No response at all from support today

Since the support history states this:
" If you haven't received an email back about a problem, we may have never received your original query"

it really concerns me that there has been no response whatsoever from support today. My site is back up and running, but it went down twice today, and would at least like some acknowledgement that they received the tickets.

I tried emailing, manually pasting in the ticket number and subject into the email exactly as every other support email I have gotten in the past has, and got this reply:

In reply to:
Our system could not find the open support case you were replying to, and so could not automatically tie your message into our system. If this was a reply to an EXISTING issue, please be sure to keep the:

[blah 123456]

in the subject line of your reply!

Since it was in there, and since I received no response at all so far, I'm a tad bit worried.

-Michael

You should try putting in a support request from the panel. There's two good reasons for this, for one your support request is actually received (when you get the error reply it doesn't go into the system). And for two, when you reply to a support message it often is directed back to the same tech who first helped you, and if he's off today you may not recieve a reply as quickly. (as I understand, the system is supposed to know he or she isn't working and forward to others, but this doesn't always work)

--Matttail
art.googlies.net - personal website

In reply to:
You should try putting in a support request from the panel.

I'm sorry, please read the post before replying. I have put it two tickets today, neither of which was responded to.

Had I not used the panel to submit the tickets, I would not have had a ticket number to put in the subject line of the emails.

As I am typing this a response from support just came in... I do not know if it was due to seeing this post though, and am still unsure why I would not have gotten an initial email, or why emailing as I did bounced back from the system.

In reply to:
As I am typing this a response from support just came in... I do not know if it was due to seeing this post though, and am still unsure why I would not have gotten an initial email, or why emailing as I did bounced back from the system.

Then I suggest you ask those questions directly of support. wink

It is, of course, *possible* that "it was due to seeing this post", but in my experience that is unlikely to be the case. The few times I have seen an official response from DH as the result of a post in these forums, they have generally been in the form of a forum post.

You should also confirm that you are not simply missing an email response (delayed delivery, etc.) by checking your Support History in the control panel; even if you for some reason do not receive an email support has sent, there is a record of the response maintained there.

--rlparker

In reply to:
Then I suggest you ask those questions directly of support.

Oh, I did... just when I had started this thread I didn't have a way to do that, and in my experience they do check these threads.

In reply to:
It is, of course, *possible* that "it was due to seeing this post"

Yes, it is. Don't get me wrong either, I like the fact that they do check in here every so often. :)

In reply to:
You should also confirm that you are not simply missing an email response (delayed delivery, etc.) by checking your Support History in the control panel

Until the recent reply I received, I had nothing in in my support history on this issue, automated or otherwise, aside from the initial ticket.

I did find out why the email bounced though. The ID numbers in the subject lines of the emails are not the same as the tracking number on the tickets, they actually increment with each email that is sent. This does mean that if you do not get an automated reply that, afaik, there is no way to add to an existing ticket.

-Michael

mvandemar wrote two tickets which made it into the system at 8:46am and 9:09am. He was initially answered at 11:06am and got a couple more replies to questions at 11:22am and 11:43am. This is a completely acceptable response time for our $9.95/month plan. You would be hard pressed to find better response times for under $100/month. If you know of a place that does it faster for cheaper, let me know, I will buy them! More than half of all of our tickets are responded to within the first hour, so perhaps this was the first time you had to wait at all?

New tickets must be created from the panel. You can reply via email to messages received from support. You can not dig up an old ticket to reply to, they do expire after inactivity. Does this explain the bounce you received? If not let me know so I can track down the error.

In general if your post was noticed here, I ask a tech to look into the problem and have them respond here as well. In this case your question was just answered from the normal support queue. You should post here when looking for support from other customers. If you want to contact support, sending in a support message is the way to go!

Actually, Michael, as much as you may get attacks on a regular basis on this forum (I've seen some of the posts), that was not what this thread was... no need to get defensive.

In reply to:
This is a completely acceptable response time for our $9.95/month plan.

Regardless of what you term "acceptable", the fact of the matter is that it was (or appeared to be) slower than most responses I have gotten through the ticket system, even though I had assigned it a higher priority than the others. I am not comparing with other hosts, mind you, I am comparing it against previous tickets.

In reply to:
If you want to contact support, sending in a support message is the way to go!

I did submit a ticket. I did not receive an automated response email, which for some reason I had it in my head that I usually did (I had never received one, but this does not change the perception I had at the time). My concern was that perhaps there might be a problem with the ticket system itself. Unless you are suggesting that the solution to there being a potential problem with the ticket system is to submit another ticket, then I don't think that posting in the forums an hour and a half after getting no response from a ticket of the highest priority was out of line.

This wasn't posted as a criticism, I was merely concerned at the time.

-Michael

In reply to:
New tickets must be created from the panel. You can reply via email to messages received from support. You can not dig up an old ticket to reply to, they do expire after inactivity. Does this explain the bounce you received? If not let me know so I can track down the error.

As to that, we did figure it out... I was trying to use the tracking number from the ticket, which is not what is used in the subject line of the emails that go out.

-Michael

In reply to:
This wasn't posted as a criticism, I was merely concerned at the time.

Okay, no worries. Just keep in mind that if you post with a subject of "No response at all from support today" it implies that you waited at least 6 or 7 hours for a response. You did not state in your post at what time you had contacted support so my 'defensive' post was to clear that up. Customer assigned priority is one of, but not the only factor which determines how long it takes to respond to a question. Other factors include the number of other messages in the queue, the availability of a tech good at answering that type of question and the amount of time it takes to solve the problem. Glad that support was able to get everything squared away for you now.

On a historical note our support response times used to be quite a bit higher. We have put a lot of effort and money into cutting our response times in half in 2007 as compared to 2006.

Well, I've been a customer for a while, and I just went through the ticket history. For tickets submitted through the panel over the last year, these were the response times:

9 minutes
3 minutes
1 minute
1:04 hours
5 minutes

Not one of those was highest priority. I guess I've just been lucky, but you can see where I would notice the difference.

On a side note, might want to look at the next thread, someone else trying to get your attention.

-Michael

In reply to:
On a side note, might want to look at the next thread, someone else trying to get your attention.

Yeah, DH support staff should be taking time from handling the queue to monitor the forums for someone who has to wait for two hours for a response...NOT!

Just because your "OMG I've got no response today" after a two hour wait elicited a response from Michael, you should note that his response was *not* to your "problem", only to your intimation that you were being ignored. wink

It's precisely *this* kind of logic that encourages the "shouting in a hotel lobby" style of communication this forum doesn't need. Of course, as your previous post(s) indicate, you are free to believe "it worked" if you want; as with most things YMMV.

I'm glad that DH staff so rarely responds to users in the forums so it *doesn 't* become a place to "whine" to get special attention. The fact that your "No response at all from support today" thread subject line prodded Michael to respond to you publicly to point out your definition of "No response at all" actually was an approximate 2 hour wait for response (that was actually 3 responses within a short period) should have elicited an "I'm sorry" from you instead of pointing to another user wanting attention "outside" the support channel.

--rlparker

Oh, what's the phrase I'm looking for here... begins with a "B"... ends with an "ite me"...

In reply to:
I'm glad that DH staff so rarely responds

Are you staff? Or do you just like hanging out on hosting forums being generally derogative towards other posters? The whole reason I knew that staff does reply here is because I have seen them do so.

Ha ha! Nice! Ok, consider yourself "bitten". wink

In reply to:
Are you staff? Or do you just like hanging out on hosting forums being generally derogative towards other posters?

Nope! I am *not* Dreamhost staff; the only reason I "hang out" here is to offer help to others when I can. I'm generally pretty friendly to all, but I think what you did "sucks", and I have at least as much right to point that out as you had the right to do it. wink

In reply to:
The whole reason I knew that staff does reply here is because I have seen them do so.

I understand! Sooo.. when you have to wait two hours for a reply to a support ticket, you jump right in and complain publicly, hoping for attention, because you've seen it "work" that way for others, and have no problem with characterizing "about 2 hours" as "No response at all from support today". Granted, that is just as accurate as it would have been if you had waited for 5 minutes or for 23 hours, but it is misleading.

"Oh, what's the phrase I'm looking for here... begins with a "D"... ends with an "ickhead"..." Yep, we understand each other perfectly. Thanks for clearing that up. smile

--rlparker

No response at all from support today