www.ultimatehandyman.co.uk

Website : http://24x7servermanagement.com/

Having parted company with my last web hosting company I found a British company that offered excellent servers and hardware support, but no software support. After searching the internet I found 24*7 server management via Google.

As a test I thought I would move my non critical website first, so I arranged for them to move http://www.ultimatehandyman.org from one dedicated server to another. As there was no live data as such this should be relatively easy. They agreed to set up the new server and migrate the site to the new server for $100. We agreed the price and they then migrated the site across to the new server. It was then obvious that a script on the server had stopped working, so I contacted them and almost immediately they fixed it for a charge of $25.

I then decided to move a few sites from some shared web hosting space to the new dedicated server, most of these sites use a content management system and so connected to a MYSQL database. I was then charged $50 to move the accounts from shared hosting to the dedicated server and this seemed to go well and everything was working as it should.

Then I took the big decision to lease another dedicated server for my main site http://www.ultimatehandyman.co.uk. Moving this site is risky because it gets 100,000-150,000 page views per day and has a forum, directory and arcade all of which use a MYSQL database. I asked 24*7 server management if they could move this site and they assured me that they could move it with ZERO downtime. I paid $120 this time to have the server set up and the site moved.

I was told to pick a good time to move the site and so I decided to move it after 11pm one evening. I was instructed to tell 24*7 server management one hour before I wanted it moving. On Thursday the 29th March 2011 I sent an email to their support department one hour before I wanted the site moving, they replied and said they were ready to do the move and so I locked the forum as a precaution.

The next day I awoke at 05:30am to check the site and the forum and arcade were not working, but the directory was. I contacted their support and informed them that the forum and arcade were not working. They said that the forum was working fine from their end, so I went to work and tried to log on from there. I could log into the forum from work, so I thought the problem was with the DNS propagation with the internet service provider I use at home. After a few hours I thought perhaps the DNS was pointing to the new server from my home address, but to the old server from work! I immediately tried to log on again, but now the forum and arcade were not available.

I then decided to take half a day off from work, so that I could get to my computer and try and fix the issues. I raised numerous support tickets and often got an answer like "we are looking into this". At about 2pm I managed to get hold of a PHPBB expert in America and he fixed the forum in a matter of minutes. I then informed support that he had fixed the forum. I then proceeded to fix the arcade and the directory myself. After a couple of hours the forum went down because the password to the database had been changed. Neither myself or the PHPBB guy had changed this, so I had to get him to fix the forum again! After exercising much restraint I then told 247 server management not to touch anything at all on the server as whoever did this move was clearly incapable of fixing anything, I also changed the server password so that they could not do any more damage!

There were 37 support tickets generated by myself and by 24*7 replying to the tickets, the total downtime for the site was in the region of 24 hours. If I could not of contacted the PHPBB expert and fixed a few problems myself the downtime could of been much worse. After feeling miffed that they screwed up the whole "zero downtime" move I asked them for a refund, to which they replied they do not offer refunds!

They did offer me a months free server management though- as if I would be stupid enough to let them near my server ever again!

Shame on you 24*7 server management!

surely if they didnt do what they said they were going to do for the money you both agreed, then they should issue a refund? "we dont do refunds" is b*llocks, if you didnt get what you paid for, fight it.

Was gonna say sue em, it can't be that tricky, can it

I paid by paypal, so might dispute the transaction

The last time I had contact with them the main guy was contacting the admin to see exactly what he could not fix.

He could of just asked me and I'd of told him that he broke more things than he fixed!

I didn't understand a word of that!

Can I simplify it by saying they were incompetent and screwed it up?

Razor wrote:I didn't understand a word of that!

Can I simplify it by saying they were incompetent and screwed it up?

Yes, I might as well have tried to move the site myself- blindfolded

They did a good job with the sites before, but really screwed the important one up.

If they had of done what they said I would of signed up for their monthly support, but instead I have gone with another firm now.

The new firm that I use for software support costs about $30 per month- they could of migrated the site with no downtime for no additional costs

And dont we all learn by are mistakes saddly at times are trust can be costly.

Might be worth obtaining a spare domain name for this site and installing a copy of this site's contents on any future new server before doing the move for real to ascertain where the issues might lie and ironing them out
More work but does mean that any issues should become rapidly apparent and more easily curable...just a thought