Providing Support

[tmanners]

I am still learning all the ins and outs of reselling and the services provided by Vortech. Can I ask for recommendations and comments on how you guys handle support situations. What I am mainly interested in is when Vortech sends us an email annoucment about services being down, upgrades, etc, how or do you inform all your clients of these things? Do you attempt to completely hide that you are a reseller when you do this? or do you tell them about these forums? What other options might I look at, etc?

Forgive me if this is an ignorant question, but I want to do things "right".

[Vixen]

Your customers should not be pointed to the forum for information for a couple of reasons. (1) Only customers are allowed access and (2) it would let them know that you are a reseller and in turn they could come directly to us (or another reseller) for service instead of going through you. I do know that some resellers tell their customers that they are indeed resellers but at the same time, alot don't and that is their decision. We do our best to be invisble and stay that way.

[mfennell]

First off I create a mailing list of all my clients that are on my Matrix account, then when I get email concerning things that have anything to do with my customers, I resend the email (of course changing the parts about Vortech and Matrix to my brand) as a BCC to my mailing list.

Remember that YOU are the one responsible for supporting your clients, do not point them to Vortech/Matrix. If your run into something you can not solve, either post here and let the good folks here help or submit a trouble ticket to Matrix support.

While I don't tell my customers that I own the servers or datacenter. I in the same turn don't tell them that I don't own them either.

Being a reseller isn't always as easy as it seems. Yes the equipment and connections are taken care of by the capable staff at Vortech, but there is always something thing new to deal with and you and they may not have the answers right away (take the core router situation, they were as frusterated as we were and all of our collective bottoms were on the line) be honest to your clients about the situation and you'll save yourself alot of headaches. Also, keep that status monitor up on a spare machine so you will always have an idea that something is going on when that phone rings and they won't have to be the ones to let you know that the server is down.

Just my 2 cents

[tmanners]

Status Monitor? I mean I know what it is but is there one just for vortech?

[mfennell]

http://status.vortechhosting.com:8080

[jmbeach]

http://status.vortechhosting.com:8080

oops!

oh, if any Vortech team members read this, you may want to update the 'status monitor' link in your toolbar next go around. It's linking to http://status.vortechhosting.com which goes nowhere.

[bubba]

What level of data do we as resellers have access to on the ipMonitor site?

When I click links I get password protected. Can we drill deeper... what is the best way to use this resource? etc. etc.

b

[Brangwyn]

You get basically just the current status and can view each monitors historical data as well, theres not really much more you'd ever need anyway.

You can either scrape that data and show it to your customers if you want, or simply just use it yourself to check on server status when dealing with your own customers queries.

[mresell]

If you check by group I think it will let you see more detail w/o the htaccess thing.