UPDATE: Oh yeah, and no offense to the actual Abdul that reads my blog! :) Abdul is just my standard stereotypical hard-to-understand I’m-stealing-your-job-for-a-quarter-a-day Indian outsourcing worker name… I know, I’m really not that creative, am I?

I posted about it earlier, but here’s a follow-up.

First off, I’d like to let everyone know that up until now, I’ve received nothing but flawless support from Superb Servers. In the entirety of my 2-year long relationship with them, I have submitted 3 support tickets. The first was when I hung my server during a reboot, and it simply needed to be hard-cycled. The other two were during problems with their data center, which were momentarily there-after reported on their status page. Both times the incidents were updated within 5 minutes and completely handled within 10.

At 2:32pm (EST), I submitted the following support ticket, via my un-affected external control panel:

Noticed some unusual latency connecting to web server. Upon further investigation, it appears I’m getting some very high response times at the last hop (your network to my server) - 91ms jumps to 1400ms.

See attached file for assorted traces.

[attachment snipped]

I feverishly refreshed the ticket status page for quite some time, as I continued about my work (since I was, after all, at work). I received absolutely no acknowledgement from support staff.

At 5:26pm (EST), I added another note to the ticket:

An update would be greatly appreciated now that we’re coming up on 3 hours post-ticket.

At 8:49pm (EST), I called their toll-free number and had the following conversation with “Abdul” the ever-helpful technical support specialist:

Me: Yes, I submitted a support ticket about 6 hours ago and have yet to hear back from anyone there about it. I was wondering if you could help me.
Abdul: What ticket ID?
Me: Uhh, I have a “Reference Number”.
Abdul: Yes, that.
Me: 119 - 047.
Abdul: One moment.
Me: OK.
[40 second pause]
Abdul: Yes, we receive ticket.
Me: Uhh, ok. And…?
Abdul: Oh yes, we forward to system administrator… in front of server, yes.
Me: Uhh, ok, it’s been 6 hours now, and I haven’t heard anything back.
Abdul: Yes, we forward to system administrator in front of server, you know, at console. He will update.
Me: Yes, but this was six hours ago, and I haven’t heard anything back yet.
Abdul: Yes, I guess you just need wait. You get email automatically.
Me: Uhh, ok… [click]

Not only was Abdul’s broken heavily-accented English almost impossible to understand, but he was totally and utterly useless. The time would have been better spent if I had found some goat porn and “entertained” myself.

So now we march firmly into our seventh hour of thoroughly unacceptable service, with not so much as a word from anyone about what’s going on, and I’m starting to shop around for new hosting companies. I’m thinking 1&1’s Root Server I would be quite nice, not to mention it would save me $20 a month (yes, I bent over and took it for this server, what of it?).

I await any news of my server’s livelihood, along with all my loyal readers. At 10:30 (the 8-hour mark), I plan on calling back and demanding to speak with a supervisor about my lost revenues due to this unresolved problem and unresponsive support… We’ll see how it goes.