Our Managing Director is speaking tomorrow in a local Secondary School about what we do as a company. As part of that preparation we wanted to give the students a flavour of what...
If you are hosting your WordPress website with us on either shared hosting, a single account server or a managed VPS server, there are 6 simple things you can do today to speed up...
Your Managed Cloud Server can be set up, configured and ready for your use in no time at all. We take the stress out of owning a web server by doing everything for you. Here are...
Here at Big Wet Fish Hosting, we’re proud to provide round the clock support for our clients, and that has not changed in any way. In recent months, however, we are seeing...
There are a new bunch of Scam Emails doing the rounds allegedly from an ‘International Hacker Group’. Due to how these emails are worded and the content of these...
This morning I came on shift and my colleague told me that a client was on live chat telling us that his VPS Server had gone down and all websites were showing an error. It turns...
To set the context to this policy as a United Kingdom based company we’ve always adopted strict Data Protection Rules and a lot of our practices and procedures fit very well...
We’ve always sold higher end dedicated servers with the latest processor family (we still do and they are awesome!) but recently we’ve seen a market for dedicated...
Big Wet Fish Hosting and GDPR GDPR – General Data Protection regulations is coming into force on 25 May 2018 and applies to all businesses doing business in or with a person...
From our MD – Stephen Kinkaid When I started Big Wet Fish Hosting our slogan was always ‘We’re Different, We Don’t do things by the Hosting Handbook’...
Our Managing Director is speaking tomorrow in a local Secondary School about what we do as a company. As part of that preparation we wanted to give the students a flavour of what happens on a daily basis in our Support Office by documenting a typical day here.
The issues below are only a selection of the issues handled in this 2 hour period but it will give you a flavour of what we do in our jobs daily.
Part One: 7.30am – 9.30am: Our nightshift ends and our early shift arrive for work.
7.32am Support Ticket Unresponsive Dedicated Server
First up is a ticket from a client whose dedicated server is unresponsive. We logged into the server and we did confirm it was very sluggish. We confirmed the load on the server was over 100 which is very high for a server with 8 CPU Cores. We restart Apache and MySQL and monitor it for an hour to ensure the load remains stable. We block some IP addresses from China that appeared attacking a WordPress installation on the server. The server is now stable.
7.39am Support Ticket WordPress Contact form not Working
A client reports that his contact form on his WordPress Website is not working. We obtain his permission to log into his WordPress back end and we see his contact form is not configured correctly. We fix that configuration for the client and we notice he is using php mail to send emails. We recommend the client installs a plugin called Post SMTP Mailer so he can configure the contact form to send through SMTP for better mail delivery. Client asks us to do that and we assist him in getting this working.
7.55am Support Ticket Managed VPS Server cPanel not loading
A local Citizens Advice Centre who we host report they cannot access their cPanel to look at AW Stats Analytics. We discover the firewall on their Managed VPS server has blocked their office IP address as there were a number of failed login attempts in quick succession. This is a good thing as it means their firewall is doing its job! We work with the client to help them reset their password, unblock their IP and regain access to their server.
8.03am Live Chat Bandwidth Exceeded
A reseller client came on live chat to report that he had just launched a new advertising campaign and his website was showing Bandwidth Exceeded and was wondering why this happened. We explained to the client that as a reseller he would have been the person who set his bandwidth limit when he set up his account from his pool of resources and he had set his bandwidth to be 5GB per month. We recommended the client increase his bandwidth to 100GB per month for this account and we showed him how to allocate more bandwidth from his large pool of resources. Website back on line within a few minutes.
8.04am Support Ticket Client wishes to cancel their Account
Sadly the school examination board no longer require GCSE or A Level Websites designed as part of the courses to be hosted on line. A school in Mid Ulster asked us to cancel down their account as they did not need to renew it. We processed the cancelation after confirming the client did not need any data and we cancelled their open invoice.
8.21am Support Ticket Migrations for a new Server Client
A new Managed VPS Client asks us to start moving her data from her old provider to us. This was a client who bought a Fully Managed VPS Server from us yesterday and who today wanted to cancel her account with a competitor (happy days!) and move her websites to our network. A technician started work at moving the data.
8.31am Support Ticket New Node Provisioning
Our Senior Team have arrived in the office and Ben P our Senior System Administrator begins work at formatting and provisioning some new nodes for our VPS and Cloud Servers to reside on. Three new servers are being provisioned this week to cope with the demand for new servers and specifically our Single Account Managed Servers.
8.55am Support Ticket Direct Debit Payment
A client had a product that was due for renewal and he asked us to change his payment method from Paypal to Direct Debit. We changed the default payment method in his client area and sent him the electronic form to register for direct debit payments. Once completed we will set up the payment when the client replies.
9.09am Support Ticket Managed WordPress Client
A new sale came in for a WordPress Management Product. Our WordPress team reached out to the client and began work on ensuring the WordPress install was completely up to date and secured. The site was also moved to our WordPress cluster from the shared server it currently resided on.
9.15am Support Ticket Email Issues
A client had issues getting their email to work whilst trying to configure it on their computer. We asked the client to send through some screen shots of their SMTP and IMAP settings from their email program. Upon receipt we noticed the client has a trailing slash (/) at the end of the IMAP and SMTP addresses causing the mail program not to connect. We recommended the client remove this and try again. We instructed the client to come on live chat so we could use Teamviewer Remote Viewer support to fix the issue directly on the client machine if they could not work out the issue themselves.
9.28am Server Monitoring – High Load
We monitor all servers on our network and we received an alert at 9.28am that one server we manage (a managed VPS server for a client) was experiencing high load. The server would not let us enter the server and we had to reboot it. Upon checking when it came back on line the logs showed that the RAM % Commit was 189%. We are monitoring the server and if this happens again we will recommend the client considers upgrading the RAM in their machine.
9.29am Support Ticket New WordPress Install not Working
A new client who signed up yesterday had used the one client WordPress installer in cPanel to install WordPress on his hosting. He was wanting to access the new install via the domain itself but the client needed to put /wp at the end of the domain. This meant the client had installed WordPress in a sub folder called /wp as the one click installer defaults to there. We helped the client move the WordPress install back to the main folder and deleted the /wp folder.