I'd like to hear opinions from people who have been hosting here for a few years, as I have. I'm a reseller and have many accounts here. Usually, the customer service is unparalleled, but I am seeing a decline as HMS grows. Here is what I'm seeing -

my requests/problems are more often misunderstood
takes longer to get issues resolved
less knowledgeable employees
ticket closed by HMS when there are still problems

There have been a few times where it has taken over 24 hours to get an uncomplicated ticket resolved. One thing I would also have as a request is that I be notified when a site will be down for an hour or more. A server went down shortly after the August downtime problem, and I was not notified. I had 4 or 5 accounts on that server and I would rather hear about it from HMS than from a client!

Hopefully, these things are "growing pains" and will be cleared up. In the meantime, I am forced to look at other hosting companies instead of having everything at HMS. Has anyone else seen these changes?

Kris,
I haven't been hosting at HMS for as long as you have, and I haven't, and still haven't seen another company that matches their support, dedication and knowledgeability. They will work sixteen hours straight on 99.99% impossible issues, and persevere until they solve your problem.
In my experience, at first I believed that some of the issues you mentioned were true. However, I found the reality to be that there was more to it than that. You mentioned unparalled service, and also tickets closed not yet resolved. I have found that 99% of the time, any issue is closed very quickly. So the reasoning I guess is that if it takes longer than a certain amount of time (which is nearly impossible), there is a ticket timeout, as otherwise, the issue is probably solved as the client hasn't reopened the ticket. And I guess that 99% of the time that reasoning pays off. And you also mentioned that there are less knowledgeable employees, and while that may seem to be the issue with tickets taking longer, and therefore being closed, I have realized that inevitably, with Asp, JSP, PHP, CFML, Windows, Linux, VPS, MSSQL, MySQl, Rails, Python, Perl, and a handul of other technologies that everyone is a specialist, and therefore, you may not always immediately get a person that knows the topic when you call unfortunately although that is changing soon. I have discovered that short term, but as I found out, and as you know, HMS is on the inc 500 list, and is experiencing so much growth that at this point it needs a tiny bit of employee catching up, because each HMS employee is rigourously interviewed, making hiring a difficult process. However, I was assured that they would catch up. This is definetly a growing pain as you said, and I think that you should really consider waiting a month or two until they catch up. And I have to be honest that if there's something wrong with HMS, then there is no hope elsewhere. I came from a host that was the runner up in service to HMS (CT), and I switched away from that for support reasons. It is true that HMS has a long history of excellence, and this is only a month or two of growing pains. As for letting you know about downtime, I totally agree, and have put a suggesion into their management. Knowing HMS, they will definely do it as I have never felt my suggestions so valued by a company. I am sure that like you said this is just minor growing pains, and that any issues will go away. And I have always felt they are open minded to suggestions and that need for old-fashioned customer service has always been their call to action so it will definetly improve. I hope for the best for you your clients and your websites.

Much agree with comprug. Growing pains happen with any company. I have noticed a longer delay in email support tickets, but I still never for a minute worry about support with HMS. I can still call and get someone within a few rings.

I was a reseller for another hosting company, and if you had a problem, and were a reseller, you had to talk to their "Reseller Support” which took you through a jungle of phone options only to be on hold for 15 minutes, and then find out their "Reseller Support” is only open M-F 9am-5pm....WTF???

So I took ALL of my reseller accounts and moved them over to HMS. When I called HostMySIte for information and they picked up on the first right, I was sold.

I seriously will not even register a domain name at a company that sells them for 2.95 when I know I can pay the $12 and have unprecedented support at any time day or night

I've been noticing these things over the past few months. Also, I am not one to complain. Some of the items that I listed would not be an issue in and of themselves, such as longer wait times or less knowledgeable staff, but together and with other things do cause a problem. The wait times I've mentioned are not about their phone being answered, it is about the response time for a ticket, whether I've submitted it via email or if I have called them. Tickets are not timing out - they are closed by HMS when there is a problem on the site. Just this week, a ticket was closed and they were saying everything was great, but every page in the site had a permission denied error!

If I had a just had my own site I would probably just write this off as nothing. But, being in business, the hosting is a reflection of my services. I have clients that call when their site is down and I always wait a little before calling in because it is usually that the server needed to be restarted. That is totally understandable and when I see the site come back up, I can call the client back and say their site is up and just needed a re-start. I also have a client who is extremely fussy and because of problems his site is flagged as one to watch by the staff. Even though he is on the site all day, there have been some times that HMS has written him to say that they saw something and that it is being worked on or that it has been corrected. I can't tell you how many times he has brought up moving the site and I've told him that it would not be a good idea since he would not get this kind of service anywhere else.

I am still hoping that this is only growing pains and that these problems will go away. I love HMS and would rather keep everything here. I have many years of saying that this has been the greatest company and because of that I have put all of my hosting accounts here. I would not move most of them. However, when I do get a new account that needs to run their whole business from the web, I will have some questions at this point. I deal with other hosting companies with some of my accounts that are happy with wherever the site is hosted, so I know from experience that HMS is better than most. I am posting this because I would like to know if there are other people who are having problems or who have seen a decline in service in the past year compared to many before that. The subject of my email is true - I hate to be saying this! There have been 4 or so years that I would have been the one postiing the glowing comments about HMS. They need to hear that there are problems, and because of the type of company they are, I think they would want to hear about it.

I still agree that HMS is great, but they definitely need some improvement at this time.

Kris,
I am just yet another client, but everything I know about them has beem from experience and asking. I'm sure it would really help if they talked to you personally. Have they contacted you? (e.g seeing this on the forum). And when once in a blue moon when I have a misunderstanding, which causes a complaint, they always seem to remedy and explain the issue. Maybe you should call them up...

We have been using HMS for approximately 5 years. We have even used 'the other guy'. On their worst day (the chain saw massacre in the street) they proved themselves to be a good partner.

Growing pains ? We see a little. But it's rare and from what we find they are the best option around.

Kris,

I would have to tentatively agree that there are some growing pains going on, but unfortunately they seem to be of a nature that simply can't be avoided. I'm one of the oldest techs here (5 years and still going) and I can say that the company has grown at unprecedented levels while I watch. While we're still the best in the business, there are a few changes that I think are inevitable as we become more large scale. To address some of your concerns directly:

1. my requests/problems are more often misunderstood
2. less knowledgeable employees

These two go hand in hand. As we grow our more experienced techs will inevitably gravitate away from the 'front line' and work on the more severe network and wide scale problems since that's where their talents are best suited. This means that when you call in you're not as likely to get a genius such as myself on the phone <ahem> however that genius is still lingering in the background resolving issues for you before they become catastrophic. This will change as our newer employees (those of the last year or so) become more fluent in our systems and learn more about the myriad technologies that we deal with on a day to day basis.

3. ticket closed by HMS when there are still problems

This is tough because it should never really happen. The only situation I can see is the case in which a problem that appeared to be resolved (site is working) actually turned out not to be, and this usually happens when there is some larger instability at work, say with a CF server that has a client with some bad code running on it. I emphasize with the tech in this case because that can be a real pain to diagnose, and the only real way we can is to repeatedly get tickets opened regarding the same errors on the same server. So, even though we have realtime monitoring sometimes it takes seeing an issue over time to really know what type of issue it is. Also on the topic of CF servers, we've dedicated some of our best and brightest to evaluating the stability of CF on our shared servers and push changes throughout our network that should aid in keeping them up and running as well as in the past.

One of the key facts to remember here is that we're at the forefront of CF hosting here, which means we also get to be guinea pigs of a sort and get to see errors before anyone else - including issues which need to be taken up directly with Macromedia/Adobe. More than a few bugs have been identified with large scale CF hosting platforms by our team, and we've often had to rely on fixes that haven't been around for years since the technology is so new. This inevitably leads to 'bad fixes' or ones that simply don't achieve the results we were looking for, in which case we revise and move on...

takes longer to get issues resolved

Another side effect of growth, as I mentioned above, however this also has something to do with the number of new technologies we've rolled out in the last year or so. Even the more experienced technicians are still learning the ropes of some of our new offerings such as Windows and Linux VPS, so it will take a little time for us to get acquainted with everything that our clients can do to a self-managed system. Don't get me wrong - we do get a LOT of training on these before they go live, but as my mother used to say, "There's no substitute for experience."

Simply put issues will arise on these new platforms that we could not anticipate, and they will have the effect of delaying our "Mission Accomplished" response - plus while we work on those other tickets will be delayed as well. We've implemented a number of failsafes regarding this; for instance there are some technicians who spend a few hours each day browsing the 'new' tickets to knock out any simple requests as well as any high priority issues.

All in all, you're generally correct in that a slight drop in service while we catch up and adjust our policies to suit the ever-increasing demand for our services, but we're making a lot of changes to address these short term issues and I expect you'll see it level out soon enough. As always if you disagree and/or would like to discuss this with our management staff - or even our CEO - let us know!

How long did you take with this response.....eloquent !

Indeed!

My first response just said

"It will get better."

But I thought better of it.

humility was never jamie's strongpoint

Intresting how a complaint can turn into a discussion of humor.

Jamie,

Thanks for your response. I did set up another (small) site today. One of the things that has been very helpful is the variety of plans. My clients range from a small church or nursery school to the e-commerce / e-business sites that notice within 5 minutes that the site is down. That is why it is so imperative for me to have a quick response in return. And the ones that call within 5 minutes are the ones where I say that the server probably just needed a restart, but I check it out for them.

I also listen for a name that I recognize when I call, but unfortunately that doesn't happen as much lately. I miss talking to some of the familiar people.

As for the list of things that I've noticed changing recently, I agree that they are all to be expected. Growing pains are part of business. The worst problem is when these happen on top of one another - first a misunderstanding, then a slowness in response, then, no, it's not quite fixed yet ... I guess that would be my real complaint - that these things together turn into 24 hours before something is taken care of. And some of that time is on my part - I do sleep occasionally!

Basically, I hate complaining. I don't like sending emails to say this is wrong, that's wrong... I'm not like that. But, I do know that things need to be said to get fixed. I did want to know if other long-time hosters are noticing these things and how they are affected.

Hopefully, I’ll be seeing this turning around soon, and I’ll be posting something that says how well HMS is working again!

Kris and others,

In retrospective, I too witnessed the growing pains HostMySite has experienced in the past two-three months. I too would have to agree that there were times when response took a long time, or there was a misunderstanding in response, and even times when I too considered switching away from HMS to the new "grid hosting". obviously I'm glad I didn't, because the GRiD fell flat on it's face, and a nameless company lost 50% of it's customers, but that's besides the point.

In the past month, service has gone up mount Everest. In just a month, it seems HMS has hired countless new people, levelling out the burden on support. Surprisingly though, the new employees have always been able to answer even the most complicated of my problems. Response time has spiraled downward, and I can finally get an answer within three rings once again. It seems that HMS is truly unique in that they can grow rapidly, and yet have only a month or two of service insufficiency even in their worst moments. IT seems other rapidly growing webhosts such as bluehost and site5's support were totally extinguished, so even at it's low point, I have always been thankful for HMS's support. Upon reviewing my tickets in the last month, and those in the months before, there is a 1x3 difference respectively, and the only time any response took longer was because of custom arrangements that I was probably the only shared customer implementing them. I am confident that HMS has turned a nosedive into a skyrocket, and hope you can feel the same way in retrospective.. I can't deny that there were times when I was infuriated by the billing department, or felt abandoned by the support department, but I have also noticed how stability has been restored - actually 99.99%, and support has replenished over the past month. While HMS has not finished this battle, I believe they are only a short distance from the top of the hill.

This post is very mixed, but posting two months later, I can say that things have improved quite a bit, but an honest opinion is still necessary

My experience has still been somewhat mixed. One of my colleagues has had numerous issues with his server and found dealing with support to be extremely frustrating. He has yet to have some of his issues resolved.