Technical support This, really, - "the guys of the heroic profession." They are the first to take upon themselves the attacks of restless users, act as “House doctors”, negotiators and more than others in IT can talk about standard and unique “clinical cases” ... Why do I write in such formulations? Probably because a knowledgeable, educated, experienced client saves his time, remembers what he pays for and does not require the impossible.

This post appeared after my communication with TeamLead our technical support. Under the cut there are a few thoughts about which clients most often see as tech support from the hoster, and an attempt to answer the question: can tech support be proactive and not reactive? We will go through 3 common myths, which we will provide with examples from our work - special cases and collective images.

"Any salesman is trying to fool me ..."
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This prejudice has been forming for decades. Soviet trade, the first steps of capitalism. The installation “we are hung around and deceived everywhere” has deep historical roots. Hence, as a consequence, the stereotype: “What is the benefit for a hoster to keep you on a low fare? Obviously, he wants to stimulate you somehow so that you pay more! ”

Life situation: the hoster sees that the client has “grown” and, by its performance, has rested against the ceiling - the memory / processor power / disk space has run out. The hoster, of course, notifies the client about this, offering to add resources. In response, the client arrives: no, I know that you can be optimized , he is told - optimize. The client (without false modesty and embarrassment) : eeeee ..., so maybe in the framework of free support? ... well, please do well, etc. (About the "free" support below).

Obviously, there are reasonable limits and the hoster cannot optimize the client’s infrastructure. This, I would say, intimate process is an exceptional and extremely personal question of the system administrator on the client side. With a shortage of resources, the client has 2 possibilities: agree to increase the capacity or turn to web developers who can dig into his, say, website and find out what is wrong - many unnecessary temp files are created or you can create less cache files. Or they will check the scripts and site plugins, optimize their work, or even disconnect them completely - this set of actions allows using a smaller amount of RAM. But there is a “special” category of customers. Even in a situation where the order in the infrastructure can and should be imposed on its own, they are trying to load the host.

For example, there was a client who had a server . One day this server started to hang. The client got worried, started writing in TP. Our admins have found a mistake - they originated due to a recent update of the site software. To correct it, it was necessary to change exactly 1 word in the configuration and the client wrote about it, even gave a link to the explanation from the official software site. It would seem that…. But the client, such, - change you ... On the one hand - it seems like a trifle for a few minutes, on the other - all these “trifles”, when they are flowing, well, it is simply unrealistic to distract the sysadmin. And the client heard a logical and reasonable answer, filled with every kind of courtesy.

Not always more expensive - better for the client

After talking about, hmm ..., "modesty and zealousness", look at the other pole. There are cases when a client is determined to arrange an attraction of unprecedented generosity - he wants to buy something more expensive, even if it is not needed at all. The temptation is great, but we are trying in every way to send the client "on the right path" and we advise you to choose exactly what will solve his problem. There was, for example, such a case: the client decided to move from one of our data centers to the second (it is more expensive). He voiced the reason - there, they say, there is protection against DDoS and he wants it, he dreams. Well, if you see a problem and know how to solve it, then ... However, the problem, as it turned out, was not that he was de-ned. The problem was in braking the site, and the nature of inhibition was in its incorrect settings. The client was reported: yes, we can transfer you, but it will not give any result, the hardware protection against DDoS will not work for you, your site will also slow down, you need to reconfigure the site .... This story has a happy ending.

“I pay money to the hoster - he should set everything up for me!”

A small digression about “free” technical support, since there are quite a few fans that the hoster, in addition to “more expensive tariffs,” always wants to “buy” paid technical support as well.

Adults understand that nothing absolutely free does not happen - the administrator’s work time is always paid by someone. Such free of charge is rather a consequence of loyalty to the client. But it can not be dimensionless. We are talking about basic support, as about a certain amount of services and time, which are included by default in the main service. Basic support does not include specific software configuration or monitoring of critical client services. At the request of the client can purchase an administration package, providing for the monitoring of the operation of its infrastructure. For monitoring, there are a number of markers that we monitor the state of client resources and which signal the need for decision-making. An example of such a marker is “less than 20% of the disk”.



But I would not write about basic technical support if everything was grand and noble. The following story happened to one very cunning ... wise client. Once he decided to beat the hoster in the "intellectual duel". Somehow, the client of our TP says - I know everything, I understand, and I repent beforehand, this goes beyond the framework of basic technical support, but configure Apache for me to open the site . Well, this is 5 minutes of business - set up. The next day, knocking the same cleverly ... wise client again: do you set up MySQL, please? Well, again, sort of, the work is not a lot - set up. But this is not the end of the story. What happened next? I played a sly hoster. Little by little, a little bit, with sustained pauses, once every 2-3 days, the client crushed his big problem into small ones, trying to solve it with the help of our technical support. When we calculated how much was done for this client in a month - it turned out that he was a cunning ... wise client, we deployed almost the entire infrastructure :-)

As the reader may have guessed, good people from this story have learned an important lesson for the future.

The desire of the client is not always - "law"

Naturally, we evaluate customer requests, even if it is obviously beyond the responsibilities of the basic technical support of the host. The main evaluation criterion is the time of the system administrator. There was a client: he took the VDS, he says - put me Ubuntu - no question, put it - put it, says LAMP to me. Well, if the client asks - ok. And the client was emboldened, he lost sight of the coast: and now, he says, expand the site to me, set up the database and optimize Apache. And this, dear, the process is quite lengthy and, therefore, goes beyond the basic technical support. For such support, the administrator needs to thoroughly study the source data of the customer’s infrastructure, the site code, how many users it is designed for, and so on — this is a lot of work, up to 6 hours of work by the system administrator. It is clear that the administrator can not do this out of the goodness of his heart. There are a lot of clients and some of them paid for TP over the base. Moral of the story: not every desire is doable.

"In every incomprehensible situation - contact the hoster!"

In our experience, the most requests for support (about 80%) create so-called. "Typical users". They downloaded the site template, took the domain name, bought the hosting, connected a lot of plug-ins, and that’s all for production. If any problem arises - related or not related to hosting - the client still applies to the TP. It’s just that in the mind of a “typical user” most often the light comes on “for all questions you need to contact a specially trained person”: - but where else should I write? In technical support engine, which is used on the site? Most often it is free. Familiar sysadmin for personal use from him, often not. Often there is no habit to first look for a solution to your problem somewhere in the internet, on the forums. It is not easy. And then, there are Christmas trees, there is a hoster - “I'll pay them money, they miss them right now - and here I am with the question“ unique and in profile ”!”

One client complained all the time about server hangup. When the admin logged in the server - everything was already working - the client managed to reload its server. He was repeatedly asked not to reboot the server, because the error had to be traced. The story did not convey to us whether the client was a fanatical or simply “without a king in his head,” it is only known that he did not listen to anyone and was rebooting all the time. Whether long or short, monitoring has shown that there is an appeal to the files on the site, to the pages of the site, there is no shortage of power: the site is working. It turned out that the reason is a bad connection - in the place where the client opens the site. He has a bad communication channel - the site loads for a long time, and he thinks that there is a problem with the server.

And there was another story ... The client complained about the hang of the site. In the opinion of the respected, all his problems were on the side of the hoster. Customer confidence was just fundamental. Diagnosed. It turned out - the RAM ends, the system kills processes to free up memory and stops MySQL, NGINX. The client was told about this, he was embarrassed, they say, I said - you have something wrong. Like, everything was fine, "before, behold, it never ended," and now suddenly began to run out. He was asked 1 question - did your visit count increase? - “Yes,” the client replied with pride, and already blushing with pleasure. I would like to write that, under the attentive gaze of the TP employee, the obvious quickly came to him. But communication went on wires and in correspondence and his admins did not see his eyes. However, everything fell into place.



As already mentioned, most support requests are “typical requests from typical users”. There are cases when a client asks, but they understand that their request, to put it mildly, is not at the address and therefore asks for references to “read how to solve my problem” - i.e. poke a finger, I can not find. The situation is not infrequent and we have created and simplified the lives of our clients and ourselves, and we fill in the wiki at www.sim-networks.com/wiki .

Ordinary users do not give technical support to be bored, and there are cases when the system administrators of the clients begin to “ignite”. Here is an example, if a client wanted to set up a virtual machine from his router to the router in our data center. He was told what and how to tune, he tried. Then the client asked for instructions on how to set up, our administrator wrote the instructions. The client was silent for 2 days, then he says: I cannot do it - half of the addresses are available on the client’s subnet, and half are not. We started to understand - it turned out that the client has a router in which some of the clients are connected, then a server with pfSense is connected to the same router and the second part of the clients are already connected to it - i.e. he has 2 firewalls - but the system administrator somehow forgot to mention this :-)

It happens, and spammers come across ...

In case customers send spam, there is always the question of blocking. Most often, our tech support asks the client - what happened? We do not chop from the shoulder, in such situations you need to consider everything. First, the client's story: if the client never did anything like that, then why would he suddenly become a “spammer”? It turned out that the client was simply hacked, so we notified him, helped him change passwords and cleared the queue. Although often hosters do not bother with the proceedings with this - they just block everything.

Of course, there are cases when a client is blocked during spam mailing. When an alarm from Spamhaus, for example, we will notify the client about the blocking. But if a client says that he was hacked, he asks to look and figure it out, we do all this quickly and for free.

It is not easy to protect oneself from spammers. It happens that the terry masters of this business come across. They, as a rule, take the cheapest VDS, 15 IP-addresses, and as soon as complaints come to it, we immediately block it. Although it happens, the spammer pretends to be a “white sheep”. Now they are tightly pressed everywhere, and they are trying to change their approach - they do not take the cheapest VDS, switching to more expensive ones, and work until they block it. And when they are blocked, they do not even respond to the letters and do not write to technical support, they understand that they have been opened and simply leave.

So it goes…

Returning to the question at the beginning of the article:

Can tech support be proactive and not reactive?

In this article, we talked about how we are resolving the difficult question of the balance between customer-centricity and the periodically arising "someone's" desire to hang "all dogs" on the hoster. For us, the proactivity of technical support lies in flexibility, non-negligence, and no obsession with dogmas. We are convinced that technical support should be based on the client's situation, and they are always different. Therefore, technical support is not robots, but real people, the same as our customers.

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