amuck-landowner

is OpenITC / XenVz about to fail?

marrco

New Member
Hi guys, i need you help ans some info about a provider i love. I'm a happy customer of OpenITC/Xenvz for 4 years, but i'm having problems with them lately.
irst they did not invoice my vps this year because i live in Europe and they are still not EU VAT compliant. That was 5 months ago, and still they did not fix that issue. I sent a few mail to them reminding to invoice me, but luck atm. But that's not a real problem, maybe just a warning sign.
Last Monday i noticed that PTR was not resolving correct anymore and since there'a small smtp server running on that vps I found lots of reject on the logs. Tried to re-set via control panel, but no luck, opened a ticket. No answer. Did some diagnostic, followed the delegation and it looks like their dns server was not responding. All queries timeout. Verified via http://www.simpledns.com/lookup-dg.aspx.
I updated the ticket. I had no answer so Tuesday i duplicated the ticket using their control panel form with secret codes etc. No answer. Yesterday, Wednesday i tried to contact them via chat, no luck. Then i fired a email to all contacts i had asking if the company was about to fail or closed for holidays. DNS ptr resolution was not working for 5 days. No answer. (i guess they had the bind bug, and did not update their servers). Today the issue was finally fixed, but still no answer to my tickets.

Now i'm worried. Is OpenITC still a reliable company? Do you have any insider info you can share? 
 

sean

New Member
Hello,

As communicated through our announcements system EU payments are still suspended for the moment. We are in no particular rush to resolve the issue as it's not affecting us too bad financially. We would much rather release our overhauled billing platform once it has been perfected than rushing out some quick fix.

I'll admit response times for our low-end support queue have been abysmal. I can't apologise enough about that. Hopefully it's something we can invest in soon.

The PTR issues you experienced were not directly related to the recent BIND bug. Although there is a workaround in place we are still working on the permanent solution.
 

marrco

New Member
Hi Sean,

 i'm happy you're still rocking. OpenITC was, and hope still is, an excellent provider. Thanks for taking your time and answering my post. My issue is not with low-end support queue, in fact i think is a great solution to offer for-pay priority incident support. I don't like paying for support when i don't need it. 
Problem is that reporting a problem of OpenITC (your dns server were not resolving PTR for 5,5 days) is not customer support. That's fixing your faulty infrastructure. 
I also tried to contact you on the irc chat channel and connected to the forums, but are deserted atm. So even a quick answer 'we need a few days to fix it' was fine to me. Instead I lost more mail waiting for dns to propagate and trying to understand why it did not work, before moving the small smtp server i run there on an other vps (with Prometeus). So please, provide your customers with one more support option 'report a OpenITC issue' or at least read low-end users tickets, maybe some are useful to know when you have a faulty server.
 

sean

New Member
Hello Marrco,

Customers on  low end packages can use the incident report system for critical infrastructure related issues. When you escalate the issue, the following text is displayed:

Quote said:
You will NOT be charged if you have a plan which includes priority support or the issue is caused by our infrastructure.
However, I realise now we should also display similar before you even choose to escalate. I will make sure we implement that.
 
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