IE running .exe files using up 90% of the CPU from the CGI bin.
IE Spamming there butts off and take down mail for a few hours. So far 90% of these spam cases have been the reseller them self some even in this post.
IE ALL users leaving there mail on our servers for months and not deleting it. ( But this will change soon ) This was the reason for the down time for mail1. Over 30GB of mail has been left on the server now. THAT is very high.. Some dating back 6 months or more.

But yet I have to issue a credit to everyone for this resellers mess up.

You have to remeber we are not here to check your code fix your code problems non of that is our job.

Our job is to keep the servers running. If i was to send a notice for every small thing that happend on the server i would be sending out 1000's of emails and no one would ever get there tickets answered..



I am looking at these options for the down time credits.


1. Leave them the way they are now..
2. Charge the reseller for any credit we must give out because of there users code. ( They can then charge that user if they want. )
3. Bring back the old way but with some new rules and forms online that would be kept in a database and only issue a credit once a reseller gets over $25 in downtime credits. These would all be checked with our logs if they don't match no credit. If we find out its your user NO credit for sure.


Just some ideas I am working with...

[Vixen]

Originally posted by jmbeach
Maybe I missed the boat on this one, but is there any Vortech employee that can specifically name a customer of a reseller (or a reseller for that matter) that has been specifically responsible for downtime?

Yes and on more than one occasion. The problem occurs when we do inform the reseller of the problem with them or their customer and they do nothing to correct the problem. I know alot of you take responsibility for your customers but in the same respect, alot don't. There is where the problem lies.