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TouchSupport - A review of almost a year
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Posted by pythonrocks, 12-12-2008, 06:55 PM TouchSupport - A review of almost a year Hello, I made a research and decided to open a web hosting business because in my country there are great opportunities, the Internet market is growing rapidely, but people use US companies since there isn't much choice around here in terms of web hosting companies. I found a great partner, TouchSupport, to take care of technical aspect of my business, while I and two more coworkers would take care of sales, marketing, communication, billing and basic support. I talked with the TouchSupport sales rep several times to make sure they would be up to the tasks. I told them I would rent a dedicated server to host several customer web sites, with WHM/cPanel. They said they had many similar customers and that this was their job. They also seduced me with their Guaranteed Uptime web site. I also saw many banner ads on WHT advertising TouchSupport, so I chose them. The first few months have been great, with not many customers hosted on the server, but then, the server started to go down every week, and I would always ask the technicians why the server went down, they would always tell me that the server had been properly rebooted and was up and running, not answering the question. The problems started to happen really often, several times a week, and it always took between half an hour and an hour to bring the server back up. I asked what could be done to solve the downtime problems and they said I would have to add extra memory, which I ordered from the SoftLayer customer portal. Later, I did the same thing for HDDs and the CPU. The problems were still happening. I asked TouchSupport what I could do, and they asked to upgrade much of the already high-end server for not many customers with small web sites, which really didn't make much sense. I asked TouchSupport to tell me which customers were using most of the resources, and the usernames they gave me didn't make much sense, as these were web sites that we developed ourselves, that we had total access over and that didn't receive many visits yet. These kinds of problems kept happening for a few months, with a lot of customer dissatisfaction for paying for a service that was down several times a week, during business hours. I even asked TouchSupport to fix the damn server at an additional cost, as I was ready to pay extra to get the problem solved. The sales manager told me if I wasn't satisfied he could refund the current month...Which wasn't what I wanted. I wanted them to solve the problem. At one point we decided to change for a different company that found the source of the problem and since then we have had very few problems, and solved right away. For me, TouchSupport can be a real nightmare if you have a server aimed at shared hosting. They just don't do the extra effort to find the source of the problem and prefer rebooting the server, which just postpones the problem that is going to happen later on. Included are two screenshots to illustrate some of the problems that would happen. The CPU and memory usage was always very high and usually, web sites returned errors for lack of resources available. For me, TouchSupport, never again. Attached Thumbnails ÃÂ*
Posted by Mike - Limestone, 12-12-2008, 07:08 PM Thanks for the review, although I'm sorry to hear it's negative. Have you used any other server management company with better luck? Platinum Server Management, etc.? -mike __________________Limestone Networks - Dedicated Server Hosting Premium Network - 24/7/365 Support Dallas Datacenter - Fully Routed Backend Networkhttp://www.limestonenetworks.com 1-877-586-0555
Posted by RSkeens, 12-12-2008, 07:34 PM By the looks of things, that server seems to have I/O problems. May I ask which data center you are / were in? Not that the data center has anything to do with it, as the number of processes is excessive, I am just keen to know where your server is __________________ PeerLevel = PERFORMANCE Web Hosting - Zero Overselling PolicySupport | Service | Excellence Last edited by RSkeens : 12-12-2008 at 06:40 PM.
Posted by FHDave, 12-12-2008, 07:36 PM do you have the top result but sorted by the memory usage? That may show what processes are taking most of your memory. You are certainly running out of memory. Quote: Originally Posted by RSkeens By the looks of things, that server seems to have I/O problems. May I ask which data center you are / were in? Not an I/O issue. The server is pretty much continuously maxing its disk swap and, thus, the high disk I/O is expected. __________________Fluid Hosting, LLC - HSphere Shared and Reseller hosting - Now With .NET 3.5, MSSQL 2005, PHP5, and MySQL 5Fluid VPS - Linux and Windows Virtuozzo VPS - Enterprise VPS with up to 2 GB guaranteed memory!Equinix Secaucus (NYC Metro). Now with Internap (1000 Mbps) and Level3 (1000 Mbps)
Posted by RSkeens, 12-12-2008, 07:44 PM Quote: Not an I/O issue. The server is pretty much continuously maxing its disk swap and, thus, the high disk I/O is expected. I don't understand why this is not an I/O problem when the server is maxing out its disk swap - when a server is thrashing swap, that is I/O as well. Sure, it's caused by depleted memory, which in turn uses hard disk and thus is I/O. I do agree with you though that the excessive number of programs (bad administration) is the root of the problem and should get better management. __________________ PeerLevel = PERFORMANCE Web Hosting - Zero Overselling PolicySupport | Service | Excellence Last edited by RSkeens : 12-12-2008 at 06:48 PM.
Posted by FHDave, 12-12-2008, 08:01 PM The root of the problem is not disk I/O, but the server running out of memory. Thus, it's not a disk I/O problem per se. Even if you stick a faster drives (e.g., 15K SCSI) the problem will still persist. In other words, you won't fix this issue by troubleshooting the disk I/O problem. __________________Fluid Hosting, LLC - HSphere Shared and Reseller hosting - Now With .NET 3.5, MSSQL 2005, PHP5, and MySQL 5Fluid VPS - Linux and Windows Virtuozzo VPS - Enterprise VPS with up to 2 GB guaranteed memory!Equinix Secaucus (NYC Metro). Now with Internap (1000 Mbps) and Level3 (1000 Mbps)
Posted by RSkeens, 12-12-2008, 08:06 PM Quote: Originally Posted by FHDave The root of the problem is not disk I/O, but the server running out of memory. Thus, it's not a disk I/O problem per se. Even if you stick a faster drives (e.g., 15K SCSI) the problem will still persist. In other words, you won't fix this issue by troubleshooting the disk I/O problem. I agree with you and as per my above post, I reflect what you actually say here that the memory / excessive running programs is the root of the issue. I think we just misunderstood each other - I personally classify this as an I/O problem caused by excessive memory usage. It could also be said in your way "as a high usage memory problem that causes high disk usage". It just depends on how you look at it. __________________ PeerLevel = PERFORMANCE Web Hosting - Zero Overselling PolicySupport | Service | Excellence
Posted by IPswing-Sarwar, 12-12-2008, 10:01 PM which company is managing ur server now?
Posted by Patrick, 12-13-2008, 12:09 AM Yeah, as already mentioned the server is running out of memory because there are too many processes running, most likely PHP and MySQL related or a combination of both. It could be the result of a DoS attack directed at one of the websites, maybe a poorly coded script not terminating after executing or just a website that's too popular for a shared hosting environment... It's actually a shame that TouchSupport overlooked this obvious issue and instead suggested upgrading the hardware when it was probably sufficient from the start. Not to knock TouchSupport, I've heard OK things about their service - but this is just a careless, borderline beginner, mistake to make in the realm of high load troubleshooting.
Posted by pasdoy, 12-13-2008, 02:35 AM Very interesting review. This give me a new opinion about them.
Posted by JFSG, 12-13-2008, 02:40 AM Quote: Originally Posted by RSkeens By the looks of things, that server seems to have I/O problems. May I ask which data center you are / were in? Not that the data center has anything to do with it, as the number of processes is excessive, I am just keen to know where your server is It should be in SoftLayer, since he mentioned that he had upgrades there. But however, I suppose the problem lies within TouchSupport's techs slacking?
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