I’m sharing my first experience with Galaxy Support here, because it’s important when choosing a hosting company.
I’ve been working with Meteor for a little over a year on several projects, and self-host on Digital Ocean with MUPX. I picked up a new client recently and suggested we try Modulus or Galaxy. We ended up picking Galaxy (even through Galaxy requires a 3rd party DB and Modulus does not).
I ran into a problem updating my server - meteor deploy wasn’t updating the settings.json file. So my app was crashing on missing settings. I clicked support and wrote up the problem.
My request was remailed from zendesk but with all the formatting taken out:
Hello,My app is not starting: https://galaxy.meteor.com/app/example.comWhen I deploy, it’s settings are not being updated: https://galaxy.meteor.com/app/example.com/settingsI’ve tried this several times, and it’s not working.Here is the command line I’m using: meteor deploy example.com --settings settings-stage.jsonCan you explain why settings-stage.json’s contents don’t show up in the tab?The app is failing because of this code:ServiceConfiguration.configurations.upsert({service: ‘paypal’}, { $set: Meteor.settings.services.paypal});It works find on localhost. The new settings-stage.json is below.Thanks! email@email.com
/** settings.json contents **/
That didn’t look promising, so I started checking the forums here. There are a variety of threads on poor support.
I commented on one about how 2 business days wasn’t good enough for support. I can’t recommend Galaxy with 2-day down-times.
Support replied having not even read my request:
Hi Michael,
Thanks for writing in. Upon checking your logs, we found this error:
MongoError: Modifiers operate on fields but we found a NULL instead. For example: {$mod: {: …}} not {$set: null}
This seems to indicate that Mongo is doing an upsert and failing; as a result, an exception is being thrown in the logs. As this problem will need to be resolved in your code, we’d suggest that you concentrate your troubleshooting efforts there, since fixing the upsert problem should resolve the issue.
Cheers,
And MDG on the forums responded by blaming me and offered me $1300/month support:
@michaelcole it appears we responded to your case in ~4 hours today with a clear resolution related to your database code, not an issue Galaxy. What bugs are you referring to? We’d love to help if you can be more specific.
and
If support time is critical-- we do offer enhanced support plans that can offer up to a rapid 4-hour response time.
I posted a rather pointed response that they hadn’t even read my request.
Another email from support asking me what Meteor version (look it up on the instance!), some “try again” suggestions, closing with “Let us know”. No acknowledgement they hadn’t read the original request.
Ultimately, I fiddled with it and it seems like meteor deploy has a caching bug. I had to change the code for the settings file to update. Or whatever, I’m tired of fiddling with it.
Negativity in the forums really bugs me. But also, I can see how MDG does this to themselves.
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Is MDG a company that offers services? Or is it a volunteer organization? If it’s a volunteer organization, does it feel fun to contribute?
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If MDG can’t afford to give decent support for bugs on the hosting platform, what’s the point of adding new features?
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If MDG’s pricing themselves as a $1300/mo enterprise platform, why are they posturing “pull requests welcome” on initial basic documentation?
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And why are they not reading support requests, but reading the forums?
MDG I don’t know what you do, and I experience your brand as dismissive.
And maybe that’s why there’s negativity here in the forums.
And if you’d prefer this was shared privately instead of on the forums, we had several opportunities to connect about it, but instead it was ‘Let us know’.