The Planet Blog

Hi everyone! I started working at The Planet a few months ago in the technical support department, and I’ve really enjoyed my experience here. I’ve been on the customer side of technical support calls for most of my life, so I’ve never understood what it was like to be on the supporting side of the call. Now that my perspective has changed a little, I’ve noticed that the best customer support occurs when the support provider and the support requester work together to create the best experience possible.

Shelves of books have been written about providing great customer support, but I haven’t seen many written about how to get great customer support. When you work with a service-based company, you’re likely going to interact with customer support representatives regularly. During these interactions, your experience will not be defined by your question or the issue you have. Instead, it will be defined by how you present your issue to technical support.

It can be extremely frustrating when a server goes down or a script isn’t working the way it should. When this happens, my gut reaction is to get upset and throw my keyboard. I’ve also noticed that when I am angry, I have a difficult time trying to explain my problem to technical support. I’ve come to realize that I’m not alone in that regard, and with my newfound perspective, I came up with a few tips that might help you get the most bang for your buck when you work with customer support:

1. Remember there’s a human on the other end. It doesn’t matter where the customer support representative is; they’re human, and their responsibility is to help you. I don’t have any empirical data, but human nature tells me it’s easier to be nice to someone who is nice to you. Once you realize there’s a person on the other end of the phone trying to do his/her job, it’s a little easier to thank them in advance for their help. It may seem insignificant, but if you thank me in advance for my help, I’ll subconsciously work harder in an effort to deserve that gratitude.
2. Don’t assume your request will be ignored. I’m surprised by the number of people who start or end their e-mail with, “No one will probably see this, but …” or “Not that anyone cares, but …” Don’t assume that you’ll be ignored. That assumption is more of an overarching negative sentiment than it is a “reverse psychology” play. The support process can be defined by the expectations you set for it, so get started on the right foot and expect that your questions will be answered and issues will be resolved.
3. Don’t start with a threat. “If you don’t do this, I’m going to report this to my bank and other authorities,” or “If you don’t respond within 25 seconds, you’ll be hearing from my lawyer” … It’s not uncommon to hear things like this in the first message in a ticket. Starting with a threat never helps your cause. It’s much easier to help someone who seems easy to help. Invoking lawyers does not make your ticket seem easy to address.
4. Provide useful, descriptive and relevant information. This tip can be tough since it’s hard to understand what information is relevant, but think about it before you send a support request. If you are having trouble logging in, then “I can’t log in. Any ideas?” is not quite as clear as “Whenever I try to log in, the login screen just reloads without an error message. I know my username and password is correct. Any ideas? Thanks.” That extra information will help considerably and will reduce the number of back-and-forth e-mails between you and the support representative.
5. Don’t write overly detailed, wordy support requests. The longer your e-mail, the more difficult it is to read, diagnose and to respond. A representative has to read the entire ticket to find what’s meaningful and figure out exactly what’s wrong. Since they’re trying to help you, you want to reduce their burden. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to help you. So, be clear, concise and brief. If you’ve got a couple different issues for support to look at, break them out into individual tickets … different issues may need to be addressed by different departments, so multiple issues in a single ticket can lead to delays in responding to specific issues in the ticket.
6. More Tickets ≠ More Support. Don’t create multiple support tickets for a single issue … While it seems like you are drawing more attention to the issue and creating a sense of urgency, you’re really slowing down the support process. Support representatives might be addressing the same issue in parallel or information might be lost between tickets, elongating the time to resolution.
7. Escalate your tickets smartly. If you think a ticket should be handled differently or if you would like a supervisor to look into a specific issue, you should always feel free to request escalation to a manager or a supervisor. The best way to make that request is to update your open ticket, initiate a live chat or place a call into the technical support phone line. If you aren’t satisfied with your support experience, then we aren’t either, so we want to hear from you.

As you can see, the prescription is not too complicated: Prepare yourself to receive the best support, and you’re much more likely to receive it.

- Sean

Hi there. Laurence Simon here. I work in The Planet’s call center. I do triage on weekday mornings, sweeping the ticket queues and picking off calls. Nice to meet ya.

You know, all things considered, it’s rather nice in here. Good ambient light, and there’s a great view of Buffalo Bayou and the Ferris wheel at the Downtown Aquarium. The chairs are pretty comfortable. And, I. Love. The Tunnels. (I highly recommend Treebeards‘ red beans and rice.)

However, there’s one thing that irks me: While we work 24/7, 365 days a year (or 366 this year!), come hurricane or hot air from the folks on television getting us all worked up over named storms, we can still make your experience even better.

I talked with my fellow trench-mates (pictured below), cobbled together a few notes, and jotted down a few suggestions, tips and thoughts that can give you a better, faster and more efficient experience with Technical Support:

1. Reboots

It takes just as long to set up a Manual Reboot Request (MRR) as it does to submit a trouble ticket or call in a reboot request when you’re at a computer. If you need a reboot for a server, use the ROD/Remote Reboot functions. If that fails, then use the Manual Reboot Request. You’ll see much quicker results this way.

Submitting a normal ticket with “Please reboot my server” requires that a technician go into Orbit, submit a reboot request for you, and then close out the original ticket. It takes much longer to get a server rebooted this way than by using ROD or Manual.

2. Initial Setup

The first thing you should do with your server is set the hostname, get that hostname resolving in DNS, and then request it as the Reverse DNS. This will prevent a lot of common network issues from the get-go.

The hostname should be a fully qualified domain name that points to the server. For example: server.exampledomain.com.

To get a Reverse DNS entry set up, just submit a trouble ticket with Reverse DNS as the subject line or a DNS Change Ticket. Make sure to include the IP address and the hostname you want to point it at.

3. Escalation Procedures

Prepare and post a set of escalation procedures for common situations so that we don’t need to ask you to perform basic recovery tasks.

Let us know in advance what to do if an alert comes up and the server requires a reboot, if it is OK to run an FSCK on the drive when it’s needed, or to replace failed drives the moment they lock up.

4. Readily Accessible Information

Keep a card with your account number and password — with bogus characters — handy in case you’re away from your desk.

For instance, if your password is:

1L0v3Kev1nH4z4rd

Besides the fact that you’ve got some serious issues to work through (or the fact that you are actually Kevin Hazard), you can bogus this up with some XJQP magic…

x1L0jv3Keqv1nH4zp4rd

If someone steals your wallet, they won’t have the actual password. Just remember to remove the X, J, Q and P characters and you have your password.

For additional security, you can require that we ask a security question, like your mother’s maiden name. That’ll also throw off anyone who gets a hold of the account.

5. Keep a Calendar

Keep a wall calendar handy with reminders when SSLs and domains are up for renewal. Also, program them as appointment reminders in your cell phone.

A multimillion-dollar operation can be brought to its knees for a day when its domain expires. Renew it for as long in advance as you can afford, and be sure to keep the account information for logging into your registrar handy. (Or, if you want to make sure it’s all in one place, make The Planet your domain registrar.)

(NOTE: According to Whois, ilovekevinhazard.com is available)

6. Notification Address

Do not set your notification address to one on your server. When you use an external contact address, you can get updates when the server’s down or if there is an abuse or legal issue.

If you lost your cell phone, you wouldn’t want people calling your cell phone to tell you they’ve found your cell phone, right?

Be sure to check that mailbox frequently, or have it alert you.

7. Up to Date

Keep all your contact information up to date. This tip is a continuation of No. 6, but it’s important enough to reiterate on its own.

8. Plan Ahead

If I were to tell you, “Your server is down and we cannot recover any data off of it,” what would you do?

Disaster planning and testing your recovery procedure on a regular basis is critical to any online business. Spending some time and money with our sales department exploring backup and redundancy will prevent you from losing clients, money and sleep.

As I like to say, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day was just a big advertisement for offsite backups.”

9. Cut out the Middle Man

Simple changes to the A Records of DNS entries can be done in Orbit instead of via a ticket.

Just go to DNS Administration, bring up the domain, make the changes, and save them.

This is actually easier to do than submitting a ticket requesting the change, and it’s a lot quicker.

10. Help Us Help You

Keep your passwords updated in Orbit and let us know what port SSH is listening to. Include any wheel users or special instructions for login.

This will save us time in addressing your issue because it will let us get into your server the moment we get the ticket.

It’s like keeping a key in a fake rock in the garden so the neighbor can feed your cat (or James Caan if you’ve got a Kathy Bates Misery thing going on).

11. Firewalled

If you have a firewall, please allow the Technical Support group access to your server.

It’s important to have a firewall on your server for security purposes, whether it’s one of our dedicated external firewall products or just a set of iptables or Windows Defender. But it’s also important that we are able to access your server quickly should you raise the alarm.

12. Be Specific

Please make the ticket summaries descriptive and unambiguous. “Help!” and “Urgent!” and “I am losing my business!” make it difficult to quickly assign issues. After the issue is resolved, they also don’t help us track down previous issues with a server to establish patterns of problematic hardware, software or networking.

We understand that it’s an emergency, but please don’t let your panic prevent us from being able to resolve the problem quickly or learn from that incident in to assist you in the future.

13. Include as Much Information as Possible

Always include error messages, exactly what you did before getting those errors and any relevant sections of log files to demonstrate what problems you are running into. If it’s with a specific domain or account, provide those, too. A ticket with “This doesn’t work!” doesn’t tell us much, since we need to know more about “this” and how it’s not working.

The more information we have about the problem, the better. Otherwise, there may be some back-and-forth on the ticket that ends up taking hours instead of minutes.

Here’s the biggest one that folks have told me about:

14. Trust Us, We’re Here for You

After a ticket is submitted, a lot of customers will speed-dial Technical Support, asking them to read the ticket and address it immediately.

We’re here to assist, but jumping the queue by calling in isn’t necessarily effective in escalating your ticket. We triage issues based on the severity of the incident, which technicians are best equipped to handle a given problem, and if the ticket needs to be handled by any of our other teams (Networking, Data Centers, Professional Services, Advanced Services, Abuse, etc.).

And, unlike those pesky elevators which actually do show up quicker when you press the button multiple times, calling in to check if a reboot has been completed will not get a server rebooted faster. Our call center is downtown while the Houston data centers are at least 30 miles away. (Dallas is even farther than that!) Data center technicians work through the queues as quickly as possible, and they are generally able to respond to tickets within minutes of submission.

We understand that you’re frustrated when your business depends on your server, and sometimes that materializes in blowing off some steam and passing along some of the heat that your own clients are dumping on you.

One odd thing I’ve noticed in my time here is that I’ve actually become a lot nicer and more patient with service representatives on the telephone. I’ve been reading the FAQs and submitting trouble tickets when possible. I know what it’s like on the other end of the line. I know what it’s like to be them.

OK, so that’s all I’ve got for this time around. I’ll have more next time.

Until then, save me the last flagon of iced tea in the break room, and thank you for choosing The Planet!

-Laurence

Howdy. I’m Lyndell, a technical support specialist at The Planet. I work with customers regularly, so I thought a server setup guide could help new customers get started with ease. This documentation is based on my personal server setup experience and on the experience I’ve had helping customers with their new servers.

1. Password

Be sure to change your password. Use a combination of letters, numbers, even symbols. You can even mix capitalization. Don’t use names, birthdays and other trivia that can be dug up out of public records. Conventional wisdom says you shouldn’t write down your passwords, but Microsoft’s senior program manager for security policy Jesper Johansson suggests otherwise: “If I write them down and then protect the piece of paper — or whatever it is I wrote them down on — there is nothing wrong with that. That allows us to remember more passwords and better passwords.”

Bruce Schneier — a notable security technologist and writer — agrees and explains, “We’re all good at securing small pieces of paper. I recommend that people write their passwords down on a small piece of paper, and keep it with their other valuable small pieces of paper: in their wallet.”

2. Firewall

Firewalls block network connections. Configuring a firewall manually can get very complicated, especially when involving protocols like FTP which opens random ports on either the client or the server. A quick way to deal with this is to use the system-config-securitylevel-tui tool. Of course, ssh, web server, ftp, mail and all the ports the control panel uses need to be open.

Mail Ports

• 25 – SMTP
• 110 – POP3
• 143 – IMAP
• 465 – SMTPS
• 993 – IMAPS
• 995 – POP3S

Web Server Ports

• 80 – HTTP
• 443 – HTTPS

cPanel Ports

• 2077 – webDisk (unsecured)
• 2078 – webDisk
• 2082 – cPanel control panel (unsecured)
• 2083 – cPanel control panel
• 2086 – WHM control panel (unsecured)
• 2087 – WHM control panel
• 2095 – webmail (unsecured)
• 2096 – webmail

Personally, I closed the unsecured control panel ports 2077, 2082, 2086 and 2095. Using SSL protected ports better protects passwords and data. To access secure control panel pages without browser popups warning about invalid certificates, buy proper SSL certificates (explained below).

Other

• 22 – SSH (secure shell – Linux)
• 53 – DNS name servers
• 3389 – RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol – Windows)
• 8443 – Plesk control panel
• 19638 – Ensim control panel

3. DNS

DNS is a naming system for computers and services on the Internet. Domain names like “theplanet.com” and “orbit.theplanet.com” are easier to remember than IP address like 70.87.6.117 and 70.87.6.16.
DNS looks up a domain’s A record to retrieve its IP address. PTR records are used to look up the domain name associated to an IP address.

Hostname

Pick a hostname for your server. It can be anything DNS allows, but some names are better than others. Hostnames such as “accounting” or “hackme” may draw unwanted attention. The hostname must be resolvable by DNS, so “example.theplanet.host” will never resolve since “.host” is not a top level domain. “host.example.com” and “server.example.com” are examples of the proper form of a hostname. You’ll want to avoid using “www” at the beginning of your hostname because it may conflict with a website on your server.

In cPanel, the hostname can be easily set in “Networking Setup”. In Plesk, the hostname is set in “Server Preferences”.

A Records

If you buy your domain name from The Planet, it is automatically added to our nameservers, but if your domain was registered externally, you’ll need to go through a few additional steps to ensure your domain resolves correctly on our servers.

To include your externally-registered domain on our DNS, you should first point it at our nameservers (ns1.theplanet.com, ns2.theplanet.com). Once The Planet’s nameservers are correctly reflected on your domain, open a “DNS Change Request” in Orbit. You’ll enter both the domain name and the IP address in the form, and we will create the DNS zone file for that domain. We automatically add A records for default subdomains like “www”, “ftp”, “mail,” and if you’d like to add any other hostnames, log into Orbit and use “DNS Administration” to add an A record for your server’s hostname. If your server’s hostname is “host.example.com”, add an A record for “host”.

PTR Records

Many ISPs configure their servers that receive email to lookup the IP address of the domain in a sender’s email address (a reverse DNS check) to see that the domain name matches the email server’s host name.

You can look up the PTR record for your IP address. In Linux and Mac use the “host” command on the console or in Terminal.app. In Windows use “nslookup” in your Command Prompt. If the results of the PTR record lookup don’t match your server’s hostname, open a DNS change request asking that the PTR or reverse DNS be configured. Please include both the IP address and the server’s hostname.

4. SSL Certificates

Getting an SSL certificate is optional, but it has many benefits. SSL encrypts passwords and data sent on the network. The certificates will assure your customers that they are looking at your site securely. Browsers won’t trust SSL certificates created by the server, so you should purchase certificates externally to keep your content safe and avoid invalid SSL certificate popup warnings.

If you’re interested in learning about The Planet’s offerings in this area, visit our SSL Certificates page. Remember, any website using SSL Certificates should be assigned its own IP address. More information can be found on our support portal.

5. Protect Your Data

An old adage says, “It’s better to have and not need it, than to need it and not have it.”

Data loss can happen to anyone. I recently experienced a hard disk drive failure at home, and I can attest that recovering data without a current backup is certainly disruptive.

Control panels include backup functionality and can be configured to automatically backup regularly to the home server or an external site. For example, cPanel and Plesk can be easily set up to backup to an FTP site. The Planet offers several options for data protection and backup to fit any of your needs.

Imagine what would happen to your business if you lost just some of your data. There’s no excuse for neglecting backup when configuring your new server.

6. Know the Mail Guidelines

Some Internet Service Providers are very particular about email sent to them. As a mail server administrator, you may experience frustration when your server’s emails are not accepted by ISPs that aggressively combat spam. To better prepare for your server’s operations, you may want to verify with the larger email providers that your messages will meet their criteria for valid traffic. Read what a few of the larger postmasters have to say:

• Hotmail
• Yahoo
• AOL
• Comcast

7. Move In!

Now that the server has been prepared and the data protected, you are ready to migrate your content. Never underestimate the usefulness of control panel documentation. Here are the links for our popular control panels:

• Plesk
• cPanel
• Ensim
• Helm

Remember, The Planet’s technical support department is only a phone call away.

-Lyndell

The Planet Knowledge Base is now LIVE. Our team has been laying the foundation for this support resource over the past few months by contributing answers to commonly asked technical and account-related questions, and their blood, sweat and tears are now available for you 24×7x365.

Whether you are curious about where to find your server’s bandwidth usage or you can’t figure out how to move or rename a file on your Linux/BSD/Unix server, you can track down answers to the most frequently asked questions we receive on the KB’s index page or search through our archives of content for specific keywords … in the clean, “Web 2.0″ interface:

We’re constantly on the lookout for new content to be included, so when you get a stellar ticket response that might be helpful for other customers, let us know, and we’ll make sure it is added to the KB.

Oh … and don’t forget to bookmark http://support.theplanet.com.

If your friends ever ask you to explain why you bookmarked a link that doesn’t involve a LOLcat or funny YouTube video, you can impress them by quoting Enrico Fermi eruditely: “Ignorance is never better than knowledge.”

-Kevin