Terrible support on Afrihost hosting

[neilgov]

Hi all,

Do any of you who are using Afrihost shared hosting experience terrible support from their 1st line support and hosting team?

Ive been hosting with them for about 2 years and have been having endless issues with intermittent downtime.

Every time I log a ticket, I need to spend an entire day explaining to the support engineers, who are quite rude at times, how Cloudflare proxies and CDNS work and "no its not a DNS" issue with my site. They would argue for hours that it's not their issue, but Cloudflare, because my DNS is with Cloudflare. I ask for the call to be escalated to a more senior engineer in the hosting team, and they refuse :-( ... Finally after loggin another 4 tickets and painfully explaining that its intermittant and they need to monitor it and just one test that it loads is not enough and engineer comes back to me and Ooops it was our fault, we were blocking the IPs on our Imunify or there where server load issues or othe issues with Nginx.

Right now im sitting with the same issue "Gateway time-out Error code 504" from Cloudflare to Afrihost server, and the engineer replies with a server uptime screenshot *Facepalm* saying all is fine. I reply, and with my testing and logs from my webservice monitoring box , I get another engineer who I need to explain the entire story from the beginning, they don't bother to read the entire ticket *Sigh*

I'm not sure what to really do because it seems I'm going around in circles with these guys.
Is it just me of or is this the norm with support at Afrihost these days?

Frustrated customer.

@AfriNatic @Afrigirl @AfriGuy

 

[Afrigirl]

Hi all,

Do any of you who are using Afrihost shared hosting experience terrible support from their 1st line support and hosting team?

Ive been hosting with them for about 2 years and have been having endless issues with intermittent downtime.

Every time I log a ticket, I need to spend an entire day explaining to the support engineers, who are quite rude at times, how Cloudflare proxies and CDNS work and "no its not a DNS" issue with my site. They would argue for hours that it's not their issue, but Cloudflare, because my DNS is with Cloudflare. I ask for the call to be escalated to a more senior engineer in the hosting team, and they refuse :-( ... Finally after loggin another 4 tickets and painfully explaining that its intermittant and they need to monitor it and just one test that it loads is not enough and engineer comes back to me and Ooops it was our fault, we were blocking the IPs on our Imunify or there where server load issues or othe issues with Nginx.

Right now im sitting with the same issue "Gateway time-out Error code 504" from Cloudflare to Afrihost server, and the engineer replies with a server uptime screenshot *Facepalm* saying all is fine. I reply, and with my testing and logs from my webservice monitoring box , I get another engineer who I need to explain the entire story from the beginning, they don't bother to read the entire ticket *Sigh*

I'm not sure what to really do because it seems I'm going around in circles with these guys.
Is it just me of or is this the norm with support at Afrihost these days?

Frustrated customer.

@AfriNatic @Afrigirl @AfriGuy

Hi.

I'm genuinely sorry for the frustration you've experienced and for the impression that your concerns were not being properly understood or addressed.

Regarding the hosting issues, we have had a number of ongoing hosting-related incidents over the past few months, including infrastructure migrations and a recently disclosed cPanel vulnerability that required mitigation and patching. While this doesn't lessen the impact on your service, it may explain some of the instability and intermittent behavior you've encountered during this period.

We also acknowledge that intermittent issues can be particularly challenging to investigate, and simply confirming that a server is online at a specific point in time does not necessarily address reports of the 504 errors or performance degradation.

If you're willing, please share your ticket reference numbers.

Once again, my apologies for the inconvenience and frustration caused.

 

[neilgov]

Hi.

I'm genuinely sorry for the frustration you've experienced and for the impression that your concerns were not being properly understood or addressed.

Regarding the hosting issues, we have had a number of ongoing hosting-related incidents over the past few months, including infrastructure migrations and a recently disclosed cPanel vulnerability that required mitigation and patching. While this doesn't lessen the impact on your service, it may explain some of the instability and intermittent behavior you've encountered during this period.

We also acknowledge that intermittent issues can be particularly challenging to investigate, and simply confirming that a server is online at a specific point in time does not necessarily address reports of the 504 errors or performance degradation.

If you're willing, please share your ticket reference numbers.

Once again, my apologies for the inconvenience and frustration caused.

Thanks for the reply, the ticket number is JWX-372-42589 its over 12 hours now and still no one has got back to me, asked for a call back and spoke to someone at 10pm last who promised to get back to me, nada.. I even emailed the supervisor, Ronny, and there was no reply. Guys, this is just not acceptable.

 

[Afrigirl]

Thanks for the reply, the ticket number is JWX-372-42589 its over 12 hours now and still no one has got back to me, asked for a call back and spoke to someone at 10pm last who promised to get back to me, nada.. I even emailed the supervisor, Ronny, and there was no reply. Guys, this is just not acceptable.

Thank you.
The callback is set with the Hosting team directly; they only start at 08:00 AM.

 

[neilgov]

So I got a call back and the agent defaulted right back to "but yourDNS is with Cloudflare........" I've been hearing since Sunday and was unable to give me any further help but to apologise and tell me it's been worked on by the hosting team.

It's now 14 hours since the ticket was logged, with zero feedback from the hosting team or any of the admins.

Can you please send your support staff on some kind of training to explain to them how cloudflare/cdns work.

 

[OCP]

Seriously - just vote with your wallet and migrate your hosting to a proper ISP like absolute hosting or domains.co.za

You will see your support tickets drop to almost nothing.

 

[mightymax41]

Hi all,

Do any of you who are using Afrihost shared hosting experience terrible support from their 1st line support and hosting team?

Ive been hosting with them for about 2 years and have been having endless issues with intermittent downtime.

Every time I log a ticket, I need to spend an entire day explaining to the support engineers, who are quite rude at times, how Cloudflare proxies and CDNS work and "no its not a DNS" issue with my site. They would argue for hours that it's not their issue, but Cloudflare, because my DNS is with Cloudflare. I ask for the call to be escalated to a more senior engineer in the hosting team, and they refuse :-( ... Finally after loggin another 4 tickets and painfully explaining that its intermittant and they need to monitor it and just one test that it loads is not enough and engineer comes back to me and Ooops it was our fault, we were blocking the IPs on our Imunify or there where server load issues or othe issues with Nginx.

Right now im sitting with the same issue "Gateway time-out Error code 504" from Cloudflare to Afrihost server, and the engineer replies with a server uptime screenshot *Facepalm* saying all is fine. I reply, and with my testing and logs from my webservice monitoring box , I get another engineer who I need to explain the entire story from the beginning, they don't bother to read the entire ticket *Sigh*

I'm not sure what to really do because it seems I'm going around in circles with these guys.
Is it just me of or is this the norm with support at Afrihost these days?

Frustrated customer.

@AfriNatic @Afrigirl @AfriGuy

Also been having issues with shared hosting recently. Performance is negatively impacting my clients. Will be looking for alternatives shortly.

 

[Anthro]

@Jade @ Absolute Hosting / @Domains.co.za (Wayne)
Customer for you to win over.

 

[Jade @ Absolute Hosting]

Thanks for the mention @Anthro!

@neilgov if you do decide to stay with Afrihost then my suggestion is to take a screenshot of your cloudflare dns config showing that your A and www record proxy to their shared server IP as to avoid less back and forth.

You can also temporarily disable proxy on Cloudflare for those two A records and document the result to send to their support team.

If this doesn’t help and you feel that you are forced to move then please DM me with your contact info and I’ll have someone from our side give you a call.

 

[Jefferson D'Arcy]

So I got a call back and the agent defaulted right back to "but yourDNS is with Cloudflare........" I've been hearing since Sunday and was unable to give me any further help but to apologise and tell me it's been worked on by the hosting team.

It's now 14 hours since the ticket was logged, with zero feedback from the hosting team or any of the admins.

Can you please send your support staff on some kind of training to explain to them how cloudflare/cdns work.

Not sure where you're based but the only way I was able to get my long-standing issue resolved was by turning up in person and asking to speak to some top brass. The support lot do not have any real domain knowledge beyond their scripts.

 

[neilgov]

Thanks for the mention @Anthro!

@neilgov if you do decide to stay with Afrihost then my suggestion is to take a screenshot of your cloudflare dns config showing that your A and www record proxy to their shared server IP as to avoid less back and forth.

You can also temporarily disable proxy on Cloudflare for those two A records and document the result to send to their support team.

If this doesn’t help and you feel that you are forced to move then please DM me with your contact info and I’ll have someone from our side give you a call.

Still no resolution with Afrihost; the website is still going MIA every few hours. Support asked me to make some changes, which I did, and it's still down every few hours.

I think it's time to move. Being in the industry myself and having some sympathy because things do go wrong in IT, I personally think they just don't care, and their service management has seriously let them down. I don't think Afrihost realises the amount of financial and reputational damage suffered by their customer because of their poor support and incompetence

 

[Anthro]

Still no resolution with Afrihost; the website is still going MIA every few hours. Support asked me to make some changes, which I did, and it's still down every few hours.

I think it's time to move. Being in the industry myself and having some sympathy because things do go wrong in IT, I personally think they just don't care, and their service management has seriously let them down. I don't think Afrihost realises the amount of financial and reputational damage suffered by their customer because of their poor support and incompetence

Neil from Hyprop ?