We have a fair few ideas of our own, of course (he’s going to need that coffee…), but we’d really like to hear your suggestions too – it’s you that uses our website, after all!

What do you like about the current website? What drives you up the wall?

Do you like the colourscheme? Loathe orange and love green?

Is there something you can never find? Something you can’t see the point of? Something you’d love to see? Something you’d miss if we got rid of it? What about the customer control panel – think we can organise that better?

I’ll discuss all of your ideas with Shaun and our Head of Marketing, so consider the comments box a suggestion box and have at it! You’re also welcome to tweet your ideas – you’ll find us at www.twitter.com/DailyInternet.

“Hello Mr. Mechanic! That car over there is mine. It started making a knocking noise a couple of days ago, usually happens when I brake. Can I book it in? Here’s the keys.”

What you’d be unlikely to do is walk into the garage and just say:
“Car’s broke. Fix it”

Obviously the mechanic would need to know where your car was for starters and you’d probably want give them a clue as to what was broken so they knew where to look instead of spending hours (for which you’re paying!) randomly testing different components.

Pretty much common sense, really!

That said, you’d be surprised how often our Support team receive emails from customers which really give us very little to go on. While we’ll do our best, if you want your problem to be diagnosed and resolved as quickly and efficiently as possible you do need to try and meet us half way – we’re often very dependent on the information you provide to us. If you omit that information, chances are your next response from us will be various questions to try to narrow down the options, instead of a resolution to your issue.

There are two reasons we need customers to be open with us:
Firstly, if we have the full details of your issue, chances are we’ll know the resolution (or know exactly where to look) and be able to provide a first point resolution. And secondly, if we have the full details, we won’t have to resort to guessing, which at best significantly delays your reply as we try to find out what could be wrong and at worst means we could perform an unwanted action.

So, here’s my guide to exactly what information we need from you in order to assist you as effectively as possible:

1) Raise a Support Ticket instead of sending a general email.
This confirms your identity as it comes from your Control Panel, so there’s no need for us to get back to you with security checks.

2) Be specific about the service to which you’re referring.
Include the relevant domain name or VPS IP address etc. Simple, but if you have multiple services then we need to know what one you’re talking about!

3) Tell us exactly what the problem is.
Provide full details of what isn’t working for you. Is something timing out? Are you getting a login issue etc?

4) Tell us whether it’s permanent or intermittent.
This is an important one. If your problem is intermittent, we’ll need to do multiple tests to get a range of results.

5) Send us any Error Messages.
The single most used feature in diagnosing an issue. Even if you think the error is in a foreign language, there’s a good chance it will mean something to us so just copy and paste it and we’ll see.

6) Let us know if you’ve made any changes recently.
It may be coincidence, but it’s probably best to let us make that call. Had you done anything different around the time your problem started? Over 90% of support tickets we get regarding a VPS suddenly blocking access to a user have resulted in comments along the lines of “I can’t think what would have caused it. I mean, I was only adding some extra firewall rules in and closing ports”.

So there you go, six simple steps that will only take you a couple of minutes, but the end result is getting a resolution back to you and saving yourself a considerable amount of time in the long run.

When do you perform your maintenance?

We perform this overnight on the last Wednesday of each month. We have a set period as this means we can always make sure we have the correct staffing present to make sure any maintenance goes as smoothly as possible.

Any different tasks that crop up requiring non-urgent maintenance will be added to this monthly schedule.

What sort of tasks do you perform?

Generally, it’s housekeeping. We need to make sure our platforms are always up-to-date with any new patches and releases and optimised to run as efficiently as possible.

Keeping on top of all this means we can schedule in some planned maintenance (often with no noticeable effects to customers) and ensure we do not ever risk a situation occurring where unmaintained servers start suffering from performance issues, or a worse case scenario of unscheduled downtime.

Will the maintenance always involve downtime?

No, the majority of the maintenance will not be noticeable to the majority of customers.

Our shared hosting is all load balanced and run in large clusters, so our sys-admins can work on one particular cluster whilst the others carry on serving as normal. The days of single-points of failures are generally in the past for most shared platforms.

Some work to specific VPS hosts or certain network aspects may involve unavailability, however we always keep this to a minimum.

There has been maintenance on dates other than the last Wednesday of each month. Why’s that?

Basically, we need to make a judgement call when a new issue develops.

If something is fairly minor and will not have any negative effects, it’s fine waiting until the monthly window to fit into the normal schedule.

If something poses a risk, however, we have to decide if we need an interim maintenance window rather than waiting until our next scheduled maintenance window.

The classic example here is new security vulnerabilities in operating systems. When these are announced then they really need addressing straight away or we would be putting customers at risk. It would be irresponsible of us to drag our heels with something like this if the maintenance window was not until a couple of weeks away, as that’s a couple of weeks we would be leaving our customers vulnerable.

I hear other providers don’t have as many maintenance windows as Daily. Why is that?

We can’t speak for other companies specifically (firstly because I don’t know their internal policies and secondly because I don’t want to get into trouble!), but the example I often give to customers who ask is this:

- How often does your home PC have a new Windows Update?

Forget about service packs, let’s just say security updates for windows, networking, IE, bug fixes etc. There’s probably a few a month at a guess. It’s just the same on servers in this respect (if not more so).

Now if there’s a new security update for, let’s say IIS 7 on Windows VPS, then that’s going to be the same for IIS7 at Daily.co.uk or any other company running that system.

If you think that it’s bad that Daily are scheduling in maintenance to address a known security vulnerability and it’s good that another company are leaving a known vulnerability active on their systems, then just play that through in your head for a few minutes and think of the implications. Is it really that good that for the sake of avoiding a planned maintenance window at times designed to minimise disruption, your site and data is at risk from exploit?

Let’s put it another way: If the brake warning light on your car dashboard comes on, do you get your brakes checked or do you just take the bulb out of the warning light? One scenario means you have to get your car into a garage and then carry on as normal; the other scenario means you’ll probably carry on fine with the “out of sight, out of mind” attitude until you find yourself whizzing across a roundabout with no brakes looking like you’re in the Batmobile.

The fact that you’re not being told about a problem does not mean there is not a problem. Any sys-admin who sticks his or her head in the sand and hopes a problem goes away is turning their network into a hacker’s paradise!

So do not all providers keep their servers and systems updated?

Again, we couldn’t comment on specifics, but if in doubt – ask them.

Most companies should be able to list any of their recent updates and the reasons for them and you can then see for yourself what sort of durations you are looking at.

If you have a VPS, then also check to see if they do even perform updates themselves. Hopefully they do on the hosts and hardware, but you may be required to manage any updates yourself within your VPS.

So does Daily perform maintenance too frequent, too slow or just right?

It’s not an exact science, but to summarise:

- We schedule a monthly maintenance window in which any non-urgent tasks can wait to be carried out at once.

- If anything urgent comes up in the meantime, we’ll perform high priority maintenance if there is a valid security risk or if performance could be decreased significantly by leaving it until the monthly window

- We also make sure that as much maintenance as possible is seamless. Downtime is always a last resort

When it comes to risk taking, everyone has different ideas of what’s acceptable but we always act as is befitting of a responsible host.

If anyone finds any maintenance an inconvenience, we do apologise – that’s not our intention. However we’d like to think you can sleep sounder at night knowing any outages are always as short as possible in periods you know about in advance, rather than trying to access your services in the middle of the day and finding them off-line!

Picture a row of houses on a street (perhaps a cul-de-sac). All the houses were built by the same builders and have the same security features, like good locks and alarms. Occasionally an opportunistic burglar may sniff around but not get anywhere as they can see all the houses are locked and there are alarms ready to go off.

Then one day, a resident decides to go out to the shops but doesn’t switch their alarm on and leaves all their doors and windows wide open.

One of the opportunistic burglars sees what they consider an invitation so strolls in, grabs a DVD player, and scarpers.

What this does not mean is that:

1) The burglar now has access to every single house on the street just because he/she has managed to find one that is insecure.

2) The reason the burglar managed to get into the house is because the builders of all the houses left some gaping security flaw (like a back door with no lock).

It’s pretty clear exactly what has happened here. The burglar only took advantage of this one house because this was the only home owner who made some mistakes. It’s no good having all these security features as standard if the owner is not going to use them.

Now think about web hosting using the same logic.

Daily ensures all the servers are fully locked down, patched, firewalled and running up-to-date, stable software with various intrusion alarms. Making sure our customers’ data is secure is one of our utmost priorities

When we do hear of customers being hacked, 99.9% of the time this is where a customer has used some sort of PHP blog or Content Management System (for example, WordPress, Joomla, Gallery etc.) but has not kept it properly secured

The most common reason for having an insecure site is:

1) A really weak password (e.g. liverpool1)

2) Not updating the CMS software to the latest stable versions (remember, programs like this are constantly being updated by the vendors/providers every time a new vulnerability is found, so any customers who install it and then never maintain it could well be in for a nasty shock)

3) Installing add-ons that are not secure or again, not installing updates to them when released.

4) Setting the wrong permissions (666 or 777 to make them globally readable/writeable)

To a hacker or someone intent on damaging websites, an insecure site is just as inviting as an open door is to a burglar.

If or when someone does take advantage of an insure site, then just like the scenario above:

1) The hacker does not have access to other customer websites – only the insecure one he/she has found

2) The hacker does not have access to the root functions of our servers and platforms. They will only have access to some parts of the home directory of the insecure site they found.

We do understand that the first reaction of some customers when they see their website replaced with a “hacker’s calling card” is that all of Daily has been compromised, but we can’t emphasise enough that this is not the case.

Our message to all customers is: if you are installing third party programs, scripts, or CMS solutions etc. you must ensure you keep them secure!

- Don’t set incorrect permissions to overcome some error (don’t sacrifice security to overcome coding issues)

- Don’t set weak passwords

- Do sign up for any mailing lists and check the providers site to ensure you update to any newly released and stable versions or security patches ASAP

This is a rare occurrence as we put a lot of work into making sure our service is always top notch, but I like to be very transparent when we do have a complaint as after all there must be some reason for it to reach us in the first place and it could give us ideas for where we can improve things.

In this case, a customer cited network issues as a problem but did not actually provide specific details, such as what was happening, when it was happening or to what domain names, to help us identify the problem. Our Support guys did track down the customer’s account (from the email address and customer name), but there was just the one service on the account and that did not really tie into the query.  So, they replied explaining what they had found and asking for clarification.

The actual complaint we then received was that the customer was unhappy that our teams were clarifying the issue with them and that we should have been able to work it out by seeing a domain name in the email address alone.

Our stance in situations like this

The instruction I give the Support Team when they receive a query lacking specific details is to find out what they can from the information we have. On more than one occasion we have needed to perform a bit of detective work  to find the exact thing to which a customer is referring. Provided that once we’ve done this we can be certain we have pin-pointed the exact service with which there’s an issue, we can take action to resolve the query.

However if there is any doubt, then we need to clarify the situation with the customer before taking action. One of my pet hates is answering a question with another question, but we simply cannot resort to guessing when it involves actions on a customer account. Should we guess incorrectly then at the best we will be spending time investigating the wrong issue and increasing our resolution time and at the worse we could be making unwanted changes to another service the customer has.

In summary:

1. When you raise a support query with us, please be as specific as you can about the service you’re referring to and the problem you’re having. At the very least we have to know the domain name to which you’re referring. More tips on helping us to resolve your query quickly.
2. If you leave something out, our teams will try to figure it out from any other details you supplied and deal with your query as normal. We will not automatically reply asking for details if we can get them from other sources.
3. If it really isn’t apparent what your query relates to or we have to get some more information from you, we will always clarify with you before taking action.

.

I’m sure that the majority of our customers are happy with our stance here and understand that if we reply asking for specific details it’s not just a way of “getting rid of a ticket”, but because we want to help you in the best possible way and we need that information to be able to do so.

I would also think it a safe assumption that if our teams really were “tossing coins” when uncertain about a task, then we’d probably be getting a lot more complaints!

Customers have full root/administrator access and so the sky is the limit when it comes to customising the machine.

Something we often need to stress, though, is that a full root access machine can serve one of many different functions depending on what the administrator (i.e. the customer) wants to do with it. As such, there are many processes and features running on a default release that the administrator may want to change, whether to increase, decrease or disable altogether.

If the administrator does not configure their machine for their specific needs then they may find they are using far more resources than they actually need for the functions they require. At best, this can be a waste of resource but at the worst it could affect the performance of the VPS, depending what else the administrator installs or how much traffic the machine encounters.

This is where sometimes we may hear at the end of a report of a VPS having performance issues, the phrase:

“I haven’t changed anything on my VPS”

If you haven’t changed anything recently it may indeed seem that any performance issues you’re experiencing might be down to the Daily infrastructure, but in reality a lack of action taken to configure the VPS properly is often the cause of these sorts of issues. As a server administrator, it really is vital that you properly maintain and configure your VPS for your specific requirements so that you can make the most of its resources.

We are of course contactable on the telephones, but we ensure that tickets will never be playing second fiddle”to the tickets, unlike in some companies I have experienced, where tickets are just left to build up until there is a “quiet period” on the ‘phones, and the support guys and gals have to try to rush through as many as possible.

So why is is we like tickets so much? This is a question we have been asked before, and on some occasions (thankfully rare) we have had customers think that our request that they send in a ticket is a “fob off”! It’s not, I promise. Let me explain the method behind our madness!

1) Security

This is the big one. In order to submit a support ticket you will have to have logged into your Daily Control Panel. This logs your IP address and of course requires your password to access it, which you should of course have shared with no-one, so we know that a ticket is coming from you. A copy of your ticket is then stored in your control panel.

There’s none of this on a telephone call. Yes, our guys can perform security checks on your account, but on more than one occasion we have spoken to someone who has all the account information but gets a little sheepish when we ask for a ticket anyway. Later we find out there is some ongoing dispute with our customer’s disgruntled ex-employee or an aggrieved web designer.

2) Accountability

We need your permission if we are to make changes to your services or files or release any of your private details. It needs to be in black and white about what we can and cannot do. Yes, this protects us but what is often overlooked is that it protects you as well.

With a telephone call there is a margin for error, unlike with specific written instructions. One thing no-one wants to ever hear is “Sorry, I thought you said delete all the files in the xyz folder. So it was actually the zyx folder?”. If you explicitly state what’s required in writing in your ticket, you greatly reduce the margin for error.

3) Trackability

Most issues that are reported to us will be dealt with in the first response, but there are times when an issue may need multiple updates (especially when something like DNS changes, that take time to propogate, are involved).

Having a ticket means that if you do need to update an existing issue, whichever one of the Daily support guys looks at it will have a full transcript of everything that has transpired before and be up to speed in a few minutes.

We previously have had some calls starting with “Hi, I spoke to you about a year ago regarding an email problem”. We are good, but it’s an awful lot easier if there’s a written record of that email problem than it is trying to remember a specific conversation from months ago!

4) Instructions

If you need to know how to carry our a specific task, then we can provide instructions.

If it is basically just a case of “click here” then that’s straight forward enough, but many tasks can be a bit more complex with multiple steps and updates.

Unless you have a very good memory, it is a lot easier following a step-by-step written guide. It also means you can refer back to it in the future if you need to carry out the same task again.

–

So that’s basically the reason we like tickets. In our opening hours our ticket response times are usually mere minutes, so we make sure you are not waiting any longer than necessary.

When I need to contact a company then I’m much happier being able to list all my points and information in an email to them.  It means that I have a copy of what I asked in my “Sent Items” and gives the company the opportunity to go through my points, compose a detailed response and then reply to me – which is great when I am asking questions that will require them to take some time to gather information.

Well, that’s the idea anyway!

The trouble is that the vast majority of companies I deal with just do not take email seriously.  The response times are very poor (often days), and on many occasions I don’t even get a reply! When I have to resort to the telephone to tell them my email hasn’t been responded to, the person I talk to usually doesn’t sound that surprised, like it’s acceptable that some emails may just get ignored or deleted at random. Sorry, but that is appalling.

When I do get the privilege of a reply, then often it’s not of much use anyway. Either some standard response copied/pasted or the responder clearly hasn’t even had the time to even read my email properly.

So why do we have to put up with this attitude towards emails in this day and age? It’s not like emails are some new overnight wonder that only just came in. Why do so many companies just not take emails seriously?

Your guess is as good as mine.

Here’s a few pearls of wisdom for any companies that place their email services pretty low down on the pecking order:

- Email is not a necessary evil. It is a very efficient way of communicating with your customers.
- With over 70% of UK households having Internet access, email is not going to go away. It’s here to stay and is getting more popular. Deal with it.
- You would not randomly hang-on on some of your customers who telephone you, play them a recorded message half way through a conversation or answer a totally different question from the one they asked – so don’t do it on email either.
- When someone sends you an email it does not mean their issue is trivial or “can’t be that important otherwise they would telephone”. It may just be your customer’s preferred method of correspondence.
- Leaving your customers hanging for days for a reply just because their query came in via email is not acceptable.
- If you are not going to take email seriously, save your customers some frustation and don’t offer the service in the first place.

Thankfully we do take your emails seriously at Daily. Checking our Support emails, the last response was within 30 minutes from when the email first arrived. It was from Nick in our Support team and addressed all the points asked as well as providing some additional information that Nick thought would be useful.  Pretty good going if I do say so myself.

Hopefully more and more companies will raise the bar to the same level as Daily when it comes to email, as personally I think some of the more “dinosaur-like” companies out there will only ever be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century (or even the 1990s for that matter!) when they realise their competition is leaving them behind and the service they offer is considered unacceptable by their customers. Until that time, many companies will be content to hide within the “norm” of what the majority of other companies out there offer – and the customer will lose out.

I remember when I initially signed up for my ‘phone then it probably took no more than five minutes to complete, but trying to leave was a whole different story.

After queuing on the telephone for over ten minutes I finally got through to someone. I explained why I’m leaving and that I had considered other alternatives to the handset I wanted, but I’d made my mind up so would just like to cancel.

The person I was speaking to then went into a sales pitch about some other ‘phone I could have. I stated again that I had already looked at this, but had made my mind up. However each response I gave was met with a “please hold” and treated to tinny hold music as the person I was speaking to presumably read through a script. This was most frustrating as all the questions they kept asking me were already irrelevant, as they would have known if they had just listened to what I had said previously.

When the sales pitch finally run out of steam, I can only describe the next line of questioning as an attempted guilt trip for wanting to leave!

I think I finally won out in the end with the following conversation:

Me: OK, do any of your phones have a lightsaber application?

Operator: I am sorry Mr. Supple. Can you better describe the application you are requesting?

Me: You know, a lightsaber! Like in Star Wars? I can wave my ‘phone around and it makes humming noises and goes “KISSSH” when I act like I’m fighting with it and I can have mock battles with other people in my office who have the same application. I can be a dark lord of the Sith purging the Jedi menace.

Operator: Please hold

<horrible rendition of Vivaldi>

Operator: We do have this other telephone. This handset has an industry leading screen size, it is very good

Me: Lightsaber?

Operator: No, but it…

Me: Ah, sorry – but I’m sold on this application.

The positive part in my little saga was that it proved to be a great reminder of how we do not treat our customers at Daily.

We always appreciate the feedback we get, as this helps us improve our service, but while we do make sure it’s the account owner doing the cancelling and quickly ask what the reason is so we can find out if there’s something we can improve on, we don’t make customers jump through hoops (often masquerading as “security measures”) such as getting people to send in multiple copies of signed faxes, hunt through well hidden links in control panels, go through 200 questions about how dare they even consider going elsewhere etc.

To me, if you treat customers right from the start, offer them the best service you can, take on their suggestions and ideas then they will want to stay and you will build a fantastic relationship which will last over many years.

If on the other hand your approach is to only wake-up when a customer mentions cancelling and to expect them to change their mind when they encounter your Krypton Factor style of completing a cancellation procedure, then you’ll find you’ll have quite a few people abandoning ship!

I’ve said in a previous blog article about Customer Service – the Daily.co.uk Way that the last thing I expect our customers to experience when they contact us is someone droning through a series of unnecessary scripted questions, or someone less concerned about resolving an issue than proving that the blame for the issue is not with them.

Following a recent case I was dealing with myself, I think it would be helpful to explain the process we go through at Daily when we are investigating a technical issue. Many people will have already had their fair share of negative experiences with other companies so it’s only natural that if this is the first time they have contacted us then they will be looking for similarities and may well expect any correspondence to go down the same dreaded path.

One of the most important factors we have when we are investigating a technical issue is being able to replicate the fault at our end.

Identifying the issue is often the first step in being able to resolve it. When we can replicate it, we can check the steps taken to result in the issue, see any error messages, alter any variables etc. Often once the issue is identified then it can be pretty straight forward in resolving it.

If we cannot replicate an issue at our end (i.e. we are performing the same steps as the reporter of the issue but getting a different result) then all this means to us is that we need to be looking in different places to find out why the reporter is seeing what they are seeing. Most likely it will be a localised issue somewhere that we need to isolate.

All too often, though, the response from other companies when they find out they cannot replicate the issue at their end will be along the lines of:

“Well it works here, so must be something you’re doing”

and then case closed…

In this industry it really isn’t that black and white and such an attitude only really benefits the person dealing with the query who may consider it as “Not our problem, goodbye, right – next ticket in my queue!”.  Meanwhile the customer who reported the problem will be in the same situation and I’m sure will think twice about moving their provider to another company more interested in helping them rather than denying there’s a problem!

We’re not delighted if we find ourselves on the receiving end of this sort of treatment, so the last thing we want to do is dish it out to our customers. So, rest assured – if ever we do state that something is working at our end, this is only the beginning of the problem-solving process, not the end.