Seeksadmin Blog

This is just an update to notify all clients that we are currently having temporary network issues connecting to certain servers. We are working with Softlayer to solve this issue. It has been reported to us that this is an issue with Iternap and effects some in and outbound routes to their Washington Datacenter where our servers are located.

During this time there may be some issues in responding to downed servers and services. We do apologise for this. If you have any issues please create a ticket.

We appreciate your patience and will update you once this has been solved.

[UPDATE 2nd September 21:44 GMT (15.44 CST)]

This has now been solved. Internap have shut down their peering loop with Cox communications and this has solved the issue. If we have any more updates we will update you

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (August 21, 2008) – SeeksAdmin (http://www.seeksadmin.com), the industry leader in outsourced technical support, server administration, and fully managed services, announced today the launch of its United States based technical support team, offering round-the-clock outsourced end-user technical support and server administration.

Based in New York City, the United States technical support team operates 24/7/365 and is comprised of highly qualified technicians, boasting a range of certifications including RHCE, MCSE, A+ Linux, and a variety of hardware and network certifications. The team specializes in server security, server optimization, database restores and troubleshooting, code troubleshooting, compiling and configuring software, fixing control panel issues, and solving end user problems.

“By adding a team in the United States, we are able to provide a high-end option for transparent outsourced technical support. For many Web hosts and Internet Server Providers, customer support is ultimately their key selling point, and it is imperative their support representatives are not only knowledgeable and trained, but as importantly, courteous and respectful to the concerns of customers,” said Steven Clarke, CEO of SeeksAdmin. “We go the extra mile, and our customers know it.”

SeeksAdmin is unique in its personal approach to customer support. It provides end-users with direct chat and telephone accessibility to the technicians working on their ticket. Through its rigid Service Level Agreement (SLA), SeeksAdmin guarantees top-notch and timely technical support for virtually all problems, large and small. Most problems are resolved within a maximum of 30 minutes – a rare feat in the outsourced support market. SeeksAdmin also maintains support teams overseas, in the United Kingdom, India, and Pakistan.

In addition to transparent technical support, SeeksAdmin provides Linux administration and a variety of other managed services.

To learn more about United States based outsourced support from SeeksAdmin, please visit http://seeksadmin.com/outsourced_support_usonly.html.

To learn more about Linux administration, please visit http://seeksadmin.com/administration_server_usonly.html

About SeeksAdmin
A leader in outsourced technical support and server administration, SeeksAdmin serves hundreds of businesses internationally across a broad range of industries. With support offices in the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, and now New York City, SeeksAdmin offers a competitive edge for its clients.

For those of you that visited Hostingcon 2008 I’m quite sure you are already aware of the motorcycle giveaway. For everyone else, we here at SeeksAdmin liked the idea of giving away the opportunity to win a great big ticket item at Hostingcon and we jumped on the opportunity to help sponsor Ping!Zine, which I’m glad we did. Unfortunately, we waited a bit too long to make a decision on exhibiting at Hostingcon 2008 and by the time we decided to move forward with it it was too late in the game to have done everything properly. While it was not our home base, Ping!Zine certainly made us feel welcome in their space.

I’ve bumped into a few blog and forum posts on the net that complained about the outcome of the giveaway. To those of you that were not satisfied and/or pleased with the results I do apologize that it did not meet you expectations. We’ll make up for that next year! I fully support the giveaway and disagree with all claims that it was a scam. The contents rules and regulations where posted right on the table next to the entry box. I know we here at SeeksAdmin were were excited for someone to walk away with the Harley and was slightly disheartening when no one won. We had a blast though, and would certainly back Ping!Zine in the future.

Be sure to look for us at Hostingcon 2009! We made sure to register with iNet as soon as we could at the convention. We’ll be there and we’re planning on giving away something BIG next year with a GUARANTEED WINNER! I figure if we can avoid the fine print altogether everyone will be a lot happier with the outcome.

Thank you again Keith, Mindy & the whole Ping!Zine Team.

Can’t wait to meet everyone at Hostingcon 2009!

Well HostingCon came and went, and as it is my resolution to keep this blog updated I know that I should write a little about it. I personally did not manage to go to HostingCon due to some meetings and management issues that were arranged during the time, not to mention that it was my girlfriend’s birthday so on a personal level I am not sure I would have been able to get away with it. None-the-less we had some of our US staff members on show, and walking around. That is my Partner Steven, and our sales staff members, Zach and Soliel.

As some of you know, we sponsered the Harley contest, which was my last blog post. So I think I will start off with some photos of that beast. It definetly got some attention which was great.

As can be seen here, is the Harley, and of course we had to get in the Seeksadmin banner behind it. Doesn’t it look sexy? and the bike too. This exhibit definetly got some attention which was great.

This being our first HostingCon we have taken away a lot of plans for what to do next year. I would like to say that it was great to meet some of our customers, and have a nice talk. Its always nice to put some faces to names, and it was a great experience. For those of you who didn’t go to HostingCon I am sorry that we were not able to meet and below is an image of two of our staff members with two of Softlayers (Sorry Amanda and Arielle).

From Left to right: Steven, Arielle, Soliel, Amanda

For those of you who have not seen enough you can access our full photo album here.

Seeksadmin HostingCon 08 Images

Once again thanks to everyone we met, and everyone at hostingCon to help make the event so fun! See you next year!

Harley-Davidson motorcycles (popularly known as “Harleys”) have a distinctive design and exhaust note. They are especially noted for the tradition of heavy customization that gave rise to the chopper-style of motorcycle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harley-Davidson

Yes Harleys are one of the best motorcycles in the world. No matter what type of bike you like from sporting to touring, you will have heard of Harley Davidsons and now the best part of this is that you can win one!!!! Yes thats right, I am not just going on a random ramble, Seeksadmin is sponsering PingZine to give you the opportunity to win of these things.

If you want more details just email sales or come and visit us at the PingZine booth. We also have a lot of other goodies to give away from T-Shirts to pens. We also have special offers, however if you are a current customer or a prospective customer we would love to meet you!!!!

Well in the past few months I have really wanted to put an emphasise on selling some Fully Managed servers. There are a few reasons for this, firstly I have dealt with a lot of different data centers, and with a lot of clients and a lot of the time there is a lot of what I will call “lag” when it comes to us telling the client of a problem and when they tell the datacenter to fix it.

So why buy of Seeksadmin instead?

Well there are a few reasons for this, but effectivly by doing so you cut out the middle man and on a lot of that “lag” that may occour. If you have a problem and we need to contact the data center, we do it and we do not need to wait. This can stop major downtime as we can react instantly. This in itself is a major benifit as it can avert major disaster, but there is more.

We get our servers from the Softlayer datacenter located in Dallas, Texas. They are argubaly the best datacenter in the world at the moment. I have to admit at being one of Softlayers largest fans, this is because they are dedicated to their clients and are always updating their services and technology. For more information just read my review which is in this blog, I dont want to clog this post up with to much about them. Anyway, I did have a point, and that is that all our staff members have worked with and know the Softlayer system and staff. This means if your server doesnt boot or you forget your password, we can immeditialy get the server up in single-user mode and sort the problem instantly.

The last advantage is probably the smallest one, and that is that it makes your bill management easier and saves you the trouble of having to contact the datacenter. This may seem silly but in the busy world we live in those extra minutes (or hours) can be everything.

Management Portal
Before there was always one huge advantage of going with the datacenter instead of going with a reseller, and that was simple. The management portal where you can reboot, and manage your server. However we at Seeksadmin have spent a few months developing our own portal to provide you the ability to see your server stats, the hardware, the bandwidth usage and graphs, to allow you to reboot the server, to control the port speed and more. This has definetly been a major project and I am very proud of it having done a lot of the work myself.

Our portal gives you every feature you need and is on par with Softlayer’s own portal. We now provide every advantage and more of going with the datacenter. Our prices are equal to the datacenter and you also can get your management from us.

This is more of an unusual blog post from me, a bit of sales pitch here and I feel a bit like I have gone around in circles, and I am sorry for that, but I thought it was important to mention our new servers and also the portal. I will make anouther post in the coming days with screenshots of the portal and a full feature list, but for now I will keep you waiting just that bit longer

We have been quite busy behind the scenes making many improvements to our infrastructure and methods to ensure our current and future clients will have the best experience here at SeeksAdmin. Below you may find some of the updates!

New Services - We have added a few new services and modified some of the existing ones.

• • Full & base server administration services are now backed with a money back guarantee. One hour response time guaranteed for full and two hour for base.
  • Outsourced support is now readily available to all prospective clients, with many dedicated staff member available for hire.
  • Our 911 Service now provides clients with immediate access to a SeeksAdmin server administrator to fix emergency situations.
  • SeeksAdmin has also partnered with some great vendors to provide you with affordable solutions to assist your business. More can be seen on our additional services page.

Monitoring System Redone…

Well, not exactly redone, but even better. We have decided to scrap the system we were using for monitoring as it was producing far too many false positives among other things. SeeksAdmin will now be providing all its server administration and monitoring subscribers with HyperSpin monitoring!

All new accounts will be setup by default with a HyperSpin monitoring account. Current clients are being migrated and will be updated once their account has been moved.

Payments Made Easy - We’d like to make it as easy as possible for all of our clients and prospective clients to pay for their invoices. We now accept credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex), paypal, e-gold, moneybookers, and mail-in money order & checks.

Website Redone - Some of our clients were getting lost with our previous design. We’ve redesigned our website to make it more appealing to the viewers eyes and make information easier to find. We find it to be a great step in the right direction considering where we’ve come from:

SoftLayer Portal Access - Our managed dedicated server clients will now have complete access to stats and reboot functions of the SoftLayer server portal via our custom panel that taps into their powerful api system.

Client & Support System Migration - To take advantage of some more powerful features offered by the Kayako helpdesk system we are migrating our support to a new helpdesk system. Clients will still be able to easily email support tickets to us and check the status of their tickets online. Should you need any assistance working around the new systems contact support.

SeeksAdmin is making improvements everyday. If you have any suggestions, feel free to drop us a line. Be sure to look out for our affiliate program, coming soon.

As one of our new features is outsourced support I thought I should say a bit about it. First off back in the day when I worked for a big hosting company at a datacenter, it was all on-site staff and they had a great thing for it and everyone was happy, but then the management changed and of course so did the staff. But instead of staying “on-site” they were one of the first hosting companies to start outsourcing.

Obviously at first this made me pretty angry, and I didn’t like the outsourcing market because they stole my job. But almost 8 years on now, I have had a lot of experience in many manners with outsourced staff. The experience I remember most was in 2002-04 where I was the team leader of a team which was outsourced so located in Pakistan. I obviously was not to thrilled, but I needed a job so could not turn it down. I was scared that their language would be terrible, that they would be lazy and not very skilled due to the low pay. I basically thought all of the bad things you could about outsourcing staff, but that all changed.

I will admit the first few weeks were a bit rough, fitting in and getting the staff to listen to me, but once we got over the first few hurdles I was pretty suprised. Firstly they were skilled and worked insanely hard - I would hire them over most other admins I have worked with, if I didnt prefer on-site staff. They were effecient, quick, and learnt very quickly. Okay so thats good you may say, but whats the point if their English is no good? Well… it was. It was pretty good. It was not as good and as fluent as someone who’s first language is English, and sometimes they sounded a bit over proffesional and not personal, but overall it was great. What was even better was that if I corrected them they never made the mistake again. It was like a dream team…. And there went my fear of outsourced hosting and I believe in it so much that I have even started offering it on our website.

Some companies do need on-site techs and it is a much better situation, but in my honest opinion, for the smaller companies it is a much better situation, its more cost effecient and allows companies to focus on other things, like sales or new services. I guess this post was for once a bit of an “advertisement” so I think I will cap it off with if you have any problems or questions, just ask us. We can even set up interviews now for outsourced staff, so it would just be like hiring your own staff member.

Well its been a long time since I last graced myself with having to write a blog post, and I guess that is due to many reasons. One of them being the fact that I was away for 2 months in Australia for a little bit of business, and the other is that I have been busy adding new features to the site to make us one step above everyone else. Before I start talking about the new features that have either been introduced or will be introduced soon, I would like to set out the idea that this blog will recieve at least 3 blog’s a week. However, only time will tell if I can actually keep up with that.

One of the big changes that has happened recently was the new website and the price structure changes. I think I will just tell people why we changed the prices a little. The reason for the change was because managing a cPanel system is so much easier than managing a system with no control panel or plesk, but we were charging the same price. This basically meant that it was hard for us lower response times and keep the quality high. We did not change the prices for clients on the old price plan because we have a policy that your price will never go up, only down!

Along with the new webdesign we have added a few new features and plans that will soon be hitting it big time (we hope). The first one of these I will talk about is reselling Softlayer servers. I have been a fan off Softlayer ever since I got my first server with them which was quite a while back now near when they started. So recently we started to resell their services with our administration slapped on top. We do not mark up the price of the server, and you get a discount on our administration plans. So everyone wins

One thing that I am excited about is the outsourcing, we have just started to offer outsourcing but with a bonus above everyone else. Every admin that is part of our outsourcing team has spent at least 4 months on the seeksadmin helpdesk, so you can be pretty sure they can deal with the hardest of problems. We believe we are competitavly priced, what that means is that we are not the most expensive out there but not the cheapest.

I have a lot more news, but for now I will leave it at this and give me something to post about in future blogs

Yesterday I was very excited and released a project we have been working on for some time. This is a tool for our fully managed clients which should help them manage there server, and also see what we are doing to it. It also helps us a lot allowing us to have a centeral database to check your servers from.

Features

• Server stats with graphs - This helps us assertain the performance of your machines to see if there are any problems with the machine, however it also helps you check if/when you have any load spikes or other such problems, and when your server is being used the most
• Remote Reboot - With this new tool we have managed to give clients without a remote reboot option provided by their host to use ours instead. This is useful as it will work if you cant login to SSH, and can still ping the server.
• Remote MRTG installation - If our graphs are not enough for you, then you can install MRTG with our configuration at a touch of a button. This will automatically install MRTG on your server. We do advise that if you do this you get one of our qualified admins to check this out to make sure everything is ok
• Server Specs/Stats - You will also be able to see the specification of your server, and your kernel version incase you were confused or needed to know what they were. You can also see the freedisk space and the load at last check.
• Server Logs - In this section of the tool you will be able to see the daily logs of all the security scans that have taken place. This allows you to check that your server is secure and that we are doing our job.

We are looking to add many new features to this as it expands, If you have an ideas or see any bugs please do open a ticket by emailing support.