Snowball

[icd]

Hey,

What happened with Snowball, I was on my way to get wireless there, but nothing.

So i was thinking, Sentech is still out of stellenbosch and I don't know when they'll be here.. so what should I go for instead of my current 28.8 connection? I can't get adsl, i live on a farm between stellenbosch and somerset.

Help.. please.

Icd

 

[prozak]

Hi Icd,

where exactly do you stay? I stay on Annandale Rd and have dsl without problems. If you are in my line of sight I may be able to piggyback you with wlan.

greets

prozak

 

[i-Guru]

you can get iBurst if you want, they just switched their stellenbosch tower on this week

 

[nomdeplume]

So whats wrong with Snowball? Did you contact them and not have LOS?

 

[mountain_lion]

Not sure why, but end of 2005 Snowball removed wireless from their website.
They still provide the service though - I use them in Stellenbosch.
Their wireless sevice is not too bad and they repond when there is a problem.

I also use Snowball for hosting, but lately this has been problematic.
For months I had intermittent problems connecting to their mailserver (which I reported).
End of last week the mailserver had a major crash - they are still trying to sort it out.
Websites and mail was down for days.
Web is back now, but email not.
Mailserver was up for a short while Saturday and all seemed fine again, but things went really wrong after this. Last I looked all my mail boxes where gone and mail was bouncing.
All this leads me to guess that Snowball only has one mailsever (no failover or backup).

Try Snowball for wirelless, but don't take hosting with them for now...

 

[nomdeplume]

There is another post of mine showing how they have 2 web sites.
www.snowball.co.za www.snowisp.co.za
One for wirelss and one for their other services. Seems like they opted to segregate the two for some reason.

Nice to hear that their Interenet provision is decent, but what you said about their hosting is a little worrying. My business (and just about everyone elses) depends on web and email, and there is no way that service can be down. There was an incident with my provider which resulted in 20 minutes down time over the past 3 years, and I received a letter of apology. There was another case where my IP was firewalled, because of "suspicous behaviour", but that was sorted and never affected anyone but my office. Anything short of this would not be acceptable.

 

[eugenevdm]

Website Segregatation / Server Crash

We segregated the wireless from our main web site because the wireless is growing at a healthy rate and we wanted a division which is focused solely on rolling out a regional service. I mentioned this elsewhere in this forum.

Yes we had a very unfortunate server crash. When we restored the backup it caused additional problems which replicated throughout the rest of the system.

Of course I will make a formal apology to my all clients but at the moment I’m trying to contain a crisis and if I have to apologise to every client individually I cannot get any work done. We have been working 24-hours non-stop since the crash in order to resolve problems.

Try running a data centre full of hosted machines 24-hours a day. I’ve been doing if for 8 years and I can guarantee you that stuff breaks. No matter what precautions you take. The original problem with our server was a hard drive crash which corrupted the Linux file system. The RAID did not even help one bit. The backups we restored corrupted other parts of our system. Have you ever experienced a hard drive crash? It’s really no fun and for an ISP it’s not easy or quick to recover especially if it’s one of your mission critical machines.

The person on this forum who had e-mail problem should have spoken to me because I certainly would have been able to sort that out. Snowball has always been very proud of our service and technical excellence and I guarantee you that we will take the lessons learned here and improve our business even further.

 

[Ekhaatvensters]

The Iburst tower in Stellenbosch should be pretty good, it just went up this week.

Will probably be very fast atm, untill alot of people subscribe to it. Depende where you are though, but a Iburst tower can cover about 10km if you use a antenna, shouldnt be a problem in Stellenbos.

 

[WISPMAN]

The Iburst tower in Stellenbosch should be pretty good, it just went up this week.

Will probably be very fast atm, untill alot of people subscribe to it. Depende where you are though, but a Iburst tower can cover about 10km if you use a antenna, shouldnt be a problem in Stellenbos.

I-Burst is not a bad solution at all. I lost a client in Somerset West about 8 months ago to I-Burst, and he is still pretty happy, all he complains about is speed and price. He still his antenna on his roof so he can switch back to our wireless service. I had my own wireless ISP for about 2 years before I merged it with Snowball end of last year.

Myself and Snowball "gooid" all our knowledge and experience about wireless together, and came up with a very good success. Snowball was allways a very stable company re wireless. I tried my best keeping up, but in my case I didn't have the propper funds to keep upgrading to the best equipment. This is why I decided to go for a merge, and my old clients are extremely happy and saticefied.

I have been with several ISP's the passed 14 odd years of being on the internet, and I experienced lots of problems with some of them. I can asure you that backup solutions isn't easy at all. From what I know (not to boost Snowball's ego or anything), Snowball had excelent uptime regarding the ISP side of things for the passed 8 years. I speak to clients on a daily basis, and some of them are surprised to have problems with mail and websites.

We definitely have more than one mail server, but it was the most important server which crached. We installed a brand new server about 2 monhts (+-) ago, using the best hardware, with RAID5. We also bought the latest software and did a lot of research before making the server live. We spent a bit over a month transfering clients to it from the server which was replaced by this one. We also have backup servers (like all ISP's should have), but like Eugene also explained, it did not help as the filesystem got corrupt. The writers of Plesk, who assisted us in the problem, confirmed they have never experienced this kind of problem.

I can asure everyone that it is NOT nice to work 24hours straight and almost getting nowhere. I NEVER want to go through such a stressful time EVER AGAIN! Imagine 1000 odd clients calling you at the same time regarding e-mail problems! Not only is it a very serious problem for clients being offline, but also for us, as we can't even have something to eat until the server is fixed.

Regarding wireless, we have most of the wine farms between Stellenbosch and Somerset West. We provide them with an in-house solution for all their IT, internet, Hosting and Mail (urm urm) needs. It is hard to saticefy a company who's business is dependant on mail, and I have to say Snowball does a real good job keeping them happy.

Moral of the story, computers are made by humans, not in Heaven. THEY DO BREAK!

I sincerely apologise to everyone who was affected by our problem. I garuantee everyone that we are doing our VERY best that such an invent will NEVER happen again. Keeping clients happy and in business, is our business!

Regards, WISPMAN

 

[mountain_lion]

Thanks to Eugene & WISPMAN for replying from Snowball.

Of course Snowball is not all bad; I am still using Snowball as my ISP!

Regarding wireless connectivity, their service has been good, even though there was down time when the high site on Papegaaiberg was removed.

Of course things do go wrong - that is life.
It is how you react and deal with the problem that matters, and I am sure the Snowball technical staff did their very best to resolve this crisis, but from the client's side it was not a good experience.

The 2 posts in this thread is also the only communication from Snowball since the event! Not even a note on the Snowball support site, or email advising that all should be fine again...

Fortunately I do not rely on my web & email for business, but I still expect a reliable service. When things do go wrong it should be able to fall back to a backup server within a few hours, even if this server has reduced functionality.
As a minimum DNS should be restored and mail should be received and buffered, even if mailboxes are not immediately accessible.

A file system crash should not affect more than one server for several days.
What ever the problem was, it caused the mail server, web server and DNS for my domain to go down all at once and it took days to resolve.
This lead me to believe that all these functions are performed by the same server.
Mail delivered before the crash was lost and subsequent mail bounced.

Anyway, this forum is not the place to discuss the details.
All seems to be fine again now.
I trust that Snowball is having a good hard look at their system and that something like this will not happen again.

 

[eugenevdm]

Hey mountain_lion I would like to update you on the situation. After this unfortunate 'issue' we changed the network architecture to split off the e-mail server. Since then we haven't had any major hassles and everything is working a treat. We're also in the process of splitting off our DNS. I'll keep you posted.

 

[mountain_lion]

Hey mountain_lion I would like to update you on the situation. After this unfortunate 'issue' we changed the network architecture to split off the e-mail server. Since then we haven't had any major hassles and everything is working a treat. We're also in the process of splitting off our DNS. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks Eugene - one year later and things are running better.

 

[PeteMooreSA]

Snowball ISP - Major Issues

I have been using the ISP Snowball (Snowball Effects) for the past 6 months ...
and found them to be USELESS !!! ...
The company has a HUGE communication problem ...
and they definitely do NOT understand that without satisfied customers they will not be successful ...
Downtime is BIG ...
and speeds do NOT come anywhere near to what they advertise ...

So my advice is STAY AWAY from Snowball ...
and find yourself another service provider ...

 

[eugenevdm]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the feedback expressing the dissatisfaction with our service. Please could you e-mail me the ticket numbers of the issues that you raised so that I can follow up why you received such poor communication. My e-mail address is eugene@snowball.co.za.

kind regards,
Eugene van der Merwe
CEO - Snowball

 

[mountain_lion]

Unfortunately things have gone downhill with Snowball. Support and communication with clients is not what it used to be years ago.
Snowball seem to be a victim of their own success. My guess is that their customer base and infrastructure has outgrown the capacity of their support staff.
They do try to do their best when they eventually respond to support tickets, but it often takes a phone call to get a ticket moved to the top of the pile.

I moved my domain to another hosting provider and am very happy with the service provided by Elitehost (thanks Jason!) over the last few months.

Snowball wireless enabled me to avoid being a (direct) Telkom client for many years. Thanks Eugene and co.

However my wife is now running her business from home, and unfortunately the Snowball wireless service is just not reliable enough for her needs any more.
Telkom has finally managed to make ADSL service available to us, so we are moving to WebAfrica for connectivity. Fingers crossed that it will be an improvement...

 

[eugenevdm]

Hi "mountain_lion",

Thank you for your feedback. Let me assure you that we have more than enough capacity and that our support staff is perfectly capable of handling support requests. I will gladly look into the tickets that you submitted and try to assist you further on the matter. Please send the ticket you are having problems with to "eugene@snowball.co.za".