And arvixe has gone the way of hostgator...

Do not use hostgator. You can get some nice vps for that price.

My last day at Arvixe was September 30th. Layoffs were announced on the 26th. There was no transition at all.

Starting on Monday people began to realize that no one was actively replacing laid off staff because there was no one to replace them with.

The ticket count kept on climbing. Some staff went to work double-time trying to at least do something for the huge number of problems our customers were facing and others were demoralized and did next to nothing their last days.

On my last day there was no server monitoring staff left. If a server went down then a shift manager had to fix it, but most of the shift managers were in training with EIG except for those who were also getting laid off. Servers failed and little could be done.

The only people who checked the forums for customer problems were laid off as well. The main Priority Support person was laid off. He was also the most experienced support tech at Arvixe. Most of the QA department kept their jobs but they were more of an internal disciplinary wing with only one person as an exceptional tech and one person as a really bad tech.

Arvixe Managers kept their jobs. Not Shift Managers, Shift Managers there were like lead support techs. Now ASO has more customers to support, less support techs but twice the managers.

If you have a ticket open at Arvixe it will not get a response for 4 days to 1 week. The best bet is to get on twitter or facebook and contact Arvixe Support that way with your ticket number. Then the social media monitor will contact a shift manager, the shift manager will then get a support tech to stop what they are doing and work on a ticket. I was stopped in the middle of tickets constantly to work on a social media ticket.

The core cause of this is a question we speculated about. Arvixe had shared hosting on two server images of 96GB RAM each. The original plan was to divide the customers on each server by 4 and place each quarter on one 32GB RAM image. That was akin to moving 1 lot of customers to a 128GB of RAM but would mean less tickets per failure should a failure happen.

But a step was missed. Instead they migrated all 96GB customers to 32GB. Then to make up for that foul-up, They provisioned more servers but the future to-be-laid-off support staff had no access to the new servers. Then, the new servers had no, or little functioning backups. One went down and was down for 1 week or more.

Then our backup software had a bug in it. This was not Arvixe's fault. But this would have been something manageable had the migration not shoe-horned 96 into 32 and support staff could not restore a working mysql database. Only one person could do this and he was not around 24/7. That added to the ticket count.

Then EIG and ASO would do poorly constructed commands. One took out part of a reseller server, Then support had to spend time recovering that. Before EIG if someone would do a command like that, they would be fired. After EIG we were told "who did it or what was done is not important". That was how we deduced a very high up person at ASO/EIG had done that command.

An ASO / EIG person also "hacked" our customer database and changed all customer names to one name of someone in Pakistan. Again, all we knew was that it was internal and it was "not important" and "not a hack", even though ASO people were the first to proclaim it a hack.

Arvixe's problems are now it is management heavy and light on support.
They moved servers from more resources to less resources.
ASO/EIG staff who do clumsy commands that destroy things.

Thats what happened.