SERVAGE HOSTING STOPS UNIQUE RESELLER PROGRAM

We just received this in a Mail from Adam (Servage Hosting):

Jan 13 - 09:08 GMT Servage - Adam

Hello Andreas, Thanks for the update. Unfortunately we have to inform you that the reseller program is to be discontinued. Therefore we ask you not to create new customer accounts. At this point we do not have any further information. Therefore we must kindly ask you to have a little more patience until an official statement has been released. You will be informed per email as soon as more detailed information is available. .... Have a nice day, Kind regards, Adam, Support -support Servage Hosting

In other words it seems lots and lots of Servage Customers and also all SUB-Customers seem to loose their Hosting Space or would need to pay extra for it.

Jan 13 - 09:33 GMT Customer

As you don't ask the question about the lost domains and about the outsourced Servage Support Team we assume that the people who posted it were absolutly right. I am sorry about that and hoped that you would answer all questions. If you discontinue the reseller program which made it possible for Servage Customers to Resell their Account to unlimited other Customers - what will happen to all those customers. Do they have to pay now an own Servage Account? Will you delete all Sub-Customer Sites? How will you control what is a Sub-Customer and what is a Customer Site? I know lots and lots of Servage Customers who host lots and lots of Sub-Customers on their sites, so what will happen to all those? A very important question. Customers are even asking us which customer we could recommend for Reselling as many of them don't need such big webspace for themselves, they are trying to share it with others to reduce costs? Also your Reseller Program was a very unique feature which brought you lots customers in the last years. Will then all contracts be changed without further notice or are only NEW contracts have to fear this loss of Reseller Program and all old ones stay like they were before. Andi

Some more Questions concerning Servage Hosting

Jan 13 - 02:37 GMT Customer

There are some more questions we would like to ask Servage: From which country is your Support opperating? Why aren't you offering GERMAN / DEUTSCHER Support even you are a German Company? Why differ the response time between new and follow up ticket so much? Why is Servage working in most of the issues with prepared answering templates? It often seems that the english knowlegde of servage support isn't so good that they really understand the issues of customers, why, what are you doing to improve this - i.e. ESL Courses? What qualifications does Servage Support Members have? We are evaluating future hosting partners and companies we are interested in to promote. In the last month you changed from a more or less chaos support to a much better one, but still there are a lot of glitches we wanna fix before recommending you our valuable customers globally with a good feeling. Thanks a lot for your answers. Andi

Jan 13 - 03:10 GMT Servage - Adam

Hello Andreas, Thanks for writing in. >>Our clustered servers are physically located in our own top datacenter in norhtern Germany with more than 120 direct peering including (WorldCom, Level3 & GlobalCrossing), ensuring ultra fast connectivity to any country – world wide. Apart from the excellent electronic infrastructure Germany is a seismic inactive area. Unlike many smaller companies we own all our equipment and our own techs are standing by 24/7 incase a problem should arise. >>We do have support in English only as it is globally understood. >>It seems that many of our clients do place duplicate tickets regarding the same issue that is the reason there is a delay in response time for the ticket's. >>We have a standard format for the replie's we give to our customer's, so it seems that the answers are prepared but the are not, just that they are in a specific format. Please contact us if you have any further queries. Have a nice day :o) Kind regards, Adam, Support -support Servage Hosting

Jan 13 - 08:08 GMT Customer

Hi Adam Thanks for your response. Could you please also answer the rest of the questions. Thanks. We heard that your support is operating from an easter Europe country like many other software centers do meanwhile. OK some of them also operate from India where English is much better then from eastern Europe. Never mind. Why doesn't Servage offer Third Party Application support. Most problems arising are normally caused while working with a third Party product. Is there any reason why you never tried to offer i.e. support for CMS's or Forums or other common applications? Thanks for taking time to answer our questions Andi

Jan 13 - 08:13 GMT Servage - Adam

Hello Andreas, Thanks for the update. We do support third party software on our server's but only if the server requirement's of the software meet our server's, if the server's requirements matches with our then you can install third part software at your end. Please contact us if you have any further queries. Kind regards, Adam, Support -support Servage Hosting

Jan 13 - 08:21 GMT Customer

Hi Adam Yes of course you support Third Party Software but I meant the Servage Support won't help you if you got problems with a Third Party Product, even it has been installed direct using a Servage Script. i.e. You install TYPO3 or Drupal or Wordpress or even Joomla and usually problems just occure while you are working with those applications. After answering Servage Support you often got the answer back, that Servage is not supporting Third Party Products thru their Support. Result: People - especially those who ae just starting to run their own CMS ... get lost in a jungle of - Oh sorry - please look somewhere else for somebody to help you. Why is it like this a Servage and why aren't you simply providing also Help-Support for those wonderful Applications? I guess a lot of customers would be very interested at such a Service and even would pay for it an additional yearly "support member" fee i.e. 20€ for free support/year to name an idea! If this would not be enough to cover your expenses please name another figure so we have an idea about it. Andi

Jan 13 - 08:25 GMT Servage - Adam

Hello Andreas, Thanks for the update. We do provide support with third party application's but there are any scripting issues with it then we unfortunately do not provide support for scripting issues for that you need to contact your webdeveloper or who has developed the software. Please contact us if you have any further queries. Kind regards, Adam, Support -support Servage Hosting

Jan 13 - 09:04 GMT
Customer

Hi Adam

Yes of course you support Third Party Software but I meant the Servage Support won't help you if you got problems with a Third Party Product, even it has been installed direct using a Servage Script.

i.e. You install TYPO3 or Drupal or Wordpress or even Joomla and usually problems just occure while you are working with those applications. After answering Servage Support you often got the answer back, that Servage is not supporting Third Party Products thru their Support.

Result: People - especially those who ae just starting to run their own CMS ... get lost in a jungle of - Oh sorry - please look somewhere else for somebody to help you. Why is it like this a Servage and why aren't you simply providing also Help-Support for those wonderful Applications? I guess a lot of customers would be very interested at such a Service and even would pay for it an additional yearly "support member" fee i.e. 20€ for free support/year to name an idea! If this would not be enough to cover your expenses please name another figure so we have an idea about it.

Another Point we just found:

Why did Servage loose over 1200 Domains last year December 10th - what happened - can this happen again???
December 17, 2007 70453 domains + 443 domains
December 10, 2007 70010 domains -1265 domains
http://servage.net.web-hosting-top.com/web-hosting/web-hosting-top.servage.net-reviews
Why do people write:
It is a great service, but I do warn you. People(I know several) have be disappointed by the host and I am 1 of those!
see also here to read more about Servage:
http://hostjury.com/reviews/Servage
Is this really true what they are writing here. Really doesn't sound good for Servage! What have you changed since?

Second Question:
we found this:
http://imarkhosting.com/testimonials.html
What is actually a Servage Netagent? Is it a Reseller. Are you allowed to resell Servage Space on your Accounts or how does it work?

As it seems, you are increasing your staff at the moment:
http://jobs.trovit.de/jobs/just-english
Will this result also in better support and even better hosting solutions like clustered-dedicated-server environments including ssh and more?

Andi

Jan 13 - 09:08 GMT Servage - Adam

Hello Andreas, Thanks for the update. Unfortunately we have to inform you that the reseller program is to be discontinued. Therefore we ask you not to create new customer accounts. At this point we do not have any further information. Therefore we must kindly ask you to have a little more patience until an official statement has been released. You will be informed per email as soon as more detailed information is available. We do not allow Telnet/SSH access to our systems for security reasons. However our techs will be more than happy execute commands for you on request. Have a nice day, Kind regards, Adam, Support -support Servage Hosting

How to speed up your Servage Hosting Tickets

Looking back to those many posts there is a good solution: CLOSE your Tickets and create the same one NEW!

We really found out that Servage is responding to new tickets in average about 5 min-1 hour - but even a second response often makes you waiting for days. I guess it is some kind of Servage policy but also could be a real problem in the ticketing system they are using.

New Tickets get posted perhaps on Top and Followup tickets just behind those new tickets. As a result you won't get an answer fast if you have a follow up ticket.

Another problem could be, that the support might get paid by NEW tickets. Especially hotlines in low budget countries often face similar problems. The idea behind all this is to get a higher quality and faster solution for customers. The downside is - especially if a hotline hasn't got enough personal and is working like Servage only with VIRTUAL personal (i.e. many names for one person ;-), then follow ups get stuck in nowhere.

There are some more questions we will ask Servage:
From which country is your Support opperating?
Why aren't you offering GERMAN / DEUTSCHER Support even you are a German Company?
Why differ the response time between new and follow up ticket so much?
Why is Servage working in most of the issues with prepared answering templates?
It often seems that the english knowlegde of servage support isn't so good that they really understand the issues of customers, why, what are you doing to improve this - i.e. ESL Courses?
What qualifications does Servage Support Members have?

We are just checking this with several other servage accounts and find a good parallel here. In the following days we will try to find a solution for this problem and hopefully Servage is interested to be the best Hoster and supports our ideas.

SERVAGE HOSTING - Number ONE Hoster?

Even I complaint at the beginning much about Servage Hosting, it seems as they have read some posts in this blog and changed their support a bit. As you can obviously see, there weren't many issues since they installed ruby gems - which was actually causing most of the problems.

Since 2 days I am now running on newest versions of RUBY 1.8.6, Rails 2.0.2 and everything works fine and fast. They have changed me to another cluster. Only one application doesn't seem to be working - it's a simple hello world application a friend who also hosts on the same cluster ;-) has written. We are still waiting for a solution from servage. Let's see! and wait!

Ruby on Rails Application don't starts

Jan 12 - 17:47 GMT Customer

Hi http://tst001.t3pack.info/ is a simple helloworld test page but it doesn't start after the move. Any ideas? Thanks It is in folder 0test/tst001

Jan 12 - 18:30 GMT Servage - Julie

Hello Andreas, Thanks for submitting the ticket. I could not find any error at http://tst001.t3pack.info/. May I know what exactly the issue is at the test page? Kindly explain little more. Thank you :) Kind regards, Julie, Support Team Member Servage Hosting

Jan 13 - 02:04 GMT Customer

Of course tst001.t3pack.info is not the starting directory for a ruby installation. The starting directory of a ruby ionstallation is always "public" So if you go to: http://www.t3log.info/public you will see an application error while the same application is running on our local system and meanwhile even uses same settings like http://redmin.t3pack.info, http://www.t3log.inf, http://biblio.t3pack.info which are all running fine. Any idea? Andi

Jan 13 - 22:45 GMT Servage - Julie

Hello Andreas, The public folder is with in the website http://www.t3log.info/public the document root is set as 1_redmine/public/ The error what is showing is no route found to match "/public" with {:method=>:get} so obviously its not available when you separately typing http://www.t3log.info/public Thank you. Kind regards, Julie, Support Team Member Servage Hosting

Jan 14 - 05:25 GMT Customer

URGENT: WORKING APPLICATION YESTERDAY DOESN'T SHOW ANY CSS TODAY!!! Please check immediately. http://www.t3log.info

Jan 14 - 05:26 GMT Customer

UPDATE: It is also so slow, that you could drink 1 cup coffee until a new page gets loaded!!!

Post hasn't been answered at all in a certain amount of time so we closed the ticket and create a new issue