| Posted by zoom123, 08-24-2006, 03:37 PM | | I am considering LiquidWeb for a dedicated server.
They seem good and the reviews I read here and elsewhere are good as well.
Problem is that they take hours (3+ on average) to respond to my tickets with pre-sale questions.
I have reseller accounts with 2 other hosts. One of them responds to tickets within 15 minutes, and the other one always has a Live Person chat, so I am a bit spoilt in this respect.
Is their response time faster when it comes to dealing with problems?
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| Posted by PixelManual, 08-24-2006, 04:23 PM | | Pre-sales isn't necessarily a priority. Of course when you sign up the response will be much faster. What times did you send the tickets at to ask the questions?
I was with LW for awhile and they do a fine job of managing your server assuming you add cPanel to the mix
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| Posted by zoom123, 08-24-2006, 04:41 PM | | Thats what I hope too.
Between 13:00 and 19:00 their time.
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| Posted by layer0, 08-24-2006, 05:06 PM | | It is possible that they did not receive your e-mail. Have you tried PM'ing one of their staff here? I know Travis @ LW is a member here...
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| Posted by PixelManual, 08-24-2006, 05:15 PM | | I don't believe that's the problem.
He mentioned that they just took more time, but never did they not respond to one of his tickets. Travis is a member here, yes. Fine guy to speak with as well.
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| Posted by Ronald_Craft, 08-24-2006, 05:18 PM | | I generally recieve a response within a few minutes to an hour when submitting a ticket. If I have something that's priority I call them and have some one pick up the phone within a couple rings. The problem is always fixed right there while I'm on the phone. Probably takes you longer to type your name into a livechat then to ring them up.
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| Posted by ala4900, 08-24-2006, 05:36 PM | | I have been working with Liquidweb regarding moving my servers as well, and have found the same situation! Travis on this board seems very good, but their overall sales efforts are very low key.
Maybe this is a good thing - better tech support than sales! Everyone seems to agree that their service response is excellent! It ticks me off a bit to have to out a little effort into getting a salesperson, but I had the same issues with Rackspace, and I think it's impressive that their management takes the time to defend their company on this board.
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| Posted by LiquidWebTravis, 08-24-2006, 06:25 PM | | Thank you for the kind words and sharing your experiences.
I am very sorry if anyone has received 3 hour response times for sales questions. This is not acceptable and we will correct this situation. I am looking into this right now with our management.
We are hiring techs as fast as we can get them
I know phone doesn't work for some people but you should get right through if you give us a call.
If anyone on here can PM their ticket with slow response time I will personally look into it and provide you satisfaction (possibly a discount )
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| Posted by zoom123, 08-24-2006, 07:17 PM | | Since I made my initial post the response time improved dramatically. So the "3 hours average" is not true for my case anymore. I guess it was just an exception for a couple of tickets.
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| Posted by I, Brian, 09-05-2006, 03:13 PM | | When I had a server with LiquidWeb their email response times were pretty good. *Real* telephone support as well.
Tempted to move back to them as I may be opening up another US server. Good company last I experienced of them.
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| Posted by WebSavvyGuy, 09-05-2006, 05:08 PM | | My tickets have been responded too within 5 minutes to 5 hours generally. However, I dont mind because I only submit tickets for things I know I can wait for.
If it is an emergency, I will call them....and the phone is always answered in under 2 minutes.
Hope that helps
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| Posted by mripguru, 09-05-2006, 07:14 PM | | I see this as an inherrent problem - sales and support staff should be seperate (but related within the scheme of things). Obviously, support inquiries get higher priority, but what happens if the queue is filled with sales tickets and an urgent support ticket comes in - but everyone is already busy responding to sales inquiries? The logical thing that I see happening would be is that:
a) the customer would call in and get their issue taken care of at the cost of a few sales inquiries (if they are US based, or wish to pay international call charges).
b) The customer waits for the barrage of sales tickets to be completed so their issue can be addressed appropriately.
While most people would probbably do (a) as a follow-up to an urgent ticket, it really shouldn't happen that way if the issue is of an emergency or critical nature - it still shouldn't happen that this is neccessary.
However, I can also see the point of tasking the support team with sales inquiries - 24/7 coverage. This is all well and good, but I would set it up so there's a designated tech or two to cover sales inquiries after-hours, leaving everyone else to do their paid job: supporting existing customers.
I'm not trying to put LW or anyone else down, but to compress two departments into one, while it makes financial and strategic sense to LW, seems to be hurting both new and current customers as evidenced by this thread (and I'm sure there are many others like it if you search).
Just my $0.02 cents.
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| Posted by WebSavvyGuy, 09-05-2006, 07:19 PM | | I think they should have a better ticket system with urgency of the ticket as an option. That may create some abuse, but for the most part I think it works.
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| Posted by VER-Mo, 09-06-2006, 07:43 AM | | Their tickets do take a while to get answered in all honesty. I find that their average ticket response time is about two-three hours which is alot when compared to other Datacenters Ive used. Telephone support is on the other hand very good, so if you dont mind calling them up when you need urgent assistance it shouldnt be a problem.
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| Posted by Jame$, 09-06-2006, 09:19 AM | | Sell those new servers at your new flashy datacenter first, and then hire techs?
3 hours for a managed provider is simply not good enough. Shouldn't have to pick up the phone if they don't want to.
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| Posted by mripguru, 09-06-2006, 12:24 PM | | However, being that they are fully managed - they should be the ones contacting you in most cases to let you know that there was a problem and that they resolved it.
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| Posted by hifive000, 09-07-2006, 12:34 PM | | Zoom123... I emailed a couple of pre-sales questions just this week as I'm very interested in a shared hosting package with them. First question took 37 mins. Second question took 1 hour 51 mins. Replies were polite and answered my question (even though one answer was not what I was hoping for).
I, Brian... Are you based in the UK? Did you leave them because their servers were based in the USA? Just curious as I'm UK based and trying to figure out this whole UK v USA server thing.
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| Posted by Zachary McClung, 09-07-2006, 01:19 PM | | Hello,
We have been located within the Liquid Web datacenter for a year now. With network uptime being a 100% nearly every month except two in the last year, being able to call and get someone right away on the phone, and fairly quick ticket response times on the phone LW cannot be beat.
I have met and know their management staff personally. I feel welcomed when I walk into the datacenter and the tech's they have are awesome. They have a sales/tech setup for a reason. Why wouldn't you want your sales people to know everything about your network?
Just this week I call a local datacenter in regards to pricing and the sales person could not even supply which upstream providers they us. That says alot right there.
Try out LW you will not regret it.
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| Posted by webuyhosts, 09-07-2006, 04:14 PM | | yep hands down , LW is the best we use alot of centers, but no one i mean no one can match the staff, servers, of LW , i am moving all my other servers slowly over to LW so we will be 100% based by next year, we have to many unanswered tickets at other centers, i cant beleive alot of centers can abuse there customers and get away with it, LW gets my stamp of approval
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| Posted by Apolo, 09-07-2006, 11:11 PM | | You're right, that should be in the case of a proactive, fully managed dedicated server provider, but they're rather reactive, to say the least.
And tickets still take 2-3 hours to receive first answer, which doesn't mean it's the *solution* to the issue reported.
We still have one VPS account there, but we are moving away really soon.
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| Posted by layer0, 09-08-2006, 06:31 AM | | They advertise proactive though...
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| Posted by Zachary McClung, 09-08-2006, 07:06 AM | | They do proactive server updates. If a new kernal comes out in a week time all servers have the new kernal, security update, ect.
They do actively watch the servers; however, if they miss the server being down because of apache or ftp is the only one down you cannot blame them for it when your not doing your job on the server side.
They will install, update, and support software within their scope and tech support does go out of the way to help you. As long as, you call to start the process you are fine. Our servers do not go down because of the fact that we have LW on speed dail and the server(s) are well tuned.
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| Posted by jerett, 09-08-2006, 10:55 AM | | Is there such a thing as a true proactive provider that will actually email you with notifications when there are issues with your server but not to worry - because they are already looking into it? And I mean a true email - not something set up through monitoring software like nadios or hybodus where they just customize the outgoing warning message to make it appear they are readily on the case.
(starbucks venti latte yum in the tum break)
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| Posted by LAMP Lighter, 09-08-2006, 11:23 AM | | Sounds like a bunch of whining and attacking to me. Some of it bordering on self promotion. I have used MOST of the popular data centers here and can tell you that my experiences with Liquidweb were all good when I was there. In fact I would rate the support there to be at the top of the heap and downtime was close to zero.
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| Posted by jerett, 09-08-2006, 11:25 AM | | Self promotion? on WHT? are you crazy? That would never happer or be a driving factor behind this forum. It's there. It always will be. Let's not whine at the whining.
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| Posted by LiquidWebTravis, 09-08-2006, 12:18 PM | | Hi Everyone,
I don't want to interrupt the flow of this thread because open discussion like this is very good. Thank you for sharing your experiences.
I just want to confirm that we do provide proactive service restoration and that I would be happy to investigate any tickets where the response time was too slow. Just Private Message me and we can go from there.
Thank you very much.
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| Posted by jerett, 09-08-2006, 12:24 PM | | Thanks Travis for hitting us back on the post.
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| Posted by webuyhosts, 09-08-2006, 04:40 PM | | god bless you LW , keep up the good server deals
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| Posted by David, 09-08-2006, 06:13 PM | | Jerett,
For the right price there's anything available. Your best bet might be to see what smaller companies are willing to do or whether technicians at one of the providers are willing to go that extra step on your behalf, even though it really should be included in the first place.
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| Posted by VER-Mo, 09-09-2006, 10:36 AM | | Please do. I really hope you do because that is the only thing that would stop me from giving LW at least a 9/10. Seems to me that you guys are a little short staffed on the tech support end. Reduce the support ticket response time and your happy customers would be delighted, and its delighted customers that will always evangelize for you.
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| Posted by Myke, 09-10-2006, 05:23 AM | | I called Liquid Web's sales line and found the representative I was talking to to be very bored sounding and extremely unhelpful. He gave short answers to my questions and even some sarcastic answers. For example:
Me: Could you explain the In/Out Bandwidth?
Sales: ..There is in bandwidth and out bandwidth
Me: ... um.. ok, could you explain what each is?
Sales: You get in bandwidth and out bandwidth. Like you walk in a door and you walk out a door.
No joke. He simple wouldnt explain what in and out was, uploads? downloads? Is it when users visit the site, whenever they download a picture, that counts as up? But if they upload a picture that counts as down? If so, 98% of the traffic would be up, so splitting the bandwidth in half doesnt make sense unless just to say you offer more bandwidth.
In addition, I asked him what he would recommend for our site, explained what it was, and all he could offer me was to go on the website and configure it myself. I just wanted advice.. I guess they dont educate their sales staff.
Needless to say, LiquidWeb was one of many hosting providers I called that day and we will not be using them.
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| Posted by Myke, 09-10-2006, 05:36 AM | | So does this mean their statement isnt true?:
"Liquid Web "Heroic Support"
- Liquid Web's highly trained staff monitors your system services 24/7 to ensure service consistency and availability. If a problem is detected, our experienced and trained technicians get paged and incident response is nearly instantaneous, mitigating the impact of any service or hardware failure to the highest possible degree. As we own and operate our entire data center directly, we are able to respond quickly and efficiently to issues of any impact level. From simple software service failures to catastrophic hardware failures our on-site level 3 technicians are able to react without delay, 24 hours per day."
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| Posted by com1usa, 09-10-2006, 09:14 AM | | I have been in the web hosting business for 6 years, went from reseller accts to vps's then to dedicated servers with liquid web.... dont worry, go with liquid web, they are just as good service wise as the better vps providers, their management of my dedicateds is nearly perfect in every way.
I made the right choice when moving to them.
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| Posted by azimpact, 09-10-2006, 10:36 AM | | I have had a VPS and a Dedicated with them for over a year now and have nothing but good things to say about them for the most part.
If you call them, you get your problem resolved fairly quickly. The ticket response time does seem to take a while longer, but I prefer to talk with them over the phone any way.
As far as managed, yes they do take proactive steps to keep your box secure from the basic intrusions and of course it depends on what you signed up for, but that is not to say you also can not do the same. A good administrator will secure their box on top of what the provider does anyway.
If your box gets rooted because of something you did, you can not blame the provider for not catching it.
I have no problem recommending someone to LiquidWeb.
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| Posted by excessnet, 09-10-2006, 01:12 PM | | Support ticket take me about 5 mins to get a return... even if I write -LOW PRIORITY - NO EMERGENCY - in the title!
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| Posted by jhadley, 09-10-2006, 04:24 PM | | I should add that larger companies will have different people for different jobs. The tech support guys will be the more experienced ones whereas the sales reps are sometimes dopes who just know basically how things work and have read the website. Stupid as this may sound, it solves a lot of customers' problems!
If you have a problem with the sales guys you should ask to speak to billing as that's usually done by upper management. I was looking at a VPS with Adiungo and got very unhelpful and rude replies from 2 sales reps, but I spoke to one of the billing guys and got a straight responce.
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| Posted by asuservice, 09-20-2006, 04:03 PM | | Hey Everyone,
Wanted to chime in hear with my "TWO" thumbs up for LW. I have been with them approx. two years and currently have about 12 dedicated servers with them.
Approximately 8-10 months ago there were a few issues that I had to escalate to management. To be honest I do (and did at the time) feel it was a growing pains situation. Since that time I have only had a handful of tickets that I feel took a little too long to answer.
Even with those issues I feel LW is a GREAT choice for a datacenter. Their uptime and stability is second to none. I can comfortably say that because I have used roughly 10 DC's in the 7 years that I have been doing this.
At one time I had all my servers in one DC but they sold out to another provider and the servers were moved at 11pm on New Years Eve with only a few hours warning. This situation made me adapt the idea that I need to spread things out.
However, because of my experience with LW I am considering bringing every machine over there. This would be a total of 25-30 boxes.
I hope you find this useful info and LW will get some of your business.
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| Posted by Rich Z, 09-25-2006, 11:19 PM | | Well in my experience, it just is NOT true! Unless my servers are failing more frequently than I would like to know about, I have ALWAYS had to contact them when I found one or both of my servers dead in the water.
Now lately, it appears their tech support just wants to point the finger elsewhere rather than tackle an issue. Intermittently, BOTH of my servers will become completely unresponsive for a few minutes, then suddenly "wake up" again. I have members on my own forums now complaining about it, so it is not something on my end or my ISP. Traceroute doesn't show any issues, and ALL of my requests for help from LiquidWeb have been just finger pointing to an external problem and NOT the data center. My latest request to have my two boxes moved to a different rack was met with basically "NO, we are not going to do that."
So am I the ONLY one having problems at LiquidWeb? I can see if one server were the only one getting the hiccups and could then say that maybe it is just the box itself, but BOTH of them? Since multiple people from all over the country are having the same problem, that sort of rules out external influences to the data center, I think.
So I am now at the point that I have to seriously consider just going to another provider. I certainly can't just accept the problem and let it continue if they are not willing to make a REAL effort to diagnose the problem and fix it.
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| Posted by WebSavvyGuy, 09-25-2006, 11:30 PM | | For the longest time I was having problems with accessing the servers (not totally offline but just hiccups like you said) It had something to do with the ISP but now that you mention it, I really do believe the issue HAS to be looked at more thoroughly. I mean it cant just be a couple ISPs having this issue.
Having said that, lately I have not noticed those sort of problems.
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| Posted by PhireFast, 09-26-2006, 12:36 AM | | If you don't like this type of stuff, don't become a customer of Ev1 Servers.
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| Posted by LiquidWebTravis, 09-26-2006, 01:07 AM | | Rich,
I am sorry that you are having problems with your servers. Can you private message me or email me your ticket numbers so that I can look into it for you? I'll be happy to provide you a detailed honest explanation and SLA credits where appropriate.
I'm sorry that you've had this problem. We'll work together to get everything squared away.
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| Posted by Rich Z, 09-26-2006, 01:57 AM | | PM sent........ Thanks.
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| Posted by asuservice, 11-27-2006, 04:52 PM | | Many of you may have read my previous post below. Well, I'm here to let you know I retract this statement and advise you look elsewhere.
Support beyond basic items has become none existant. In the last three weeks I have had several issues that have been totally ignored unless I raised hell. One never did get sorted out ... thankfully cPanel worked on it for me even tho' the license was through LW.
One more ding for you ... just discovered they closed a ticket that was NOT resolved!
I'm off to find a new provider ... just can't do this any more.
Last edited by asuservice; 11-27-2006 at 05:02 PM.
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| Posted by domaincart, 11-27-2006, 06:51 PM | | Hi. Our site is hosting on their a managed server. Their average email response time is a few hours. But I don't like their some services. For example; they don't accept online payments by credit cards if you don't come from US. If you want to upgrade your VPS to a dedicated server when they don't move your data to new server. This is very bad.
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| Posted by LiquidWebTravis, 11-27-2006, 07:21 PM | | Mike Alton,
I'm sorry that you are unhappy with your service but I do not see anything in your account that indicates we were ignoring your issues. Can you please private message me the ticket numbers of the issues in question so that I can verify your experience?
We take these accusations very seriously and will investigate this issue completely to ensure all of our customers are getting excellent service.
Thank you.
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| Posted by LiquidWebTravis, 11-27-2006, 08:34 PM | | Dhcart,
Thank you for your comments. Are you a Liquid Web customer?
The information you provided is not correct. Liquid Web DOES accept credit cards outside of the United States. How did you come to this information?
Additionally, our average response time is _significantly_ less than a "few hours." Can you please direct me to the ticket you are referring to?
Please try to limit your comments to your personal experience for the sake of accuracy on this forum.
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| Posted by The Creature, 11-27-2006, 09:13 PM | | hmmm I had an account with Liqiudweb for a little over 2 years and only had one issue with this jack*ss named Brett Other than that they were great for an easy no hassle vps solution.
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| Posted by iowaguy1, 11-28-2006, 01:20 AM | | Did you get your issue(s) resolved?
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| Posted by skywin, 11-28-2006, 07:48 AM | | The support of Liquidweb sometimes is unfortunately bad, in my case have taken 18 days in repairing a failure in Cpanel.
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| Posted by domaincart, 11-28-2006, 10:03 AM | | I am not Liquid Web customer. But our site is still hosting on your managed servers by another company.
Maybe some times your email response times less than 30 minutes. But some times it's more than one hour.
Your sales department say: "Your order will require phone verification". So you don't accept "online payments" by credit card(if require phone verification then name of this is not online payment). And our phohe is closed for international calling!
Also Why you don't move their data to new server if customers want upgrade their VPS (or reseller) account to a dedicated server? I think you have your own data center, isn't he? If so, is this operation hard? You must do it if you want to give a good service.
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| Posted by iowaguy1, 11-28-2006, 10:18 AM | | Even though this thread isn't completely postive about LiquidWeb, it is nice to see that people that are having negative experiences are posting, what appear to be honest comments.
Some threads just bash a host by saying things like, 'they suck', 'stay away from them'....
In a thread like this, when posters make seemingly legitimate claims against a host, it certainly comes across as more believable.
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| Posted by swijaya0101, 11-28-2006, 12:16 PM | | LiquidWebTravis,
Yes, support response time has been slacking compare to a year ago.
Ticket number #525099
it took 2 hours to response and no resolution for another 8-10 hours.
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| Posted by LiquidWebTravis, 11-28-2006, 04:13 PM | | Swijaya0101,
I investigated ticket number 525099 and verified that you did receive slower than acceptable response time. I am very sorry that you received this kind of service. It is not how Liquid Web does business. My sincere apologies.
I would like to grant you a half months credit for this delay. Please private message me and we'll get it all taken care of.
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| Posted by LiquidWebTravis, 11-28-2006, 04:22 PM | | Since you are not actually a Liquid Web customer I'm unsure how you can estimate our response times. Please private message me the host that you are using and I can investigate the issue with them.
I'm sorry that your phone is turned off for international calls but due to the tremendous amount of fraud that web hosts experience it is important for us to verify credit card orders. If you would like to work out another way to verify your order I would be happy to work with you.
We do own and operate our own data center. We do help customers w/ migration when needed but the customer must take the lead on this activity to make sure everything transfers smoothly.
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| Posted by LiquidWebTravis, 11-28-2006, 04:24 PM | | Dixtech1,
Please private message me the ticket numbers so that I can verify this 18 day wait. I find this quite curios given your post 8 days ago praising our support times.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=563988
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| Posted by domaincart, 11-28-2006, 06:17 PM | | We had wanted to change our reseller hosting provider with you months ago.
Then we had contacted a lot of times with you and had ask a lot of questions. So I know it. And your email response time is normal and fast for me.
Also I like your company. But these two things(requiring phone verification and not moving data) are not good. Thanks.
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| Posted by sirius, 11-28-2006, 06:36 PM | | Then it sounds like it's time for you to find another provider, if you haven't already.
There have been quite a few folks who have complained here about either having to do phone verification or faxing of their identification. The bottom line is, the businesses need to protect their investment from fraud. If you don't like this, then you choose to do business with someone else.
Sirius
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| Posted by domaincart, 11-28-2006, 07:11 PM | | We already made this and went to another company few months ago
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