ServerMatrix / ThePlanet Support – Two Thumbs Up
This week my websites on one server suddenly became unavailable after a bad update from Red hat/CPanel had BIND fail to start properly. BIND is the DNS server piece of the server that allows for name resolution of the sites located on this server. Shortly after 1 AM on Friday morning the affected web server stopped working. My monitoring did not pick up the service failure. Well, it picked it up, but the email did not reach me as it went to my Gmail account and I usually do not check that at 1.00 AM in the morning. So, I need to revisit my monitoring and work out something else.
Anyway – when I realized that something was wrong I checked the server via SSH, ping, and ran a trace, too. I could not connect. I logged onto to my support portal at ThePlanet.com and submitted a ticket to see if there were any hardware problems. Once the ticket was submitted I then tried to connect to the server via IP address (actually by accident) and that worked. I logged into WHM (Web Host Manager) and checked the service status. Once I saw the DNS service down, I tried to restart it, but that failed. When those things happen the first thing I do is to check the CPanel.net forums for issues. If I experience a not-normal problem, chances are pretty high that somebody else has run into this problem before. And I did not even have to search very hard to find an existing thread talking about the about the problem. Before I was able to implement the solution I found at CPanel.net, my email started working. ThePlanet support staff had already fixed the problem – within less than 10 minutes after the ticket was submitted. I still logged into the server to check if they did what I would have done and indeed that was the case.
I am renting hardware at ThePlanet/ServerMatrix for over 2 years now and except for one case support requests have been taken care of fast and issues were solved to my full satisfaction. This last incident confirmed my good feeling that I have about ThePlanet/ServerMatrix. In my opinion these guys rock.
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