ok, I hate doing that because I know I'll have more "work" (writing, answering, getting stressed), but I'd like if someone did that before me when I was searching about SeeksAdmin reviews
I want to say it was some days ago and I'm not upset anymore, but I think they messed up bad with me (maybe I just got unlucky, since there isn't many bad reviews on the forum, but I know how it worked for me)
here come what happened (sorry for my English), with tickets number:
one of my first tickets:
RUN-751282 - sent 12:54 PM, answered 05:14 PM - way more than the guaranted 2 hours
QTF-695109 - I sent all my servers information, including monitoring information, right after I subscribed... but they didn't detect/fixed a failure on my server (I got an alert on my mobile when I was lunching, and normally I'd connect and fix it, but since I knew now I had the monitoring service, I didn't bother)
in this ticket it was claimed that "We recieved the monitoring alert but we do not have escalation details" (I though the default escalation detail if a service is down would be to at least login to the server and try to restart it, and I wasn't asked for specific details), but they offered me 75% discount on my next invoice and I decided to keep trying them... maybe I just got bad luck in the begining
YZA-305386 - I wanted my server ports (it's a FreeBSD server) to be updated
since I already planned to hire a monitoring/admin company, I didn't update the ports for a little longer than normal, because I'd fell more comfortable if it was done by experienced techs
I wrote a big "procedure" on how I expected the updates to be done (that's the way I have always done before with no problems, but I was open for discussion if they believe there was a better way)
one of my instruction was * NEVER RUN portupgrade WITH -a, -r or -R PARAMETERS! IF YOU NEED TO DO SO FOR SOME REASON, LET ME KNOW IN ADVANCE *
that's because I know some people that had problems doing "portupgrade -a" on DirectAdmin servers (I believe it's because it could conflict with apache, because apache is installed by DirectAdmin, not by ports; or something like that)
but anyway, I'd prefer any ports that needed to be upgraded with -r / -R parameters to be left not upgraded while I could do some reasearch on how to upgrade it correctly
well
do you wanna guess what was the tech first command?
luckly I was watching him and requested him to cancel it
maybe the command wouldn't do any harm, maybe he knew what he was doing... but I specifically gave some instructions, so I expected at least to be consulted before breaking them
GVA-346898 (and others) - since I wasn't trusting their monitoring system, I started to send monitoring alerts from my Nagios server
they were being directly sent to "Trash" status
DNO-193999 - from 07 Aug 2008 11:15 PM - their international phone number wasn't working
I created this ticket about that and didn't try to call later (so I don't know if it's working today)
but the last answer was 12 Aug 2008 that it wasn't fixed yet (no more answer until today)
EIQ-388354 - 09 Aug 2008 05:52 PM - I requested them to confirm the monitoring system was working correctly
answer on 09 Aug 2008 06:08 PM that they would be checking
next answer on 11 Aug 2008 01:40 AM, that it was working
my question on 11 Aug 2008 01:43 AM:
"ok, but you made sure it's setup as specified?
HTTPS (443), SMTP (25) and POP3 (110)? each 5 minutes"
answer:
"We have setup monitoring as asked.We will get alerts for it in every 5 minutes."
then I logged to my server and confirmed it wasn't correct
they gave me their monitoring server IP and I started to snoop the connection to see when it tried to connect to my server, just to find out it was just monitoring PING (each 5 minutes) and port 80 each TEN minutes
a few E-mail exchange later, on 11 Aug 2008 05:54 PM I got:
"This has been sorted there was a configuration error. Please can you wait 10 minutes and then confirm"
but it wasn't fixed yet... my answer, with output from tcpdump:
"... POP3, HTTP, SMTP checks still made each 10 minutes, not 5 (just ping is 5)
HTTPS (port 443) is not being checked and HTTP (port 80) is"
answer:
"I have checked it all out and everything seems to be working fine. There was a small error on the https on server09 which mean its not working but I can confirm everything else is working with no problems. "
well...
a few mails later I got tired and decided to cancel
they still doesn't admit the monitoring is being made each 10 minutes, not 5
they even sent me a screenshot of the configuration
ok, I don't doubt they configured it, but I can confirm my servers is not being checked each 5 minutes (and they can do that as I already suggested, snooping their router connection), because it would be show on tcpdump (and it only shows connections each 10 minutes)
maybe they didn't restarted Nagios after configuring it, maybe there is some bug, I don't know
but I insisted a lot on that and they just keep saying it's correct
so, on 14 Aug 2008 (same ticket, EIQ-388354) I requested the cancellation of the service and asked if they would refund
no answer until 08/20, so I opened another ticket (CYK-621392)... and no answer
in fact, I don't know if they really have to refund, since they will probably consider I used "more than 3 tickets" (max 3 tickets is a criteria for refund), although what I requested them to do on my servers until now was "check why the CPU load is high" (that's the first ticket, that got more than 2 hours to be solved), "change the tripwire configuration" (correctly done) and "upgrade ports" (already told the story
)
finally, I'm not telling my experience because I'm upset they didn't refund me yet... in fact my first intention was to let them decided if they would refund or not before I posted here, but that's taking so long
a refund won't compensate for all the stress this experience caused, but I just don't think it's fair for them mess up that much and still get the money
and I also want other people to be aware, since I just hired them because I didn't find any recent bad experiences posts about them on WHT when I searched
I just hope they answer that in a proper way, not giving private informations about me, my company, my servers IP or anything else that shouldn't be public, since I took the same care here, not giving any tech name or IPs and just posting what was necessary from the tickets
[I'll be out for the next hours and will probably connect just a few times on weekend, but I'll keep an eye on this thread when possible]Hello Luis,We have discussed this multiple times over ticket which I believe you mentioned above. So I will just make my reply short.There were a few errors on our part as we discussed and we apologised and acknowledged this with the credit for the next month. At the time I was concentrating heavily on our US plans which have just been released and hence some ticket response times slipped but they are now well within our guarentees.The main issue about the monitoring system we discussed. On our end it was configured to scan every 5 minutes and it seemed as if it wasnt. I have not had time to investigate this yet so I can't say for sure if it was an issue with our system but the evidence you gave was good enough for me. There were definetly short comings in our monitoring for you here, and I do apologise. We are currently coding a custom solution as I mentioned as using nagios has proven to be slightly slower than we would like.As for the refund, that is for our billing department to sort. They should be refunding it however via our ToS they have the right not to refund it. I will talk to them to see if I can get the refund for you.I am sorry that you had a bad experience with us, we have hundreds of happy clients. I know you won't accept but I want to forward another oppertunity for 1 free month for one of your servers any time you want so you can test us out again.thanks for the replyas you know, I can't accept that nowI have no hard feelings for your company, so I could try you again some months later (after your sort out those problems and if I can't find other complaints here), if your proposal is still upmaybe I really just got unlucky, but I expect you understand my frustrationLem0nHead, you are not the only one with a bad recent experience with SeeksAdmin. I have one and my review so far is well over 1000 words long with fully supported PDFs of what has been going on.In short we gave them 3 tickets, they screwed up 2 of the 3 tickets then after a long international phone call to Tris Pulford who turned out to be as equally as useless we are now waiting since the 4th of August to have our account cancelled and refunded for their incompetence. After they screwed up I had a good 15 minutes of Chris on the phone telling me how he "believes" and he "thought" but nothing that contained Fact. We then had another server admin who we paid diagnose the problem and give them the diagnosis to login and fix it, you guessed it, they still couldn't do that. Even after the issue was fixed and explained by someone else he went on to catagorigally state how he "beleived" and he "felt" but nothing based on what they could "fix" or had "fixed." Infact during the ticket we were told how "everything looked normal" yet when I logged in to the box and looked at the records they hadn't even logged in to check! Didn't even touch the httpd conf files or a single file to resolve the issue, however told me everything was fine.And of course all along we got the whole "this is not a usual indication of our services" etc, however it continued everytime a support ticket was opened. So far I have held off, but to see this nonsense response as above is the same dribble I received yet their lack of ability to resolve a ticket (in this case billing) still continues for what in 24 hours will represent 3 weeks.Regards,Joel
I want to say it was some days ago and I'm not upset anymore, but I think they messed up bad with me (maybe I just got unlucky, since there isn't many bad reviews on the forum, but I know how it worked for me)
here come what happened (sorry for my English), with tickets number:
one of my first tickets:
RUN-751282 - sent 12:54 PM, answered 05:14 PM - way more than the guaranted 2 hours
QTF-695109 - I sent all my servers information, including monitoring information, right after I subscribed... but they didn't detect/fixed a failure on my server (I got an alert on my mobile when I was lunching, and normally I'd connect and fix it, but since I knew now I had the monitoring service, I didn't bother)
in this ticket it was claimed that "We recieved the monitoring alert but we do not have escalation details" (I though the default escalation detail if a service is down would be to at least login to the server and try to restart it, and I wasn't asked for specific details), but they offered me 75% discount on my next invoice and I decided to keep trying them... maybe I just got bad luck in the begining
YZA-305386 - I wanted my server ports (it's a FreeBSD server) to be updated
since I already planned to hire a monitoring/admin company, I didn't update the ports for a little longer than normal, because I'd fell more comfortable if it was done by experienced techs
I wrote a big "procedure" on how I expected the updates to be done (that's the way I have always done before with no problems, but I was open for discussion if they believe there was a better way)
one of my instruction was * NEVER RUN portupgrade WITH -a, -r or -R PARAMETERS! IF YOU NEED TO DO SO FOR SOME REASON, LET ME KNOW IN ADVANCE *
that's because I know some people that had problems doing "portupgrade -a" on DirectAdmin servers (I believe it's because it could conflict with apache, because apache is installed by DirectAdmin, not by ports; or something like that)
but anyway, I'd prefer any ports that needed to be upgraded with -r / -R parameters to be left not upgraded while I could do some reasearch on how to upgrade it correctly
well
do you wanna guess what was the tech first command?
luckly I was watching him and requested him to cancel it
maybe the command wouldn't do any harm, maybe he knew what he was doing... but I specifically gave some instructions, so I expected at least to be consulted before breaking them
GVA-346898 (and others) - since I wasn't trusting their monitoring system, I started to send monitoring alerts from my Nagios server
they were being directly sent to "Trash" status
DNO-193999 - from 07 Aug 2008 11:15 PM - their international phone number wasn't working
I created this ticket about that and didn't try to call later (so I don't know if it's working today)
but the last answer was 12 Aug 2008 that it wasn't fixed yet (no more answer until today)
EIQ-388354 - 09 Aug 2008 05:52 PM - I requested them to confirm the monitoring system was working correctly
answer on 09 Aug 2008 06:08 PM that they would be checking
next answer on 11 Aug 2008 01:40 AM, that it was working
my question on 11 Aug 2008 01:43 AM:
"ok, but you made sure it's setup as specified?
HTTPS (443), SMTP (25) and POP3 (110)? each 5 minutes"
answer:
"We have setup monitoring as asked.We will get alerts for it in every 5 minutes."
then I logged to my server and confirmed it wasn't correct
they gave me their monitoring server IP and I started to snoop the connection to see when it tried to connect to my server, just to find out it was just monitoring PING (each 5 minutes) and port 80 each TEN minutes
a few E-mail exchange later, on 11 Aug 2008 05:54 PM I got:
"This has been sorted there was a configuration error. Please can you wait 10 minutes and then confirm"
but it wasn't fixed yet... my answer, with output from tcpdump:
"... POP3, HTTP, SMTP checks still made each 10 minutes, not 5 (just ping is 5)
HTTPS (port 443) is not being checked and HTTP (port 80) is"
answer:
"I have checked it all out and everything seems to be working fine. There was a small error on the https on server09 which mean its not working but I can confirm everything else is working with no problems. "
well...
a few mails later I got tired and decided to cancel
they still doesn't admit the monitoring is being made each 10 minutes, not 5
they even sent me a screenshot of the configuration
ok, I don't doubt they configured it, but I can confirm my servers is not being checked each 5 minutes (and they can do that as I already suggested, snooping their router connection), because it would be show on tcpdump (and it only shows connections each 10 minutes)
maybe they didn't restarted Nagios after configuring it, maybe there is some bug, I don't know
but I insisted a lot on that and they just keep saying it's correct
so, on 14 Aug 2008 (same ticket, EIQ-388354) I requested the cancellation of the service and asked if they would refund
no answer until 08/20, so I opened another ticket (CYK-621392)... and no answer
in fact, I don't know if they really have to refund, since they will probably consider I used "more than 3 tickets" (max 3 tickets is a criteria for refund), although what I requested them to do on my servers until now was "check why the CPU load is high" (that's the first ticket, that got more than 2 hours to be solved), "change the tripwire configuration" (correctly done) and "upgrade ports" (already told the story
)finally, I'm not telling my experience because I'm upset they didn't refund me yet... in fact my first intention was to let them decided if they would refund or not before I posted here, but that's taking so long
a refund won't compensate for all the stress this experience caused, but I just don't think it's fair for them mess up that much and still get the money
and I also want other people to be aware, since I just hired them because I didn't find any recent bad experiences posts about them on WHT when I searched
I just hope they answer that in a proper way, not giving private informations about me, my company, my servers IP or anything else that shouldn't be public, since I took the same care here, not giving any tech name or IPs and just posting what was necessary from the tickets
[I'll be out for the next hours and will probably connect just a few times on weekend, but I'll keep an eye on this thread when possible]Hello Luis,We have discussed this multiple times over ticket which I believe you mentioned above. So I will just make my reply short.There were a few errors on our part as we discussed and we apologised and acknowledged this with the credit for the next month. At the time I was concentrating heavily on our US plans which have just been released and hence some ticket response times slipped but they are now well within our guarentees.The main issue about the monitoring system we discussed. On our end it was configured to scan every 5 minutes and it seemed as if it wasnt. I have not had time to investigate this yet so I can't say for sure if it was an issue with our system but the evidence you gave was good enough for me. There were definetly short comings in our monitoring for you here, and I do apologise. We are currently coding a custom solution as I mentioned as using nagios has proven to be slightly slower than we would like.As for the refund, that is for our billing department to sort. They should be refunding it however via our ToS they have the right not to refund it. I will talk to them to see if I can get the refund for you.I am sorry that you had a bad experience with us, we have hundreds of happy clients. I know you won't accept but I want to forward another oppertunity for 1 free month for one of your servers any time you want so you can test us out again.thanks for the replyas you know, I can't accept that nowI have no hard feelings for your company, so I could try you again some months later (after your sort out those problems and if I can't find other complaints here), if your proposal is still upmaybe I really just got unlucky, but I expect you understand my frustrationLem0nHead, you are not the only one with a bad recent experience with SeeksAdmin. I have one and my review so far is well over 1000 words long with fully supported PDFs of what has been going on.In short we gave them 3 tickets, they screwed up 2 of the 3 tickets then after a long international phone call to Tris Pulford who turned out to be as equally as useless we are now waiting since the 4th of August to have our account cancelled and refunded for their incompetence. After they screwed up I had a good 15 minutes of Chris on the phone telling me how he "believes" and he "thought" but nothing that contained Fact. We then had another server admin who we paid diagnose the problem and give them the diagnosis to login and fix it, you guessed it, they still couldn't do that. Even after the issue was fixed and explained by someone else he went on to catagorigally state how he "beleived" and he "felt" but nothing based on what they could "fix" or had "fixed." Infact during the ticket we were told how "everything looked normal" yet when I logged in to the box and looked at the records they hadn't even logged in to check! Didn't even touch the httpd conf files or a single file to resolve the issue, however told me everything was fine.And of course all along we got the whole "this is not a usual indication of our services" etc, however it continued everytime a support ticket was opened. So far I have held off, but to see this nonsense response as above is the same dribble I received yet their lack of ability to resolve a ticket (in this case billing) still continues for what in 24 hours will represent 3 weeks.Regards,Joel