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Deafening silence as Smart Hosting support tickets keep piling up

It's probably a good thing that their address isn't listed

Updated Customers of British cloud biz Smart Hosting are furious at the company's radio silence throughout its ongoing support tickets crises.

The business has been left with "an incredibly high volume of support tickets" after merging with Krystal. Smart Hosting has been asking customers to keep non-urgent issues to themselves since the firm first complained of a support tickets backlog on 14 January.

The company has turned off phone comms after merging VoIP systems with the other firm, and has not responded to complaints on its Twitter account for nine days. On 29 January, in its main feed, support bods explained that they were working through support tickets as they brought new hardware online. But a fortnight on, customers are still in the dark.

We spoke to a user who said several of his customers' websites had gone offline on Saturday morning. Complaints from other users have been stacking up over the lack of communication, with some customers noting on Twitter that they actually seem to be losing their places in the queue.

Smart Hosting recently merged with another hosting company, Krystal. A customer in touch with The Register speculated that their apparently high support ticket number was as a result of Smart Hosting and Krystal merging their systems.

Smart Hosting's new business address of The Apex, Coventry CV1 3PP, is an accommodation address, also housing over 900 other companies, making it impossible for affected local customers to even knock on the door and ask what's happening.

Marcus Stafford, of B2B hosting business Wintercorn, told The Register that the issues have cropped up "exactly one year from the Heart Internet fiasco, which was the reason we moved to Smart Hosting, so it's pretty galling to experience it again.

"I didn't think that the Heart experience could be any worse but at least they communicated with their clients and responded to support tickets. There is an ever-growing queue of over 700 tickets and we have only moved to number 178 since Saturday morning. Some kind of announcement would be appreciated and is the minimum that paying clients expect.

"Fortunately we have moved many clients to Amazon, Google and Digital Ocean since the Heart outage so it's only affecting 30 or so sites but they are important, high-traffic sites and being offline is damaging to them and us."

The Register has contacted both Smart Hosting and Krystal for comment. We will update this article if we receive a response. ®

Updated at 14.20 UTC to add: The Register spoke to Simon Blackler, who admitted that the company had a severe support ticket issue, and had failed to communicate thoroughly with its customers. He stressed the Krystal was not shuttering the Smart Hosting brand, and was working hard on resolving the backlog of tickets.

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