Last year (2008), MediaTemple was having a lot of issues with their Cluster 02, which meant my websites (and everyone’s) on the cluster would be unavailable several times. After struggling for months they were able to narrow the problems to a defective segment of their storage components. By then I had spent hours on the phone with them, noticed that Cluster 01 would also have its issues; but I never saw any issues issues with Cluster 03.
It was then, that occurred to me to ask them to move my account to said cluster!
Unfortunatelly they couldn’t do it automagically, which I was ok with doing manually since they gave me an one month credit to do so. Great so far.
If I remember right, I managed to move everything working late hours spread over 2 nights. Since all the transfers were inside their network I’d get speed transfers liks 30MB/s which really saves a *lot* of time.
First *HUGE* problem.
Right after I moved and had everything working on the new (gs) on Cluster 03, I called them to expedite the old (gs)cancellation. That was when the technician clicked the wrong (gs) and deleted the new (gs) server… Need I say I yelled at him?
Well, he said he would escalate my ticket to the administrators to have them restore my server from their graveyard (he said they mantain the data somewhere else even after cancelling accounts, probably, for cases like this one). When I asked when that ticket would be processed, he game the standard “ASAP” response. And I said…. Wait! You deleted my account and now I have to wait??
Around 4 hours later (the administrator was having lunch and no one else was taking care of their hundreds of thousands of customers), I finally have my data back.
Now this part, I don’t remember very well, but if my brain is not playing tricks on me, they could not recover everything. And so I still had some tweaks and adjustments to have my websites up and running smoothly again….
At around 11 p.m. that day, I had everything working again…. so I called them to get rid of the now old (gs) server (the one they killed by accident). I asked whoever answered the phone that time to please read the screen very carefully so he wouldn’t kill the wrong (gs) server…. (yes, I tend to be sarcastic)
Whatever he did there…. my server disappeared one more time…. everything was down again….
At this point I turned into the kind of customer that can only ask: “Are you guys playing around there?”
So he has to check went happened and calls me back around 30 minutes later, and said something about simply deactivating the account (as opposed to killing it) and my websites were up and working again.
Customer support until that day had been really helpful and seemed like they knew what they were doing.
From this day, though, I kinda lost confidence and have always argued back.
BTW, I asked for some compensation for the first technician having deleted my (gs) and that almost happening a second time, no administrator present to solve my problem. I got 1 month of credit….. NOT A YEAR, SIMPLY 1 MONTH CREDIT. That’s how important my websites and data are…. $20 for MediaTemple.