October 25, 2007
Posted by Lars-Christian
How to NOT treat your customers
For the past couple of years I’ve been a loyal customer to the company which I currently host my blog with, Site5, but now I have decided to look elsewhere. After my blog and all my other sites that I have hosted on this account went offline yesterday, I sent a support ticket their way to get the lowdown on what was going on, and their response completely threw me off.
We do understand your frustration and are working as hard as possible to resolve the server/service issues that have been occurring very recently. Many of our servers have been attacked by a rather severe DDoS attack, which we are currently working on implementing a more permanent solution for. We do hope to have this resolved very soon.
That being said, our help desk is quite understandably being flooded with tickets regarding these issues. We ask that everyone please refrain from submitting tickets regarding server/service issues unless you believe the issue effects only your account, or otherwise not a global service failure issue to help keep support times low.
I might just be a tad sensitive here, but basically they are saying that even though I’ve been a loyal customer for an extended period of time (a couple of years certainly is just that in the fast-paced internet world), I shouldn’t bother them with my concerns when my sites are left online because it might not be affecting only my account? Okay, next please.
I have put up with Site5 for all this time mainly because they are cheap, and relatively stable if you overlook the longer periods of extremely slow loading times. This was however most certainly the final nail in the coffin for my relationship with Site5 though, and I’ve now decided that I will give my money to other hosting providers which will hopefully appreciate my business.
From the looks of it I’m not the only one tired with Site5 either. Alex over at Web 2.0 How-To Spot-er recently issued similar complaints and moved his blog over to another hosts, while Joe over at JJMELO was fortunate enough to avoid having to experience them first hand due to a beef with their Terms of Service.
Now let this be a lesson to all of you out there trying to make some money online, if you don’t at least manage to act like you actually care for your customers and the business they bring you, it will reflect poorly on your results. Show your customers that you care about their business, and you’ve already taken a large step towards success.
In this case a simple “we will try get your account back online as soon as we can, hopefully within xx minutes/hours†instead of the line about how I shouldn’t bother their swamped helpdesk would have made all the difference. I would have thought that large companies in such a competitive business as hosting would have realized the importance of customer satisfaction by now, but alas. Maybe their new Director of Technical Operations can help them with their problems?
And yes, that was just a cheap attempt to notify them how I felt about their customer service by pinging their blog.
7 Comments
October 25, 2007
Thanks for the link. Even though I’m a bit frustrated with Dreamhost right now, they are awesome when it comes to support. They report their issues and fix them pretty quickly.
I haven’t experienced any outages since yesterday, we are monitoring our server closely…hopefully they were just experience a ton of issues the past couple of days.
October 26, 2007
If you get tired of the huge guys like dreamhost/site5/hostgator try somewhat smaller hosting providers for a refreshing experience. I recommend http://www.asmallorange.com or http://www.webfaction.com for a refreshing experience … stable servers and good customer service is all I ask for.
October 26, 2007
Joe: No problem! Hope it works out well for you with your hosting. Nothing is quite as frustrating as hosting issues, especially if it affects your bread and butter money.
Brett: Yeah, I’ve heard only good about A Small Orange, and I’m switching to them now
October 26, 2007
I host all my sites with Dedicore (http://www.dedicore.net) which is my brother’s shared hosting company. Prices are cheap and the uptime is about 99%. The hosting is all Linux based so you get CPanel which is a great management tool.
October 26, 2007
cPanel is definitely great. Today I’ve begun moving my sites over to A Small Orange, and things are looking good so far. I suppose that my blog will be moved sometime this weekend as well.
And 99% uptime is alright, that means a little over 7 hours downtime per month. Not spectacular, but certainly acceptable as long as the speed is good.
November 19, 2007
Lars,
Yeah, Site5 is gone down greatly … I hosted with them for almost 3 years and now going away from them. Still have 3 sites to migrate but blog had to go first as their service sucked to the point that I started to pull my hair out
Alex
February 28, 2009
Hi nice post, i read your blog from time to time but i was wondering something. I also run a blog on a similar topic, but i get 1,000’s of spam comments and emails every day does that happen to you.. Any ideas to stop it? I currently have commenting disabled but i want to turn it back on.. Thanks!
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