Good experience with support

[brucew]

I'm not a big fan of outsourced, offshore support and I always cringe when I have to call 1and1 (US) after 5.

Through most of the day I was experiencing performance degradation to both my root servers, admin.1and1.com and www.1and1.com. I traced the problem to a router connecting the data center to the Global Crossing fiber optic network. That router was dropping between 30% and 70% of the packets during my testing.

The first tech I got at 1and1 wasn't really trained in network issues, but I explained to her as best I could, gave her the IP address of the router and she apparently took pretty good notes before putting me on hold.

The second tech didn't quite get it either, telling me his traceroute to my servers looked just fine. I told him I was glad to hear that, but since the problem also affected my access to 1and1's servers, that it deserved a little more attention.

He found the router's IP address in the first tech's notes, did some more testing and confirmed the issue. Then he passed it up to network support.

Less than an hour later, I had an email from an American, presumably in network support, confirming it was a Global Crossing matter and indicating (but not actually saying) the matter was resolved.

My followup testing confirmed the issue was resolved.

Based on my experience with other data centers, these things can take days to resolve, probably because of either vendor finger-pointing or because they think I'm an idiot or a flake.

I'm astounded that it took only an hour to resolve this. (And that I was never once told to re-image my servers!)