On 9 November 2010 12:42, Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk wrote:
We currently use MemSet for most of our hosting requirements. We run Ubuntu virtual servers and have very few problems caused either by us or Memset.
I'm a sysadmin/support admin at Memset - hello :)
However, Memset don't provide out-of-hours emergency support except with fully managed servers (£40/month overhead, on a virtual server which might only be costing £10/month itself). This has occasionally caused problems in the past, with an upgrade taking place late on a Friday evening leaving the server inaccessible until after 9am Monday. It means we can't risk a major update out-of-hours in case of problems, but equally don't want to schedule downtime in office hours either.
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.
£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. We also aim to start working on your problem within 10 minutes of receiving that emergency SMS 24/7.
We prefer to run multiple virtual servers rather than having one "big" one - spreading the load but more importantly meaning that one outage it less likely to hit all customers or all services at the same time (much easier to manage!). At £40/mo for multiple servers this means paying around £3-4k just to be able to contact emergency support typically once per year when we have a problem that requires it.
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.
So, what are the current suggestions for hosts that other people can recommend with 24/7 support availability for those rare disasters? I know this type of thread crops up fairly often but recommendations change and I haven't seen the specific issue of out-of-hours support cropping up.
Not many of our competitors, that I am aware of, that would be able to do this unless they're operating a 24/7 outsourced support service and that's generally limited to rebooting only, or charging extremely large sums of money to do anything other than a re-install.
Other than this I have no reason to wish to move away from Memset, but we have reached the stage of migrating several sites to new virtual servers and that can either be at Memset or elsewhere, so I need to consider the alternatives.
Mark - have a word with Nathan or Alexandra in sales in the first instance.
Regards,
Martyn