Interland Really Sucks
Posted by dminor Tue, 14 Oct 2003 05:15:00 GMT
As my business partner Doug has stated recently, Interland support for dedicated servers really sucks. Not just sucks like it could be a lot better. Better as in it couldn’t get worse.
Ever since they bought our previous provider Communitech and moved our server to their Atlanta NOC, we have had trouble with server downtime and non-support. Unfortunately, it started with a failing hard drive. They were very reluctant to replace it since most of the time it was running, but after several extended (8+ hours) of downtime and repeated techs saying “We don’t know where your server even is” and “You’re really not our customer” we finally got a SysAdmin to just build us a new box and image our failing drive to the new box.
All was good for a while. We had several more times through the short few months in Atlanta where the box would disappear for whatever reason—typically for a short period of a couple of hours. But what was bad was that disk I/O on the new server was bad. Really bad. Like 10X slower than my partner’s laptop on performance tests.
We believe the this is a result of the two drives living on the same bus. Interland support agrees with us. It took two nights of self-imposed hour long downtimes to piece together the following information. The reason that the drives were on the same bus is that the CDROM drive is hardwired as the master device on the secondary bus. Interland’s words: “Well, that’s just how we build ‘em. Two drives on the primary bus.” OK, so my request is that they ditch the CDROM and separate those drives on their own busses. They can’t seem to do that. In fact, the most recent request I’ve made for them to complete the task was responded to with this:
Hello, I have spoken with the previous admin. We will not be performing your request. You will need to upgrade your hardware. You can contact your salesperson to place the order. If you have any further concerns, please let us know. Again, thank you for contacting Technical Support. We appreciate your business. Sincerely Daniel Cooper Systems Administrator Interland, Inc. Got Questions? Get Answers: http://answers.interland.com
What?? Yeah I got questions! What are you smokin’?!? If the hardware is insufficient to handle a properly configured two hard drive system, then the hardware does need to be upgraded, but definitely not at my expense. I’ve already lost enough downtime to this issue.
So what is really going on? What has been told to us is this. Our box, although this is how we purchased it, is not their standard configuration, therefore, they are making every excuse possible not to do anything to it. Their two main gripes are 1) IDE instead of SCSI 2) Debian instead of Redhat. I didn’t put Debian on this box. It came that way. Interland doesn’t understand how Debian could have ended up on this box. Well, that’s what happens when you go out and buy up all the good providers out there. You end up with boxes configured in ways that you don’t have staff to support and customer support folks who don’t know simple technical terminology. Well boo hoo that’s not my problem. I pay these people good money for this hardware. It’s not my problem if they don’t want to support it. I’m not asking them to do any managment on the box. Just take care of the hardware.
Let this be a warning to you: Use Interland with great great caution. Approach these folks with fall back plans. As soon as I get back in my office, we’ll see what kind of response we get from the corporate side of things at Interland. The technical and customer service side of things has proven itself again and again—not in their favor.
