On 09/11/10 13:14, Martyn Drake wrote:
I'm a sysadmin/support admin at Memset - hello :)
I'd forgotten you were Memset! Hi!
What we DO provide is that if your server stops responding to ICMP packets, this alerts an on-call engineer who will investigate for you
- regardless of whether or not you have fully managed support. I know
I tend to look at the support queue if this happens and the server in question is in state and I can, and do, help to resolve the issue if it's an upgrade problem and is relatively straight forward to fix.
We had a specific problem a while back that I no longer recall, but the server was responding to ICMP packets but that was about all it was responding to; we couldn't SSH in, the reboot option wasn't working from the web management thing (or if it was it was rebooting to the same state), and all we could do was wait until Monday (the problem started Friday evening I think).
£40 may seem like quite an overhead, but we're still cheaper than the likes of Rackspace and other providers. We manage the base OS as well (along with the standard components such as Apache, MySQL and so on) and, as you say, you get out of hours emergency SMS.
Looking at the support matrix, there's plenty in the £40/mo that justifies it, but we don't need or want almost anything that's ticked in the managed support column. After all, "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" handles most of the updates to the core components, and if we do it ourselves we can pick the time to do it and schedule it to suit the customers out of hours. Paying someone else to do it is fine, but we'd have to be around at the same time (to test and handle any application issues) so just arranging for a third party to run a couple of apt commands for us isn't a good use of your time or our money!
On the other hand, sometimes (very rarely) an upgrade kills something, and then we're just plain stuck! £40/mo for access to chargeable out-of-hours support is perhaps neither here or there, but if we have (say) 10 small virtual servers then nearly £4800/yr just for access to emergency support, against just £1200 for the actual hosting costs, is a bit skewed!
Have you spoken with our sales department about this? It's not entirely out of the question that if you're looking to run multiple virtual servers that something might possibly be done about the fully managed support option. I can't guarantee it of course, but always worth having a word with them.
I have, and it's kind of "sorry, this is how we do it". I have no complaint about that; Memset have no obligation to offer a service I need! But it has lead me to look at alternatives. I like Memset and want to continue using them, but I'm not able to justify paying for a range of support services I don't need just to give me access to emergency cover on the rare occasions I need it.
Mark - have a word with Nathan or Alexandra in sales in the first instance.
I've spoken to both in the past, and Alexandra today, before posting here.
I'd like to stress: I'm not unhappy with Memset's services in any way. It's just they don't quite seem to "fit" what I need. It's not a problem for me if I get a call at 3am on a Sunday morning with a problem on the web servers, but if I can't access the servers via SSH to investigate and I can't get help from anyone until Monday morning then I can't give satisfactory answers to my clients, even if that is only once every few years.