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 Four:  1.30pm – 3.30pm:  Lunch over and we’re into the afternoon.  Slight lull in support tickets over lunch but they soon ramp up again.

1.46pm Live Chat Website Not Loading
A client came on live chat to remote that his website was not working.  This was a strange issue caused by a misconfiguration on the server.  A Level 3 technician took over the chat and managed to resolve the issue for the client to bring the website back on line.

1.55pm Support Ticket Server Running Slow
A client opened a support ticket reporting that he felt his managed server was running slow today.  We checked the server and load was normal as was RAM % usage.  We checked some random websites and they seemed to be responsive for us.  We replied to the client and asked him to come back to us with an example of a website that was slow so that we could look into it in more detail and we await the reply.

2.05pm Support Ticket Database Restore Failure
The client who had issues with the database restore earlier on R1Soft has come back to us asking for more information on why the restore initially failed on R1Soft.  There is nothing in the logs to indicate any issues and R1Soft uses a GUI and stores databases in such a way to make troubleshooting difficult.  We may need to reach out to R1Soft for advice on this.

2.40pm Support Ticket IP Blacklist on Firewall
Pretty standard firewall block ticket.  We found the reason the client was blocked and we unblocked the IP offering relevant advice to the client.

2.45pm Support Ticket IP Blacklist on Firewall
It’s all about bad passwords today as we have another client who is blocked on the firewall.  We unblocked the IP and advised the client to check his password as entering repeated bad passwords would result in a firewall block.

2.47pm Live Chat Spam Experts Email Issue
A client has recently bought a private server and is moving his websites over to his new server.  All his domains use Spam Experts email filtering.  There is an issue whereby the Spam Experts Service still thinks the email is on the old shared server despite the DNS being changed days ago.  We’ve had to escalate this issue to the folks at Spam Experts and we have mitigated the issue temporarily for the client with a hosts file edit on the server itself although strictly speaking that should not be necessary.

2.50pm Support Ticket Sub Domain and Site Duplication
The same ticket from earlier about the sub domain and the website duplication.  Client came back with some additional questions for us that we answered.

2.55pm Support Ticket SSL Certificate
A reseller who just added a new account to his web host manager.  He cannot wait until the overnight script runs to issue new certificates so we issued his new Let’s Encrypt certificate manually for him.

2.55pm Support Ticket Email Bounce
A client had an email they sent bounce back.  We looked at the bounce message and confirmed there was a valid SPF record and that the sending IP was not on any block list.  The bounce message showed an issue with the receiving server and there is not much we can do for this particular email address.

3.06pm Hourly Database Dump
A managed server client has asked us to write a script to dump her database hourly to a remote file storage system she has in place. We advised the client this was outside of the scope or normal support but we could have our system admins write a script that we anticipated would take an hour and we quoted accordingly.

3.15pm Email Sender Incorrect
A client reported that when sending email the incorrect email address was showing up in the received emails.  We believe this may simply be caused by the client having multiple email accounts connected to their email software and them selecting the incorrect one when sending the email.  We advised the client to ensure they had selected the correct email address from the SMTP senders list in their email software and to let us know if there were any issues.

3.17pm WordPress Password Reset
A client had forgotten their WordPress back end password and asked us to reset it.  We logged into the database back end and reset the password there for the client and passed the new password on.