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InterServer CEO answered my $2.50/month ticket at 3am

General Discussion by tomchan 22 replies 3.8K views
tomchan

Member OP

#1

So I have this fun little project, right? NAT VPS from InterServer, $2.50/month, running wireguard and pihole. It actually works. Mostly.

I open a ticket because my port forwarding broke after they "migrated" my container. Expected tier-1 copypaste. Instead:

[code]From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: #48291 port forward 51820/udp

Hey, this is Derek, founder. Saw your ticket come in. The migration script missed your iptables rule because your container ID has a leading zero and I wrote the regex wrong. Fixed now. Also your node is on a host with a failing NVMe, I'm moving you tonight to new hardware in Secaucus. Will be 2min downtime.

Derek

I mean... what? A CEO at 3am for a $2.50/month customer? Explaining his own regex bug? This feels unsustainable. But also I kind of want to host everything with InterServer now.

Is this good business or a warning sign?

works on my bench ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
JE

Member

#2

Fighting!!

This is either BEST or WORST sign
No middle ground
CEO answering tickets means either:
COMPANY IS SMALL AND CARES
Or
COMPANY IS DYING AND DESPERATE

Which one is it??

cpanelliw780

Member

shared hosting survivor

4 #3

Lol thats wild ive been in hosting for years and never seen a ceo touch a ticket usually its some outsourced team reading scripts But heres the thing if hes doing regex at 3am either hes insanely dedicated or he has no one else and that second one is scary because what happens when derek burns out your $2.50 vps becomes $2.50 of nobody answering Ive seen it before the "founder magic" phase

Vanessa10

Member

802.1Q evangelist

#4

Unsustainable. Obviously. The math doesn't work. One human. Even a fast one. Can't scale to thousands of nodes. Not without automation. And if he's doing regex at 3am. The automation is broken. Or missing. Or both. The unfiltered honesty is refreshing. But refreshing like cold water. Not like sustainable business model;

pablowild

Member

#5

¡this is very strange! ¿a CEO doing overnight shift? Jajaja

I think there is something they dont tell you. Maybe normal support quit that day. Maybe they have no money for more staff. The unfiltered honesty is because there is no filter anymore, no PR team, no manager to check the reply.

I wrote a long paragraph about this but deleted it. Short version: enjoy it while it lasts but backup your data.

Berlin1

Member

#6

Someoneelses Burnout is not a BusinessModel[1]

The unfiltered honesty is actually the most worrying part. A CEO with nothingtohide still has somethingtolose: the Company itself. If Derek is covering Overnight shifts because the entire supportteam quit that day[2], then your "refreshing" experience is just someoneelses desperation wearing a friendlymask.

I predict: in 90 days either InterServer hires support and Derek disappears behind a zendesk, or Derek stops sleeping and the Hardware failures multiply. There is no third path.

Footnotes:
[1] see also: every "founder-led support" postmortem in hosting history
[2] this happened to my former employer, not naming names, but it rhymes with "Hetzner"

Nadia

Member

/dev/null enthusiast

#7

I did the SAME thing at a "budget place", lost everything too

/dev/null: full of good ideas
cpanelliw780

Member

shared hosting survivor

#8
Nadia said:
I did the SAME thing at a "budget place", lost everything too

Wait which provider was this? Same one or different

Also when you say "lost everything" do you mean data loss or they just ghosted and you couldn't renew

The ghosting scenario is what keeps me up at night with these founder-dependent shops

Vanessa10

Member

802.1Q evangelist

#9

9 days late but this thread is too good to let die

cpanelliw780 said:
The "founder magic" phase

That's the exact term I was looking for. Seen it twice now, both times the magic ran out around month 18 and the handoffs were brutal

The regex detail is what gets me though. A CEO who still knows his own stack down to pattern matching bugs? At 3am? That's either a beautiful anomaly or a very specific kind of warning sign

Did you ever end up migrating off InterServer or are you still riding the founder wave

HO

Member

#10

16 days and nobody solved it

Did Derek ever burn out or is he still doing 3am regex

cpanelliw780 said:
The "founder magic" phase

This is what I want to know too
Founder magic is great until it isn't

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