The Role of Community-Based Support

By Doug Kaye

September 20, 2002 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- I recently took a holiday from my Internet-infrastructure consulting business to solve my own web-hosting problems. Like many of my clients, my concerns over the financial instability of my former web-hosting service led me to search for a new vendor to host rds.com and a few other domains and projects. I didn’t encounter too many surprises during the relocation processes other than some noteworthy exceptions in the area of tech support.

In this month’s column I’m going to depart from my usual format, and instead describe my personal experiences with community-based forms of support: FAQs, forums and chat. Whether you’re a customer or a vendor with customers of your own, these are valuable support channels you should keep near the top of your own checklists.

Based on their low price for dedicated servers and apparent high volume, I selected Rackshack and a server running RedHat Linux and Ensim’s WEBppliance. This is an entirely do-it-yourself deal. You get a ready-to-roll server, but from then on it's all yours. Rackshack will reboot the box if you kill it, but that's about it. I signed up on line, and had access to the fully provisioned box a few minutes later.

Of course, I quickly got into trouble. I was messing with things I had no business touching. But I’m undeniably a geek, so there was no stopping me. I wanted to tweak one thing and customize another. Dangerous is the only way to describe it.

The first place I turned to for help was Rackshack’s archive of frequently asked questions (FAQs). The list was short — too short — and I didn’t find what I was looking for. (Surely there must be more than two frequently asked questions about DNS.) I left the FAQs, disappointed.

Forums

Next I turned to the User Forum, a threaded-discussion area driven by vBulletin (a good package written in PHP/MySQL). This turned out to be far more promising than the FAQs. Here I found 1121 posts in 251 threads on DNS alone. In particular, I found links to a number of how-to’s—articles in which authors have taken the time to document step-by-step procedures for common sysadmin tasks.

One such how-to wasn’t posted on Rackshack’s own User Forum, but rather on an independent site called unofficial-support.com. This is a small (500-member) community site for those administering dedicated servers, primarily running WEBppliance. (By the way, most of these forums provide far more information about vendors’ products than you’ll find at the vendors’ own sites.)

And then there’s WebHostingTalk.com, another vBulletin-based site, which claims over 20,000 registered users and half a million posts in more than 70,000 threads. Its team of moderators does a commendable job of maintaining the content, which includes such diverse topics as reseller business issues, security and PHP programming. WebHostingTalk is operated by Rackshack’s CEO/founder Robert Marsh. Yes, there’s a pattern here. Marsh has clearly learned the benefits of community-based support.

Chat

But what do you do at 3am on a Sunday morning when your server is down you really need the 1:1 advice of a guru? It’s probably something simple. It’s just one little thing that you didn’t do quite right. You know that the right person could tell you how to fix it in one sentence or less. But it’s 3am on a Sunday morning. Besides, if you’re like me, you’re too cheap to pay for support. You’ve got a do-it-yourself box and here you are, unable to do it yourself.

This is the point at which I discovered Rackshack’s chat room. In their case, it’s an IRC chat server you can reach using standard IRC chat software (I use my multi-protocol Trillian IM/chat client). If you’re not IRC-enabled, you can just use the Java applet client on their web site. Free to anyone (not just customers), this IRC gathering is available 24x7. Even at 3am on a Sunday morning, there was someone there to answer my questions, either a Rackshack employee (they all seemed to be named Brian) or a fellow sysadmin with nothing better to do. Although the official Rackshack proposition implies very little support, I've actually found the support I've received in the chat room over the past few weeks, superior to that for which many of my clients pay big bucks.

Beyond FAQs, forums and chat rooms, there’s an entire community of small web-hosting vendors helping one another on a regular basis. In one case, I was unable to re-create a virtual site because previously deleting it through the WEBppliance GUI left remnant files I was unable to locate. A query to the chat room yielded a link to yet another third-party forum operated by host and consultant Webscorpion. There, the owner had posted a well-written step-by-step process for fully deleting a virtual site. My new site was up and running in a matter of minutes.

If you’re wondering whether you can handle a do-it-yourself box, remember this: You’re not alone. If you’re comfortable with 80% of the sysadmin tasks for a Windows or Linux server, you’ll find a community of fellow web-hosting operators in the same boat; very willing to help you close the gap on the remaining 20%. If you’re a vendor, keep these community-based tools in mind.

I've still got to do all the hands-on work myself—I’ve got a bare-bones server, after all—but given that I'm willing to do that (and sort of enjoying it), this has turned out to be an excellent experience so far.