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I recently had two very contrasting experiences with technical support from two very different companies.

RSYNC.NET

You have got to love those guys over at rsync.net & johncompanies. They recently sent me an email notifying me that they had added subversion support to their geo-redundant backup facilities. I wanted to see if I could get things up and running using TortoiseSVN but had never used the ssh+svn combination before and got stuck.

I sent out a quick ‘help!’ message to the support email address to see if they had any experience using TortoiseSVN. They quickly answered with a few pointers which should get me going. I did not get a chance to go back and try the suggestions immediately as I have been busy moving into a new office (whole different story). I got home tonight and found another email from the support team, this time time round they wanted to share some further knowledge they had gained in the last 24 hours to see if it would be further benefit.

I cant ever remember getting a support email like that before. Normally you have to fight tooth and nail just to get one line answers, and 90% of the time the first response has been taken from their ‘auto response’ bucket.

So rsync.net I salute you!

MEDIATEMPLE.NET
I had a case of ‘the grass is greener’ last week when I heard about a new Grid service hosted by the people over at mediatemple (no I wont even link to them!). It offered the ultimate hosting facilities in that it could instantly scale across any number (well 100+) machines if traffic demanded it. I currently use a VPS service for this blog and for some of my other sites that do not require dedicated power. I thought as an experiment that I would move over one site to see how it would perform under heavy traffic loads.

The site I moved was using WordPress plus a few of the usual required plug-ins. I got things up and running quite quickly but hit problems as soon as I put in any serious testing. With every page request I kept seeing different parts of the page go missing. With further investigation using Firebug I could see that I was getting 403 errors (page denied). Now I had setup a .htaccess file so that the content was protected while I got the site back up and running.

I could not work out what the problem was because I had not changed anything from my VPS hosting and it was a pretty clean WordPress install anyway. So I sent over a email to the technical support team (via their control panel) stating the problem and including at the top of the page the user & password to access the site.

24 hours later I got back a email stating that the page was not accessible and could I supply the user & password.

So I write back stating that I had already supplied the user & password.

Another 27 hours and I got back a message saying that they could not see the problem and that could I try using ‘firebug’ (grrrr) and for me to work out what was wrong.

So I write back saying this is a near vanilla install of WordPress and that the problem is definitely happening and that I have had a number of very technical friends verify my claims from different parts of the world.

Another god knows how long later I still have not had another reply so I close the account.

The base cost of the Grid service was £10 a month (a bargain) but this is no excuse for bad support, in comparison I am actually paying less that £10 a month to rsync.net (soon to be much more as they really are impressing me.)