Considering Switching to KnownHost

3

3BCTO

New Member
We have been happy with our current VPS provider for several years. However, about a year ago, the company was sold to a company in Massachusetts that has a reputation for poor quality customer service. We have observed a drop in network quality, and a slowdown in customer service ticket responses.

When we get the "old team" they are still as good as ever, but they appear to be less well supported by upper management . They appear to be making an effort, but they moved our VPS to a data center in Utah, and it was a disaster not only for us, but for the clients we had been referring to them.

We're developing custom software on a VPS with cPanel.

Help We've Gotten From Prior Managed VPS Host

Identifying False Positives Appropriately for PCI Scans
Installing SSL certificates we purchased elsewhere
Adding Additional services and packages Like
gearman (including the PHP package)
git
recompiling the php interpreter to include process control
adjusting the maximum file upload size on PHP
deleting email files when a cron job I wrote went out of control and filled up the disk.

We are thinking about having redis installed soon.


Is this the type of help we can expect from KnownHost if we make the switch? I noticed that there is no support phone number, nor a real-time support chat. How long does a ticket usually stay in the queue before the issue is addressed?

We are a little concerned that there doesn't appear to be a phone number at all. However, this forum seems to be quite active, and the sales rep was there for real time chat immediately.

Thank you.
 
I had the same concern about there not being a phone number when we signed up about a month ago. The longest I've had a ticket sit waiting was 4 minutes. That was on Normal priority (they don't have anything lower). I am moving from Gartner's "leader" in hosting and their "fanatical support." The other guys have nothing on KnownHost.

I had an issue while moving one of the sites related to some permissions. KnownHost asked for a setting on the old server. I called the support phone number I had for the old company and was on hold for 12 minutes, then on the phone for another 20 trying to get the answer. They couldn't tell me. I updated the KnownHost ticket and received a reply about a minute later telling me how to get the answer. 5 minutes later the issue was resolved.

I'm not normally one to become a "fanboy." The folks at KnownHost may make me one.
 
I to was concerned with the lack of phone support initially. I went through several providers an finally landed at KnownHost about 4 years ago. As with all providers, there is an occasional glitch but KnownHost is quick to make it known to customers and just as quick to address the situation as well as keep customers updated and in the loop. Support is their Shinning Star. They are so very quick to respond and are more then helpful when it comes to providing help and a problem resolution. They have always gone overboard to assist when I had a problem in just minutes 24/7. Even in situations that they likely should not be responsible to address. I'm just an average user with about a dozen sites that I host. My experience is that KnowHost is the absolute BEST of the lot and provides the absolute best in Customer Service as well as Support. They know how to keep their customers happy and keeping them. Give them a try and I think you will find the absolute best in your new hosting home.
 
We use an independent monitoring system that checks all of our sites every 5 minutes and have had no alerts since switching to KH about 3 months ago. We used to get a couple minutes of downtime every week on just about every site with our previous host.
 
Current users need no explanation. The GREAT Service and Fantastic Support speaks for it's self. Potential customers are the ones who need the education.
 
OK ... I had put the decision on hold until some other business had cleared up. This decision will probably be back on the front burner in January.

... "SIX weeks. Non stop outages. Non stop BS from support. The issue with Knownhost in a nutshell is that there is no communication between support staff. No one read history. No one takes accountability and responsibility for solutions."

These are pretty serious claims, especially as there is no support phone number ... @KH-Paul ... I'm very interested in hearing your response to this.

I have to keep in mind that we not only need one for our app, but we often make recommendations to our clients, and our reputation is on the line as well. That's why we are considering switching in the first place.

The fact that this public form exists and you have not quashed kiwi's replies says good things for your transparency.
 
I agree with everyone except kiwi, but then I have only been a KH client fir three months. This is my sixth host and by far the best. HG was great for the firts 5 or 6 years, but went to pot when they sold out and migrated me to a inferior "upgrade".

I couldn't be happier with the service I have received for KH so far.
 
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Not to be critical of those who have legit issues but in my world what they are experiencing just isn’t happening for me. Granted, there is an occasional glitch but they are seldom and quickly addressed and corrected in short order. Unlike many other host providers, KH keeps the customer in the loop by quickly informing and keeping them them apprised as to actions being taken. Like many others here, I have been through a whole gamut of other providers and found KH to be the cream of the crop in both service and support. Since there is no such thing as perfect in this game, I go for the best available and in my 5 years have found KH to be that provider.
 
Howdy,

I'm a brand new forum member, also considering switching to KH. The original posting describes my situation to a tee. Yesterday they provided me with a 3+ hour outage for all my client sites. The overall tone of Kiwi's issues sound kind of familiar from a different hosting provider I tried and have just abandoned.

I maintain a set of 15 client accounts using WHM and cPanel accounts. The majority are tiny, and the only moderately sized account has something like 25,000-50,000 page views per month as measured by Google Analytics. After some period of time and/or volume of usage, all of my PHP sites would just respond with HTTP 500. The host kept tweaking PHP's memory limit up until finally someone set it back to the default and started over again. I never fully migrated my largest client; I had their site loaded, but DNS still pointed to their old location. So these errors were stopping me from ever moving them across.

So I ended up with 2 months of trying to solve this and two other irritating issues. The same sites function without these errors at the old provider (Haha, they just shut down ALL access for hours at a time).

The lingering issues were:
- PHP crash errors;
- Periods of approximately 20 minutes where the servers were extremely slow. It might take 20 seconds to echo "ls" to the screen after typing it in SSH, and the results might never show up before I was disconnected. When the problem occurred, on a few occasions, I tried to connect via DSL, AT&T HotSpot, Verizon mobile and through a corporate LAN -- while all other Internet access seemed normal, SSH and HTTP traffic to the sites was horrible;
- Messages sent a client site forwarding email address were 75% rejected by att.com even though they didn't show up in blacklists and the same message might be accepted 2 minutes later.

I expect tuning issues and differences in configuration to cause some problems. Should I experience similar issues with the KH, how would I escalate the issue so that a point of contact will be familiar with the problem and follow it through to get it fixed? When the issue spans shifts and days without showing itself, or without comment on the ticket, I would need to know how to be in contact with a person who won't require that I retell the story each time I need to contact KH.

One last concern: While I'm very comfortable in communicating via email, ticket systems and the like, is there NEVER a time when phone support is used, even when an issue has been escalated beyond first line support?

Thanks in advance,
Andrew
 
I suspect, Andrew, that we are victims of the same company, as we also had a major outage yesterday. There is an investment company in Massachusetts that is buying up high quality brands, and moving their customers to a sub-standard data center in Provo Utah. This is quite frustrating because even if you THINK you have a different provider, they are all under the same shell.

The fact that KH lets us pick where our data center is located is a plus for me. Yesterday's outage was the straw the broke the camels back. We are going to try KH and if it works, recommend them to our clients. I'm still concerned about the lack of phone support.
 
Andrew,

First off welcome to our forums and we appreciate you taking the time to post your questions.

The 500 errors definitely sound like a mis-configured setting, but it could be any number of things to be honest so I won't attempt to guess at them here.

The periods of slowness do not sound normal, from the sounds of it, it could either be the network speed to your vps or something with the main node causing it. Some slowdowns can occur when backups are running but they shouldn't be anywhere near a 20+ second delay, so something is definitely up with that host.

Without seeing the type of messages that are being rejected I couldn't say why, but it is possible if too many messages were being sent by one IP then att might rate limit them, this also could be rate limit settings within cPanel for each account.

We do our best to complete customer issues during each shift, however, our technicians always review any previous ticket notes to bring themselves upto speed and during shift changes our technicians make sure to leave any relevant notes for the next shift so we can hand off tickets with very little impact to our customers.

Should our technicians not be able to resolve an issue you are more than welcome to ask for that issue to be escalated. We do ask that you give them a chance to work through the issue with you, but if you do not feel satisfied with the results simply ask for it to be escalated and it will be placed in a queue where our senior admins review and work the ticket with you. At this time even during escalated tickets we do not offer any form of phone support.

If you have any further questions please don't hesitate to ask.
 
Yep, 3BCTO, it's the same. They told me yesterday it was an "unprecedented" event. :) I guess the support guy wasn't impressed when I reminded him of the previous outages this year. It was my last straw, too.

DanielP, thanks for the reply. I appreciate the level of answer you provided for the concerns. I'll talk it over with my main client and make our decision today. Maybe in the near future, I'll be another of your clients explaining to people like me that no phone support is no problem. I hesitate on that just because even though the vast majority of the support I provide to my own clients is via email, the occasional phone call is sometimes very useful to cut to the chase.

Andrew
 
Andrew,

I can understand the hesitation of not wanting to move away from phone support, but in the end it allows for everyone to be more productive. It does take a level of trust that you can simply send an email to us with your issue and that we will figure it out and get things working for you, but at the same token it means you're not glued to the phone, constantly being put on hold while the technician searches for answers or perhaps even collaborates with their co workers.

We are big on collaboration here in the office so at any given time it may be a single tech working on an issue, or four people huddled around a desk scratching their head tossing out suggested solutions to the main tech. Much easier to do when everything is email based compared to live phone support.

We also pride ourselves on having a very fast response time, our advertised times are 15 minutes for a critical ticket and 30 for a normal ticket, however, we are normally under 10 minutes response time to all tickets with regards to initial responses and getting them assigned to a technician. Granted the problem may take longer than 10 minutes to solve but we will keep you informed and updated throughout the process.

Support is the life blood of our company and we take it very seriously.


Again as always if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask.
 
our advertised times are 15 minutes for a critical ticket and 30 for a normal ticket,
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Really?! I've never even come close to that long waiting for a response on a ticket. I think the longest I've waited was 7 minutes. Talk about under promise and over deliver... that's on the verge of sandbagging. :D

Seriously though, my biggest concern with KH when I was evaluating hosting companies was the lack of phone support. I can honestly say I haven't missed it at all. Like Daniel said, it was an unexpected productivity boost not sitting on the phone listening to keys clack and filler words. And the responses to tickets are often so quick it is like chatting through the support system.

Also, unlike support I have dealt with in the past, the people at KH seem to use their brains to try to understand what you are really asking/telling them rather than just replying to the specific question. We just had an issue where we moved over a fairly large site and it was performing terribly, even causing httpd failures. Here was the question I asked support (there was other info in the ticket, but this was the question part):
Would you please let us know if there is any more information related to the httpd failures that might help us troubleshoot and enable mysql slow query logging so we can investigate that as well? Is there any way to isolate the XXXXXX user so it doesn't crash httpd and take down other client sites?
Click to expand...
Rather than just getting a "slow query logging enabled and sorry, XXXXX user can't be isolated," Jeremy from KH support provided a ton of information, ideas and things for us to check and follow up on. It is really like having another member of the team and nothing like I have experienced with other hosting providers. The last time I had this level of support, I had an internal team of Unix admins and DBAs.

Oh, and that was a normal priority ticket Posted On: Nov/19/2013 08:15 PM and the initial response was Posted On: Nov/19/2013 08:19 PM. The follow up with all of the info and ideas followed about an hour later; more than acceptable in my eyes. I was trying to get that level of support for that particular site from the previous provider for about a year. Within a day and a half on KH, we had information available that we never had before and now have that site performing extremely well.

Sorry, I get long winded. I just remember all the anxiety and sleepless nights I had when making the decision to switch hosting providers. "The devil you know" is a strong contender, especially when that devil is a $5.57B company and the "leader" in hosting. Unfortunately, my anxiety only delayed switching to KH. I truly should have done it much, much, much sooner, and hope I can help some others avoid delaying their decision.
 
Welcome HG transplants I hope I had something to do with you moving here to KH.
I to was leery of no phone support but think about it how good was the phone support at HG??

Let me tell you a little support story.
Last week I had noticed my customers site kept getting slower and slower on loading, I emailed support in 5 min's they replied they would look into it, in an hour they told me there was something funky with the server and I was being moved to a different server while they fixed the one I was on I could tell when they moved me as all my sites were zipping along again and in less than a day I was put back on my server and all was good. My customers never knew what happened they only knew there sites were zippy again.
 
I've been with KH for over a year.
I can tell you this - I've been with several hosts. I've NEVER seen the level of service and fast response time that KH provides. Superb. And friendly.
As far as their infrastructure - very dependable.
Don't hesitate to move to KnownHost...
Your life will get easier! :D:p
 
I made the change and am in the midst of the move and have had only one problem ... they have responded so quickly I haven't had time to brew my coffee before I had to get back to them to keep my productivity high.

I am impressed with both their knowledge and their response time. More details to follow, but I am happy so far.
 
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