As some of you may know, I have stopped hosting my own servers recently – in stead paying for space on other peoples’ machines. This site (as well as a few others I run) are located on pair Networks space.
However, several of my projects (the mud for one) require more than mere web space. Thus, I investigated alternative options and have been enjoying TekTonic‘s VPS service for the past several months (the hostname being A’tuin).
Yesterday afternoon, they had a serious networking problem. I found out about it around an hour after things went down (my IM started ringing off the hook as users from all over checked in to see what was wrong). I submitted a trouble ticket and got a prompt answer – that things were down and they were fixing them.
An hour later, a sales rep closed my ticket, saying that the problem had been resolved and the affected servers were booting back up.
An hour later, we still didn’t have service. So I started sending follow-ups to the first ticket in hopes of receiving news of the problem. No such luck. They didn’t respond to any of my querries, and they didn’t post any news of the problem to their support forums.
This morning, I sent a 911 ticket to the sales department, and after about 20 minutes, got another short response. This is the last I have heard from them. They’ve still not posted a formal announcement of the details and I am definately not the only user being affected by this.
The TAMS Alumni site is probably located on the same machine as mine (since they’re successive IP’s), and some other users have complained on the forums (this thread, not about our problem but it was the newest thread in the outage category). Another good thread on the subject on their forums is here. There are at least 5 more threads all related to this same problem – and still no official announcement on the subject 
My saga of tickets so far goes like this (timestamps are east coast):
#33610: atuin.simud.org unreachable
me, 01/16/2006 6:24:09PM
For at least an hour it seems, my VPS has been inaccessable via any means. An SSH session I had open to the machine was just hung and any attempts to connect to any services running on the account or log in to the web interface at [address] have failed.
Since there is no message posted in the forums, I am assuming this is a new issue. Thank you for getting this back online as soon as possible.
them, 01/16/2006 6:25:49PM
Hi
There is a network issue at present that is affecting a large number of our servers.
We are working on the issue as fast as we can.
Rob
Support
them, 01/16/2006 7:29:42PM
We had some power issues on some the racks, it has been taken care of, the
servers are coming back up and may already be up.
–
–
-Ryan M. Adzima
Tektonic Network Solutions | sales@tektonic.net
[ticket closed]
me, 01/16/2006 8:19:06PM
It has been 50 minutes since you declared the problem solved, yet, my machine is still down.
me, 01/16/2006 9:22:31PM
Hello? Any response would be nice.
My VPS is still not up, it has now been about two hours since you said that devices were coming back up. I’m guessing that it doesn’t take this long to boot a machine.
[two more posts of this nature snipped because they're not that interesting]
#34155: poor customer support
me, 01/17/2006 12:32:46PM
Howdy.
Yesterday afternoon, there seems to have been a fairly big networking/hardware problem that affected multiple servers, including the one that my services are operating off of.
I submitted a trouble ticket and got an almost immediate response – they were actually working on the problem. Then, an hour later, Ryan Adzima closed my ticket saying that problems had been resolved.
They have not. My machine is still inaccessable, and despite my submitting multiple follow-up requests to the ticket, I have not heard back from the support department since they closed my issue in the first place.
As I am rapidly approaching 24 hours of downtime and since that ticket (#33610) is apparently being ignored, I am attempting submission of a new one in the hopes that I will actually get a response this time.
<Insert angry words here>
them, 01/17/2006 12:53:42PM
The support department is quite busy right now dealing with an outage on a particular server that was affected by the power issue. They are troubleshooting the problems but it looks like it may be a hardware issue. I understand that this is an unacceptabel amount of time, but the team has been up all night dealing with it.
–
–
-Ryan M. Adzima
Tektonic Network Solutions | sales@tektonic.net
[ticket closed]
I love how he can’t spell the word unacceptable 