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The Worst Web
Site Hosting Company EVER!
If you have
website you know that you either have to host it yourself on your own server,
or you hire an outside company to store and serve your pages / site for you.
Dear BBB,
I am the owner of Buttonstore.com, Laughshop.com, and about 28 other domains as well, Buttonstore.com being my primary means of making a living.
Being an Internet business, we rely on our Internet hosting provider to
have good and responsive service. If our web site(s) are down, we run the
risk of loosing business to our competitors, thus taking food out of the
mouths of my family.
I pay an Internet hosting supplier to keep our web pages on their server,
so that when an end user (my customer) types in our domain name, our site
shows up in the end user's web page browser. The provider's job is to
maintain the server, keeping it in operating condition, and providing tech
support should our web site(s) not be functioning properly.
In this arrangement, server downtime is a major concern, and in the event
of downtime, the Hosting provider has supplied us with a means of reporting
a problem by submitting a "support ticket" via their Hosting home,
Splashhosting.net.
On 10-25-07, just before 5PM Pacific time, I received 2 phone calls, back
to back, from 2 customers who expressed concerns that they couldn't get into
Buttonstore.com. One customer is a long time client, the other is new to us,
and had been dealing with me for the last couple of days in putting together
a button order for her daughter's run for office at her High School.
I gave them assurances that I'd look into it, and that I was certain the
site would be back up soon.
Immediately after the second call I tried to open Buttonstore.com, only to get an error message back that the site couldn't be found. I tried again. Still no site. I then tried refreshing the site (which reloads the data), and still the error message came up. I then tried ebay, yahoo, and google (refreshing the opening pages on each so that I could be sure the problem wasn't on our end). All these came up perfectly, so I knew it was a server issue. I then tried my sites again. Still nothing. From the first customer call to this time 10 minutes had elapsed.
At this point I submitted a "support ticket" though the original site I had
signed up with, gooddealhosting.com, asking them why my sites were down.
About 5 minutes later I realized that I might not get a reply since they had
changed their name to splashhosting months earlier, so I checked my sites
again (still down) then logged into Splashhosting.net to submit a "support
ticket" asking why my sites were down. Elapsed time : 17+ minutes. 2 minutes
later my sites were back up and running.
At 6:50 PM I receive an email from "Gary," at the "support center." Pasted
here is his reply:
Trouble Ticket #2701 has been updated
Hello Steve, Your server was rebooted today, but that only takes like 3-5 minutes so I can't imagine that is what you mean by down, and that you would open a ticket about it. Please provide pings with your ticket so you can ensure that the problem is not on your end. Best Regards, Gary.
I have no idea what pings are, but whatever. A little
late, but we were running again. I wrote back that it was closer to 20
minutes, and while their rebooting the server was all well and fine, that
their downtime was costing me potential business, and questioning my
submitting a support ticket was both silly and unprofessional.
Their response from "Tammy" was (from actual email at
8:22 PM):
There is no need to open a support ticket about a server reboot (especially two of them), they need to happen once in a while, and they only go as fast as they go. If new software is installed, or the server has been upgraded, it needs to be rebooted after. Opening a support ticket will not speed up the time of a reboot. A server takes aprox 5 mins to reboot, it may seem to take longer because sites may load slowly for the first few minutes after reboot until all services are back up to speed (like your home computer, the hour glass spins for a short while and things load slowly when first turned on, but the computer is on). If a server is down for more than 15 - 20 min you can log in to check the announcements to check if the server is undergoing maintenance.
Um, ok. I wrote back that, really, from my home
computer thousands of miles away, how am I supposed to know if they are
"rebooting" their server or it's a plain outage? If they're going to provide
"support tickets" then they really shouldn't complain about them. Also
that, supposing they are customer service oriented in the least, that maybe
they could send an email to their clients warning them of a reboot in
advance. Either that or could they schedule updates and reboots at hours of
the day that do not interfere with business operations.
Their reply was again pasted from their email to me at 10:45PM: A server is world wide and off-hours to you is not to some else, you are not the only person on the server. If the server needs to be rebooted, we are not waiting for your permission to do it. Thank you, Web Hosting (Typically when they get snotty they don't give a name)
Huh? I neither asked for, nor implied, the right
of granting permission. I simply asked if they could warn me (and whoever
else uses their service) of impending outages, regardless of the why's and
how's. A simply reply of "No, sorry, we can't do that" would have been
sufficient.
At this point I was to getting ticked off. How dare
they! I fired back that each and every reply was being saved, and would find
their way to being posted for a "world wide" audience (mocking their use of
the words "world wide") if they persisted in behaving badly. They had been
warned. Even a moron would understand that you don't treat customers like
that.
World wide servers? Gimme a break, I wrote. Penny ante,
two bit, one horse show.
Their predictable reply was (this also pasted from the
actual email received at 11:48 PM):
We are not here to take threats and
abuse. Find some else who wants to hear about 5 minutes reboot complaints as
we are not here for that.
At 11:53 pm they shut off all our web sites,
unannounced, and a partially refunded the payment that I had made for the
time period of 10-16-07 through 11-15-07.
Fortunately I had decided to fire them already, and had
begun to seek out a new hosting supplier. However, it takes up to 3 days,
and sometimes longer, for web site addresses to "matriculate" throughout the
Internet, coming up with only blanks until such time as the Internet catches
up with the domain name. At this moment, if you type in Buttonstore.com, you
get a page that says "SUSPENDED," in large letters, adding insult to injury.
I went on a digital paper trail this morning (the 26th)
to see if I could contact the owner of the company, thinking that there's NO
WAY that a business owner would tolerate this behavior from their "support
staff." Obviously they must be subcontracting out their support to some
other entity, as nobody operates like this under their own guise, so it'd be
best to make them aware of this behavior.
Once I found the owner, "Tanya," (who I found out is
also "Tammy," [and I'm pretty sure she's "Gary" as well]), I discovered that
this owner is the SAME person I'd been dealing with the night before! She
defended, in earnest, all the same "points" that she had written the night
before! I let her know that I'd be forwarding my complaint to the BBB, which
she just laughed at.
If you need good hosting, use ANYBODY but these clowns and you're ahead of the game! |
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