blog.gabrielsimmer.com/content/posts/lets-clear-up-some-things-about-ggservers.md

---
title: Let's clear up some things about GGServer
date: 2017-03-15
---

#### We get a lot of hate directed to us because we aren't as transparent. Let's fix that.

I've been a developer at GGServers for about a year
now. In that time I've gotten a good sense of how things work behind the
scenes at the budget Minecraft server host. I've (this is going to sound
canned but it's genuine) dedicated myself to improving the state of the
technology running everything. I've had to put up with hate and abuse
from unhappy customers, some justified others not so much. One thing
that some people have pointed out is how opaque commununications from us
can be -- hell, in the four years we've had our Twitter we've tweeted
less than 1,000 times (250 tweets/year on average).

Let's make something clear -- We are still a very small company. Like,
*really* small. We have five dedicated support staff, answering tickets
of various technical depth. These people unfortunately are not
"full-time". They don't come in to an office 9am-5pm, answer your
tickets and go home. They're spread out. When we say 24/7 support, we
don't mean your ticket will be taken care of immediately, we mean that
our support system doesn't go down. We -- I -- Get it, you want your
question answered right away, and properly. We've gotten a lot better at
replying to things quickly, and typically manage to get the entire
ticket queue handled every week or so.

Let's talk about server downtime. It sucks. You can't access your
servers, can't pull your files to move to another host. Currently, we
have on person in our limited staff who has access to our hosting
provider, and he is busy very often. Our previous systems administrator
just sort of went AWOL, leaving us a bit stuck in terms of responding to
server downtime. I was just recently granted the title of sysadmin, and
am still waiting on our provider to grant me access to our hardware. And
to be clear this does not mean I get a keycard to datacenters where I
can walk to a rack of servers, pull ours out and tinker. It means I have
as-close-to-hardware-as-possible remote access, where I can troubleshoot
servers as if I was using a monitor plugged into it, but I never
physically touch the bare metal. *But* it does mean I can get servers up
and running properly. Once our provider allows me access. Hopefully that
clears that up a bit.

We try to limit our interactions outside of tickets for two reasons.
One, we can log everything that is filed in our system. Two, and most
importantly, we're not quite sure what we can and cannot say. There's a
fine line between being transparent and divulging company secrets. I
feel comfortable saying what I am because I don't feel anyone could gain
a competitive advantage knowing these facts. I would love to get access
to the Twitter account and start using it to our advantage but it's
going to take a while.

Anyways, if you guys have any more questions or comments, keep it civil
and I will do my best to answer.