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 Three:  11.30am – 1.30pm:  We’re getting into the workflow as lunch approaches.  It’s the time of the day where tickets from the morning get replied to by clients with additional questions as you can see below a number of issues are client replies from earlier.

11.32am Support Ticket Migration for a New Server Client
The migration we started earlier was completed and the client came back to us to alert us that he could not get in contact with the people who control the domain name DNS and he would contact us later.  We advised the client that the domains still pointed to the old hosting account and if any data was changed on the websites between now and the time they changed their DNS we would need to re-migrate the data.  Client will let us know.

11.40am Support Ticket Migration for a New Server Client
The marketing agency who earlier contact us about setting up a new account for one of their clients came back to us and we assisted them further in getting a client area set up for their client and getting the order processed.

11.48am Support Ticket Phone Call Migration for a New Server Client
A client called to clarify why we had refused to enable shell_exec on a shared server for him.  We clarified this issue for him and explained why we felt on shared web hosting it could be a security risk.  We informed the client that we had a couple of legacy servers we could use for the client as long as he understood there would be reduced security. We also mentioned our Single Account Servers where we offered a small discount to the client to give him a private solution where he could make any changes he desired.

11.55am Support Ticket New Server Client Email Issues
A new client who just took a Single Account Server informed us his emails were not working.  We believe this is a simple case of DNS Caching as the TTL value on his name servers were 48 hours and he just changed his DNS an hour ago.  We asked the client to wait a few hours for some more DNS caches to flush and to try again.  As far as we can see all MX Records and server settings are correct so we are fairly certain the issue will correct itself with DNS propagation.

11.58am Support Ticket Live Chat High Traffic to a Website
A client came on live chat to report that there will be high traffic to their website this evening.  They are hosted on an entry level lite plan so these servers are not designed for large volumes of traffic.  This issue has been passed to a senior admin and we will be reaching out to the client to find out what volume of traffic they are expecting to receive.  We generally like isolating websites where we get notice as it helps ensure the website stays on line and also ensures other clients on the same shared server are not affected by a traffic spike.

12.09pm Support Ticket Server Backup Issue Resolved
The client who in the past couple of hours asked us to change their backup policy to take 7 daily, 3 weekly and 2 monthly retention points now had that policy in place.  We set a support ticket follow up for 4 weeks from now to remind us to double check it was how the client needs it.  We also advised the client that the server she had purchased came with 300GB of remote backup space and they would need to keep an eye on their disk space used to ensure they did not exceed that.  We’d pick this up ourselves as part of our monthly checks anyhow but it was important the client knew extra space would cost extra money.

12.11pm Support Ticket Email Signature Question
A client was asking for advice about what global email signature options were available in cPanel email.  The client needed the exact same signature to appear at the bottom of every email for multiple email users.  Unfortunately what this client wanted is not possible with the way cPanel emails works and the client would need to look for a third party enterprise email product such as Office365 to achieve this we believe.

12.19pm Support Ticket Server Monitoring – Emails in Shared Server Mail Queue
We got an alert that there were 222 emails in a shared server mail queue.  All server alert tickets bump the queue and are checked immediately.  We noticed a compromised WordPress install on the shared hosting account was sending a large amount of spam.  The WordPress site was many versions out of date so had not received security updates.  We found the compromised file causing the issue and deleted it.  We cleared the mail queue of the spam emails and monitored to make sure no more spam emails were appearing.  We opened a support ticket to inform the client of the issue and advised the client to work to secure the website.  We mentioned we did have a package called WordPress Management whereby we would help the client for a fee keep it updated and secured.

12.26pm Support Ticket Email Bounce
A client on our Business platform was getting a bounce message when trying to send an email.  We assisted this client with setting up Spam Experts Outgoing Mail Filtering on their account so all their outgoing emails were sent via spamexperts.com which filters out spam and helps increase email IP reputation.   We’ve asked the client to test this again and let us know if it works this time.  We’re confident this will solve the issue this client is having.

12.30pm Support Ticket Domain A Record
A client has a domain at another provider and did not feel confident in making an A Record change himself to point the domain to his server with us.  He provided us with logins and we logged into his domain name account and changed his A Record.  This sort of ticket always raises security questions so we always advice clients to change their password before providing to us and then changing it back.

12.39pm Support Ticket Sub Domain and Website Duplication
A managed server client contacted us.  He is developing a new website in WordPress and intends to use the same template as a previous website as a starting point.  He asked us to set up a development sub domain on his server and then duplicate another account on his server onto the sub domain.  We informed the client we would be happy to do this but we’d need it to come via a support ticket for authentication purposes.  Ticket has been opened and a technician is working on this now.

12.40pm Live Chat Firewall IP Blacklisted
A client came on live chat to let us know his website was not working for him.  We confirmed it worked for us and also worked on many proxy servers around the world.  We checked and the client had gotten himself blocked on the firewall for failed login attempts.  We assisted the client in changing a password and unblocked the IP address on the firewall.

12.40pm Live Chat Reseller Account Package Issue
A long term reseller came on live chat to query why he could not use certain packages he had created on his reseller account.  We explained that the reason was due to change in our policy many years ago where we no longer allowed packages with unlimited features.  We advised the client to change the unlimited to a large number so his sites could grow into the limits of his reseller account as a whole.

1.06pm Support Ticket Reseller Dedicated IP Address
A managed VPS client asked for a dedicated IP address to be assigned to a hosting account on their server.  We advised the client the cost of a dedicated IP address and recommended we do the switch overnight as anyone who recently visited the site would be cached on the old IP so would get a server config page.  We’re waiting for the client to come back to us to confirm if they want to go ahead and to give us a time to make the switch.

1.11pm Support Ticket Reseller Dedicated IP Address
The ticket we mentioned previously about the R1Soft database not restoring has now been resolved.  Our Level 3 team worked some magic and the website is back on line again.

1.18pm Support Ticket Spam Emails being Received
A reseller on legacy pricing has reported some spam emails being received by one of his clients.  We have already set up the free cPanel Spam Assassin on this account but he has come back saying the free spam filter is not good enough. We have informed the client of Spam Experts the enterprise spam filter product we sell licenses for at £1 per domain name per month.  We advised this would be a good solution for his particular issue.

1.18pm Live Chat Emails not being Received
A Managed Server client came on live chat telling us he was not receiving any emails.  We discovered that his email account was maxed out on disk space allocated so that is why the emails were not being received.  We gave the client instructions on how to increase this and advised him to open a support ticket if he had any issues doing this himself.