thePlanet Customer Service getting worse?

[RobFerrari]

I've had a server at thePlanet for over 3 years now and overall I would say I'm very pleased. Prices are competitive, rarely any technical problems on their end, and they are large enough to offer support in diverse areas. However, over the past 2 years seems like there is a steady decline in customer service. Hold times are longer and sometimes after a long hold you don't even get through. The response time to online submitted tickets is also longer and I've seen them take 2-3 days to even make an initial response. So the first problem I've seen is responsiveness by either phone or online ticket, but the major problem is the level or support you receive when they finally get to it. They often don't read through all the information well and they will just tackle a small easy piece of the ticket, not getting to the core issue and then respond "anything else we can help you with?". Very frustrating along with sometimes 5-10 different techs will work the same ticket, which in my mind is OK for Level 2-3 support in a large organization, but at least review everything in the ticket first before working yourself. Too much repeat and missed information.

I don't expect miracles or above and beyond, but we pay plenty good money to at least have techs understand the foundation basics of hosting support.

[RobFerrari]

Man they use to be really good a couple years back. I've had communication problems with both support and sales. That last one is funny, because you think they would at least be responsive getting more of your business.

Support will go days without a first response on a ticket, then after that it might be anywhere from a few days to even weeks for ticket to get resolved. They use to be responsive, at least within 24 hours.

I've sent two requests to the sales email they tell me to contact in Orbit. First one was for adding another server and this last one was just to add some more RAM. The first one will be worth another $8,000 a year in sales on top of my current $8,000. RAM not as much additional money for them, but that isn't cheap. I guess they are too overworked for the additional business.

Isn't there a nice big secure host like thePlanet without the small host problems, but with decent communication and responsiveness?

I worked telecom a few years and I think hosts are in the same classification. The telecom I worked for would even say "we're the best of the pigs". :D

[Zachery]

Recently due a phone mis-communication theplanet took my server down a whole day before i was ready. They also seem to have a newer policy that means that once the machine is "cancled" they INSTANTLY wipe it with no holding policy.

I've moved to softlayer.com

[encryption]

How are soft layer zachery ?

[Zachery]

I've worked with them before and I personally like them.

[encryption]

I was browsing their site in search of a few Opterons and they seem rather competitively priced. Was wondering how they were in terms of support / response times (for resellers).

[dSpotter]

I was browsing their site in search of a few Opterons and they seem rather competitively priced. Was wondering how they were in terms of support / response times (for resellers).

Softlayer is terrific, the few times I have had to send in a support request it was always answered quite fast.

[encryption]

cool - I'll have to snag a couple of opterons and check 'em out ;)

[Scott.Mc]

Have to add my thoughts on ThePlanet.

We have around 200 servers at The"new"Planet (tp+ev1 merged) and to be honest overall it's been getting absoustely terrible.

We have a private rack aswell and the rack support has always been good but when you need to have someone outside that (IE accounts/sales/managers or whatever) it takes forever. We don't require support other than hardware from them and they simply fail to provide it.

We ordered a new server and the ticket went unanswered for 40 days, (still not been answered to this day as a matter of fact). The only reason it got answered is we took it upon ourself to bug them on live chat.

They then setup the server the next day but it took a further 4 days to get the login information. Again the only reason we got that is because of the private rack techs, we had them reset it. Once we did get access it became clear that the partitions we requested were totally ignored and had to be reinstalled.

When we ordered the private rack we also paid a hefty setup for a KVM unit and pay monthly for it aswell.

Yet to this day it has NEVER worked correctly, it would always randomly fail and we had a few IP switches on the KVM, we were never told about them until we asked why the unit was down, so anyway after a year we got tired of it not working and asked for it to be fixed once and for all (this is after a replacement, a firmware upgrade, and god knows what else) and it's been 3 months now , we had some manager do whatever and said that we should get a refund (still waiting , and actively chasing it up with everyone and anyone, no results). The manager himself however after he said it has been fixed it hadn't and he actually broke it for a further month.

So as the story unfolds, we had 1 more firmware upgrade on the KVM which did work for a few days but as of right now the unit is down.

We also get new tickets raised in Oribt but we don't have the login for it, when they search orbit they provide us our orbit which is for the servers we have at theplanet (they have nothing to do with the rack) and none of them display the ticket. So now we are left with updates to tickets they create but have no idea the contents of them or have any way to update.

It's a real shame as the private rack techs are great, Jenn/Aaron/Kyle are all very helpful.

So i'd recommend you stay clear of ThePlanet.

[Subah]

WoW i don`t this theplant is having bad support team as i see at there demo i think they will answer on my ticket befor i click send :D