Web Africa, from hero to zero
I am a webafrica fanatic. I have used them since my return to South Africa three years ago, and have converted countless friends and family into webafrica fans. I run an internet based business and have invested close to R100K in services with webafrica over this time.
I love the simple yet powerfull control panels and account management tools. Whenever I have an issue I just fire up the instant message client and talk directly to one of the support people.
Then it all changed….
First the instant message client was discontinued, with the promise that this would streamline customer support. No more realtime conversations. What used to be fixed in a five minute instant message conversation now takes a few hours of ping pong via email, often having to deal with multiple support staff as issues are rarely resolved during a single shift.
Next came bugs in the new version of the Plesk control panel software. Adding email redirects randomly fails. Creating new domains randomly fails. Creating email aliases randomly fails. Creating additional DNS entries randomly fails, etc. The list goes on and on. Now, I come from a software development background and know that software is never perfect, especially when new versions are released, but for a hosting company the Control Panel is the most important cog in the machine. To make it fail repeatedly is like running a transport company on secondhand tubeless retread tyres.
Then came the indifference from the support staff. Whenever I raise an issue with the Control Panel it is quickly pointed out to me that it worked for the support guy when he tried. (So the problem is with me, the customer, end of story). Time after time I have to point out that it is not a once of, I have done their testing for them, from numerous machines, etc. Eventually it gets sorted as I have the issues bumped back and forth.
Then came the over utilization (exploitation?). I host many many sites on the webafrica servers. All my sites started running slower and slower, until I (and my customers) could bare it no longer. I was told the server my sites were on was old and I needed to migrate them over to a new server. After baulking I was enventually assisted (thanks Matt for your help that time) in the process of recreating all the domain email accounts, copying databases, etc, from the old to the new server. Guess what happened a year down the line? Yes, once again the “new server” is overloaded. It has become so bad that some sites that loaded in under 5 seconds now takes 30+ seconds to load, due to mysql and php performance issues on the hosting server. How do I know this? The support staff blamed my inefficient code,
I finally wrote a simple monitoring page to track the overall server utilization, so as to prove the server was being overutilized. What solution do they have to the position I am now in? Easy, support says, all I need to do is migrate all my clients, their sites, email accounts, databases, etc, over to the new new server, and webafrica will assist if need be, at R100 per item (website, database, email, whatever). All just to be in the same boat again a few months down the line? Why are shared hosting servers loaded to the point of deteriorated performance?
Now, in the beginning I used to be able to send Matthew Tagg (MD of webafrica) an email and get my issues sorted. These days webafrica has turned into a burocracy, nothing is simple or direct anymore.
I aim to provide a first class service to my customers, but can no longer do that by relying on webafcrica to support my underlying infrastructure.
What are my options now?
- Migrate to a new shared server and repeat the whole process again in a year or less?
- Switch to a dedicated managed server, ensuring no over-utilization?
- Switch to a managed dedicated server with another supplier like hezner (which offer a better spec’d managed server for half the price) ?
I have not decided which way to go yet. I know I need to make a change, but do not want to end up being held ransom by deteriorating support again, so need to choose carefully.
Hi and welcome to my corner of the world.
Well said! We’re having the exact same issues with the 266 domains hosted with them.
I guess it is a case of growing to big to quickly, and letting things slip through the cracks in the process.
Pity, as webafrica used to be a great company to do business with.
I also use to have a server with WebAfrica and the sites got slower & slower, we moved almost 2 years ago to DiaMatrix and have had awesome service and there connectivity speed is fantastic. The support guys have been friendly and help quickly. Touch wood no issues in 2 yrs.
Nedd
@Nedd, checking out DiaMatrix now, looks very promising.
Hi Imel
I’m still around. Let me address some things quickly.
The levels of support where I’d personally get involved of course are no longer possible, now I’ve seen more of complaining about this by our old customers. We really want to keep you happy and I think the the engineers, and support staff do as well.
Let me explain some reasoning.
1) No access to the CEO.
A fair comment, however with 130 staff to manage, to ensure we hiring fast enough, training, spending capex, operations, human resources, raising finance etc. Can you imagine if I personally gave you support? What about the opportunity cost of me neglecting my other duties that cost the company overall and hence affect more customers. We have been and always will be about the customer.
2) No instant messaging.
Ok what was happening here (and I’m not saying you) but we had resellers say paying R400 per month, hosting hundreds of domains and messaging us simple requests all day long. IE Basic stuff that a reseller ought to know and do themselves.
Secondly we don’t have the tools to track and manage the agents on Instant Message. (what if an agent spends all day on there?) Our ticket system has rating systems built in for this purpose and are of valuable use to management to weed out poor support staff etc.
3) Regarding the slow servers. I will ask NOC (Network operations) to provide feedback on this. A cursory glance on your graphs seem fine. Avg (5-10% CPU). But regardless, if servers are slow that is unacceptable. We need evidence and data here, I don’t like working on heresay. In fact I’d like to go the extra mile and offer those statistics down the line. We monitor it ferociously, everything from CPU, to disk etc, backups are monitored etc. This may sound like standard stuff, but I can assure you there are many examples of SA and international hosts not even doing the basics.
Remember a lot of factors can contribute, the network speeds, and yes efficiency of one’s script. Think about it, if you have a poor script (and we have LOTS by careless programmers) on a brand new server, obviously it won’t be a problem, a bad script on a decently sized server, is more of an issue.
4) Web Africa I honestly think is a great hosting platform and strong value proposition and more importantly we are a strong partner. We will be around for the next 10 years to come.
and we continue to experience strong growth as a result.
http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/WEBAFRICA.CO.ZA
However we won’t let that stand in the way of delivering good service.
Yes things have changed but overall we care and will continue to do so into the future. We are here for long term sustainability.
We value your criticism and above all will continue to strive to improve and we will never shied away from this.
@Matthew, thanks for taking the time to read this rant and respond.
I have certainly never abused the instant messaging system to ask trivial questions. As an experienced IT & operations technician, consultant and senior manager I know enough to fix most things myself. As the ex Head of IT for a large global software firm I know enough about operational issues to know when things are not the way it should be. (Feel free to check out my LinkedIn profile.)
I raise issues with support only when the issue is out of my hands. The frustration of no instant message service means issues takes days to resolve instead of minutes. Ask your support staff to brief you on the two issues I raised this week alone. Both could have been resolved in minutes over IM. Instead both took 24 hours as I have to keep sending email replies to basic questions which goes unanswered for hours.
This is infuriatingly frustrating, as I am sure you can imagine.
Note that my own graphs does not show CPU % but server load. An average of 10 means complete overload, not 10% utilization. Perhaps you can share your performance stats on that server with us?
Another frightening issue I have not even mentioned before is that of email non delivery. I find (and am told by my customers) that not emails goes out. Various support staff have confirmed this, but there seems to be no real pattern. Spam filtering is pointed out as a possible reason, but there is no assurance that the problem is being addressed or the end is in sight. I feel powerless to do anything about this.
As to server over-utilization, twice I have been put in a position where all my sites are becoming slow (all of this can definitely not be due to inefficient code as some are standard WordPress and Joomla sites). I have moved all my sites to a new server once before but am now facing the prospect of doing this again, without the assurance that it will be the last time.
What is your position on server utilization, i.e. when is a server capped and new domains pointed to a new server?
What do you suggest customers do who have all there domains on a server that is swamped by other customer’s sites?
Can you give any assurances as to the recent introduction of numerous errors in the Plesk control panel software? Are you aware of this, is it being addressed? Again I feel powerless and unable to create email aliases, etc, without delayed intervention from support.
How do I move forward? I need to scale up in my hosting service, probably to a dedicated server (that way my sites are isolated at least), but I need to feel comfortable that my issues will be treated as real issues by support staff that are willing and able. At the moment I (and may others like me) feel powerless and unable to offer our customers the best possible service.
Hi Imel
Regarding the IM support, i fully understand where you coming from. It was a difficult decision and from our side there are fewer experts than there qualified resellers nowadays. If there was a way to include a subset of clients, and to track it properly then that is something we’d like to do in future. Its just a question of time and resources.
Also bare in mind we are starting a new BSS (business support) division to handle more high level clients so that they don’t have to go through traditional channels. This will be offered to the larger and or more savvy customers.
If you in ever in Cape Town why not pop in and we can take you through some of the behind the scenes stuff. Take a look at how we run things and we’d love to hear your suggestions for improvements.
Regarding the specific issues you have raised (eg Plesk – I was not aware of bugs), I have asked someone to look into them. Our COO (Rupert) has been made aware of this and will take it further with you.
Feel free to contact myself or him off site.
Hi There, I am right now (as in this minute exactly) switching from a dreadful host in Germany to Hetzner, whom I host multiple sites with already and am a reseller for. Let me tell you that with Hetzner support is WONDERFUL. No host I’ve been with (it’s been a couple) is this accomodating. Telephone support resolves issues instantaneously, with South African support staff, not some eastern european call centre as the big US hosting companies. Also you can choose to host in either Germany or South Africa (international cap) and you have a wonderful award-winning control panel. I strongly suggest you try them out, they are some of the leaders in their field. Also cheaper than webafrica as you said.
Regards, Mike
Hi Michael, I have been in your boat before, hurriedly migrating sites from one host to another. I hope your site migration went smoothly, but is not something I am looking forward to doing again.
As to Hetzner, I have heard good and bad things, and do not want it to be a case of jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
Every host or business partner will have there ups and downs, for me it goes more about the partnership and the flexibility / re-assurance your supplier can give. Having first rate competent support goes a long way in my book towards putting my mind (and business risk) at ease.
Regards, Imel
As Matthew Tagg, our CEO, has mentioned above, our NOC department actively monitors any activity,lag or any other issues that could occur on any of our Shared, Dedicated and Office servers. A short list of what we monitor on our Plesk Servers is displayed below(Windows Shared Servers Sensors are different):
PING , HTML , ASP, PHP, Perl, Python, PHP4 , PHP 5, MySQL 4, MySQL 5, Disk Space % HTTP Check, HTTP CPU Load Check, Control Panel HTTP Check, HTTP Backup Check, HTTP Tomcat 5.
These are the common sensors that exist on our Plesk Servers, some Shared Servers however have more services monitored, to name a few, Coldfusion, Smarterstats, Mail Queue, POP, SMTP, IMAP, Spool Count, etc.
We utilise monitoring software called IPCheck and large screen displays indicates a failure on any sensor which is picked up within 60 seconds, for a NOC engineer to resolve. Secondly we also look for trends in hosting tickets or specific problems that clients escalate that are unable to be dealt with on a support level.
If you do find any occurrences like these and receive no acceptable response from any of our frontline support agents, kindly request they escalate the query through to the Engineering Department where we will attempt to identify, firstly if there is a performance issue and secondly the cause of the performance issue and take corrective action.
Now, with respect to your query regarding slowness on the control3.wa server – I’ve personally investigated this and noticed the query was not escalated to any NOC Engineer. We will however actively monitor this server and compare our stats to your own to verify if there is in fact a lag and contact you with a solution sometime today.
A quick update:
Had a call from Daniel Hendler, Web Africa Quality Assurance, glad to hear that my issues are being taken seriously and are being investigated.
Have been promised that server load is being addressed and will improve soon. (Why reactive and not pro-active?)
Non delivery of emails is also now being investigated and will hopefully soon be a thing of the past. (As this is a know issue why are customers not informed that some outbound emails are dropped without notification?)
Control panel issues are a concern and am being investigated as a result of my issues logged.
Have been given a shortcut to get directly to the techies, hopefully this will relieve my frustrations with the helpdesk.
As to the way forward, considering a few options, hope to get a call form the sales guys soon.
Hi Abdul, there was a two hour blackout on the server last night, between 11pm and 1am, followed by a server reboot.
During this two hour window my own pings and http requests to multiple domains on the server continuosly failed. Can your NOC shed light on this?
Hi Imel,
Yes there was an issue last night where one of our cabinets, (Cabinet 3) lost power completely. We had to send an engineer to go take a look at the DC to see what the cause of the issue was. We then ended up moving the APC it uses to a entirely different multi-plug. This caused all servers in that cabinet to go down for that period. Our graphs, aswell as your own indicate similar readings regarding this.
I have moved over all my customers to smtp.saix.net after repeated failure by the WA SMTP servers to deliver mail reliably.
I just noticed my disk usage at #webafrica has more than doubled (almost trebled, actually) overnight without me adding anything.
Have you checked yours?
Hi Francois, my disk usage is still as it was a week ago. Maybe it is related to the increasing of mailbox limits that is currently happening?
Best to check with support.
The new network webafrica is testing shows some real promise. Both local and international traffic is performing better than any other ADSL networks around.
Some issues remain though, like not being able to access any websites one of the webafrica servers (control3), but this is likely a routing issue which will be addressed soon.
If the new network is made available at a reasonable cost (R40 – R50 per GB) then I suspect many customers will return, being willing to pay more for a better experience.
Hi Imel
Stumbled upon your site and wow…I am so glad it is not only me experiencing the same trouble.
As I am no IT expert it is very frustrating when things go wrong as I am now experiencing. My one domain has been down 5 times (that I know of) in the last 2 weeks. Everytime something different goes wrong.
First a PHP error
then site down completely
then control panel says my account has been suspended
etc etc
I am now also thinking of moving my domains and am scared to death to it
I have been a Webafrica supporter and have also sent people their way but I am disappointed by their service lately. It has cost me a lot of money holding on the telephone hoping somebody will come to my rescue.
I am not here to brand bash but feel that these guys deserve to hear how they are upsetting their customers. Like I said I thought I was alone in this…and after being told the problem is on your side a few times (even though you know that you have not changed or fiddled anywhere) you start to doubt the whole process.
So here is to them sorting out whatever went wrong in their system…and hoping that we will all be able to get the service we deserve…
Cheers
Pierre