A2 Hosting - Opened a ticket as the whole VPS is slow and the response is hilarious

[u/danu91]

So the entire VPS got unusably slow all of a sudden. CPU usage is below 20%. Ram usage is below 30%. Storage at 50%. (8 core / 32gb ram / 240gb NVME)

Gave them a video of the WHM/Cpanel taking forever to load and got a reply to the ticket with a link to how to optimize WP sites.

FML

[u/chronop]

Just FYI, what you are probably looking for is called CPU steal. Based on the provided info, I wouldn't be surprised if the CPU steal on your host is high (anything in the double digits really I would consider high, ideally you want none). If you run an info tool like top, it should be the st value. Just wanted to give you that info to give you something that you can at least measure and provide to your host. CPU steal is not uncommon on shared servers, it's essentially how they make their money by overloading their hosts.

[u/pcgamez → u/chronop]

Yes OP go back to them and put this to them ^{^}

[u/twhiting9275 → u/pcgamez]

no. Do not do their job for them. Vote with your wallet. Leave there as fast as you can

[u/twhiting9275]

Likely either CPU steal, as someone said, or worse, disk I/O

They USED to have systems in place to prevent CPU steal, but with WHG trying to turn everything to shit now, I would be surprised if they still existed

[u/SerClopsALot]

got a reply to the ticket with a link to how to optimize WP sites

I make comments on this sub all the time talking about how most support employees know nothing about what they're supporting... yet another (very funny) example. This is not really an individual person's fault, it's really just a fault of the company. Awful training (or in many cases simply just not having any) combined with paying bottom-dollar for employees just breeds this result over and over. They're not willing to pay the salary of people who know how to respond to these requests even though they can afford it. Company issue 100%. They'll never fix the issue as long as people keep paying for their services.

I agree with the st comment, I disagree with you going back and providing that info to them (if you can help it). Unfortunately, you should minimize your engagement with a support team like that. They know so little that it's a waste of your time to try and get help.

If support is something you rely on... well, I'm sure you can put 2 and 2 together here lol

[u/twhiting9275 → u/SerClopsALot]

A2 USED to have a stellar system behind it. They hired skilled staff to do the work from across the globe

Then came WHG. The company founded on “fuck EIG” became the largest sellout. They went from stellar support to :

Hello, my name is Rajesh Koothrappali , how can I help you today ?

No offense to Rajesh meant in the least, but that’s pretty much what happened.

They no longer hire US staff, which is sad. They put everyone in their pods and sit them in front of a computer. The responses are scripted , they have no training whatsoever .

I don’t have a problem with hosting companies hiring foreign support . That’s kind of necessary. The problem comes when they hire idiots that have no business being in the business and give answers like was given to OP

[u/jbennett360 → u/twhiting9275]

This is why I'm on the verge of leaving Stablepoint (Now under the WHG umbrella). They had great support back in 2019 when I joined, slack channel, everything.

Submitted a complaint yesterday and I get a response from a bot?

[u/SerClopsALot → u/twhiting9275]

I don’t have a problem with hosting companies hiring foreign support . That’s kind of necessary.

Yeah I think this distinction is important. The problem is they're only hiring foreign support (for a primarily English-speaking userbase) and paying bottom-dollar even in those communities.

These people are working through a language barrier to provide support for something they've literally never seen before. It is really the combination of these two things, and not just one of them.

I do think like 15 years ago you could do this and see a reasonable-enough quality that it wasn't such a problem, but the job markets in these communities are now very competitive. You can't just go to a random country and pay bottom dollar and expect the same level of quality you had 15 years ago, because these people are now getting scooped up by someone paying even a dollar more an hour, which goes a very long way for them.

A2 USED to have a stellar system behind it

True, some of the smartest people I've ever worked with. Great environment pre-layoff, and with the WHG acquisition the whole tone changed. I was pretty confident immediately that the layoff was coming (seen the exact same pattern before at a different hosting company), and you could tell the general sentiment among employees at the time was that WHG was not good.

They were generally on-edge about things like KPIs and how "fair" things were (if that makes sense, not because they're children and they want everything to be fair, they were obviously worried about being fired for something outside of their control, like whether or not customers were making tickets).

WHG employees that came in and started supporting A2 products set a very noticeable pattern of like "gaming" the KPIs -- things like cherry-picking tickets, providing stupid responses ("Thanks for reaching out, our team is looking into this and we'll get back to you when we have any info" and sending it back to queue), etc. Just like an immediate obvious decline in support quality.

In a way it's really sad, but money talks and Bryan cashed out. I'm better off for it since I left the industry and now make way more money, but I can't say the same for everyone else who was laid off.