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anthony_henson2003@yahoo.com

Major HFBServers Changes Inbound!

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We here at HFBServers have heard the complaints, we are not oblivious to this. HFB will be making many changes in the coming weeks. Some of which will be detailed below:

First and most important I would like to apologize for some of the issues our customers have been having with our hosting. We have allowed things to happen that should not have, the most important thing is customer support. I will be the first to admit that our customer support is not on par with that of our competition. That will however be changing here very soon, we will be bringing on more support and operations staff to cope with the load of hundreds of tickets per day. There will also be a decent amount of other back end changes that will take place, some things that you will see and some things that you will not. If there are any important changes that are made, all customers will be notified via email.

The next set of changes will deal with the hardware that we use for the dayz servers many of you have made statements about the quality of our hardware and just exactly what we use. Well let me tell you what we currently use. 99.9% of our dayz servers are hosted on Dual Cpu Xeon machines with 16Gb's of ECC ram, 1TB Enterprise grade hard drives, 100MB-1Gbps network connections (depends on the Data Center) And 10-25Tb of bandwidth for each server. These machines are very powerful and are capable of running multiple DayZ servers without any issue.

But no matter how powerful they are we can still get better and that is what we will be doing. We are going to be upgrading a vast majority of our servers to the latest and greatest Ivy Bridge series of servers. These are Very powerful machines and should deal with any hint of heavy load the servers might be under.

Now to what is currently going on. We have closed all orders for servers currently so that me can make the changes I spoke of above. And some more changes which I will highlight below. Many of you have seen the email that we sent out to all active clients but to those who have missed it I will outline it below.

The next round of changes that we will be making is updating all the servers operating systems to fix some of the issues we have been having with our time change script not working correctly. Along with these updates we will also be rebooting all of the servers. A few of the servers will be moved to different racks. We are trying to have all of our servers in the same racks in each DC, to help with transfers between servers. Some servers will be down for a matter of minutes some maybe down for a few hours.

We also have several machines that have not been updated to run the control panel, that will also be changing. All of those machines will finally receive the much needed control panel.

During this time of reform here at HFB all of the HFB team who is available will be actively working on the changes, These changes will hopefully for the most part be done by Monday evening. So during this time we will be answering only the most important support tickets and we may have the billing system under maintenance for random amounts of time.

We are very sorry for any downtime that you will have but after these changes hfb will be a better company overall.

Now to the people who claimed that we are running 10 servers per box and that we are overloading the servers. That is simply Not the case I will tell you exactly what we are running. We are running 6 servers at MAX per box, with that the machine never hits 100% overall cpu (across both cpu's) there is never less then 8gb's of ram free, and even on a 100mbps port it never uses more then 30% of the network connection.


Basically we will be doing a LOT of maintenance to our current servers. These things will consist of the following. First we will be load balancing servers. What that means is we will move servers from machines that maybe running a bit higher on cpu usage to machines running less. After our upgrade to a TCAdmin Enterprise license there were some issues with servers not being where they "should" be (servers copying themselves, etc). This has caused a few servers to run a little higher on cpu then we would like. The moves are moves of feet (rack to rack) not locations like some of you have started to think.

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Til;dr: please still pay us?

It's good that you want to do better, but I'm sure people will wait until they see some credible testimonials what it's actually true before committing.

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Hungover, I greatly appreciate your thoroughness in this post. My 2cents on this is when you implement further customer support is to have a mid-tier type staff that doesn't deal with the hardware end of things. What I mean by this is that it is obvious the customer support and technical upgrades are falling on the shoulders of the same people. This means that regular customer support or communication goes dark when the technical sides need tweaking. I have had server issues for about 3 weeks now, like our server not being updated to the hive which results in characters not saving, something that could be easily handled by someone with basic knowledge of the system. I want you to have time to improve the big picture stuff and not worry about individual servers.

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Hungover, I greatly appreciate your thoroughness in this post. My 2cents on this is when you implement further customer support is to have a mid-tier type staff that doesn't deal with the hardware end of things. What I mean by this is that it is obvious the customer support and technical upgrades are falling on the shoulders of the same people. This means that regular customer support or communication goes dark when the technical sides need tweaking. I have had server issues for about 3 weeks now, like our server not being updated to the hive which results in characters not saving, something that could be easily handled by someone with basic knowledge of the system. I want you to have time to improve the big picture stuff and not worry about individual servers.

We are planning something along the lines of "sales staff who just handles sales" "tier one support who handles the basic's" "tier two support who can handle just about anything" "then well me and adam who can handle everything" doing it this way relieves the load from just one person or group and things can get handled a lot faster.

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Also to those who stated things like "the new hardware changes are worse" and "these moves have caused my ping to change" in some of the other threads regarding complaints about hfb. Those changes have NOT been made yet, we have moved NO clients nor have we made any upgrades to hardware just yet. If a client is moved your ip for the server will change, it will not remain the same.

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Noting an absence of any rough idea timelines / dates for upcoming changes.

When u plan to start moving people over to new hardware + hope to finish by ?

Hotfixes / os upgrades for tzutil to solve people timezones issues ? (or this gonna be part of the server hardware upgrades?)

Control panel upgrades ?

Give a small break down of times u hope to start by / finish by with a pinch of salt.

Otherwise ever day someone checks to see if its fixed & its not will just annoy them.....

i.e waiting on timezone fix myself nearly 5 days now, with no idea when it will get fixed.

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Your non apology (I will be the first to admit that our customer support is not on par with that of our competition) is unacceptable. You've apologized for the technical issues but you've not apologized for the outright disregard for your customers. You have representatives (workers, volunteers, whatever) on here belittling your customers, calling them children, when in reality, the only group that has acted unprofessionally and immature is HFB. Seriously, can you get any more unprofessional?

You've had a total support information blackout and only finally now you come out with this: "I will be the first to admit that our customer support is not on par with that of our competition". That's a slap in the face to all of your customers and shows a continuing denial to accept responsibility for your non actions.

That's it? That's the best you can do? Man up or put the person that is ultimately in charge on here and let him man up.

I want a proper apology and I want a functioning server with up to date hive files that actually works as intended and PAID FOR.

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I want a proper apology and I want a functioning server with up to date hive files that actually works as intended and PAID FOR.

I have been trying to get them to realize the hive they are running is the one they got before the hotfix was released. I have been trying since the fix was released, but the one time I managed to get them on teamspeak they pretty much said they had gotten the right files. The files they have at the moment are the ones from 1.7.2.3 release. The hive files were updated 2-3 days after. The names and versions are the same on the hotfix, but the files are fixed.

Edited by anonymous83

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I have been saying the same thing, tickets emails and TS, it's obviously not working and is exclusive to HFB.

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Well it's good to at least know why I seem to have problems connecting to HFB based servers and not with others.

What all these guys said - you need to up your level of customer service. Hosting the DayZ servers - and you appear to be hosting a lot of them - and HOW you execute the hosting of the servers is going to be unpaid marketing.

If you can support the 100s of 1000s of people playing DayZ effectively - good for you. Last few days has not been kind to your standing with the DayZ community. You can step up quickly and take care of the problems and help improve your reputation, or the opposite happens. That's my take on things, anyway.

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Nice

Also did Inu inform you on anything?

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Will get ANY control of the server back?

I want to actually be able to blacklist scripts so I stop getting nuked... Being a Cow is cool, breaking my legs and dying isn't.

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Will get ANY control of the server back?

I want to actually be able to blacklist scripts so I stop getting nuked... Being a Cow is cool, breaking my legs and dying isn't.

seriously this is the least of issues. HFB servers are UNPLAYABLE right now. Mine took several minutes to join with 10 people playing and looting items took 3-5 minutes. Just having hackers would be an improvement right now.

Edited by BeowolfSchaefer

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I've got my server down until something can be fixed with all the desync and broken things.

Same here. No reason to ruin the experience for DayZ players.Honestly the DayZ team should revoke HFB's IP whitelists. It is a tragedy that so many servers are unplayable on a weekend when the core game is on steam sale. I for one have had several people from my community purchase the game this weekend in order to play DayZ and have not been able to. It is going to be a hard sell to get them to buy the standalone version now.

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All they have to do is replace the @hive with the new one. We are seriously considering moving our hosting to a different provider at this point. We are playing on random servers while paying for multiple HFB ones...

Edited by anonymous83

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Same here, we have to go to random servers to be able to play at all. I've also thought about shutting ours down, because it's unplayable. We were moving up on server ranks, after this, no one will bookmark the server. I also, placed a ticket, and they will not update the @hive file. I mean, thanks for the update etc, and improvements, but we want, at the least, a working server for now without 2-4 minute desync issues, you simply can't play with that. We are losing our regulars, can't even play on it at all, due to a simple file update.. come on!!!!

I really want to stay with your guys, changes are needed, you admitted that and are addressing it, great. But we need some fixes in place now, so servers will work until the upgrades etc. If it's a file, update it. To move forward as quickly as you did with all the orders, it's understandable to get overwhelmed. This can be behind you, but your customers don't have working servers currently, sort that, and go forward...

Edited by CrazykillaG
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Another HFB customer that has had to shut their server down on a weekend. We definitely need a time frame on these upgrades otherwise we'll be forced to migrate in the next few days.

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Right now we are working on upgrading all the server. There will be some servers that will be moved to reduce the number from 6 servers per box to 5.

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As of right now, my service ends on August 4th. After what has happen this past week, i don't think i will consider paying for another month of sub par service. The damage was done.

for the customers that stick with you... you should credit them with a free week.

Good luck.

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As of right now, my service ends on August 4th. After what has happen this past week, i don't think i will consider paying for another month of sub par service. The damage was done.

for the customers that stick with you... you should credit them with a free week.

Good luck.

Thank for the feedback. We are still working on either giving a free month or half off coupon.

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Is there a time frame on when our servers will be moved? and or updated? I just bought a server less then 1 week ago, so if its going to take another week to fix i just want a refund so i can get a server that works.

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it doesn't seem like the real problems right now are becuase too many servers are on the same box. It seems like something else. People have been saying HFB are running the wrong hive version. Is this true?

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Is there a time frame on when our servers will be moved? and or updated? I just bought a server less then 1 week ago, so if its going to take another week to fix i just want a refund so i can get a server that works.

It will be a little over a month before all of these will take place. All of the servers are running fine CPU and network wise. All the desync is caused by hive.

it doesn't seem like the real problems right now are becuase too many servers are on the same box. It seems like something else. People have been saying HFB are running the wrong hive version. Is this true?

I cant say exactly. I will look into the hive versions and make sure they are running 0.6.2.1.

Edited by Ryahn

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