What Do You Expect I’ll Say When Folks Ask Where To Host Their Blog?
Posted by Liz Strauss · 8 Comments
Seven Days without My Blog
It’s been seven days since Successful-Blog.com went down. And it still doesn’t work now.
If you visit you’ll see what appears to be a working blog, but it’s not.
The issue isn’t nearly so much the code or the database as it is that folks reading the messages that explain what’s going on. The system they’re using is based in support tickets meant to keep conversation focused and to a minimum. Unfortunately, some things are not well explained in writing.
The fastservers.net team hosting my blog seems to have decided that because I opted for a managed account that I have minimal credibility. No one listened long enough to find out.
Instead they told me:
- fill out a support ticket (I already had)
- you can’t have access
- we don’t service applications
As a result, attempts to locate and fix the issue have been more difficult because the support team draws lines around their job.
SEVEN DAYS and No action that says they want to be sure they’re not part of the reason my blog is still down.
Some folks go ballistic when a site is down for 7 minutes.
I’ve remained calm. Perhaps they’ve misinterpreted that to mean I don’t care. Hopefully this might correct that wrong assumption.
What do you expect I’ll say when folks ask me where they should host their blog?
Liz Strauss
I know that feeling all too well. Had an ecommerce website go down for 10 whole days. Each attempt to contact technical support ended without any real change. Worst thing was that I had to keep trying to reach real people in the middle of the night our time because the site was hosted on the other side of the world. Charged us a small fortune for something that turned out to be their problem.
Solution, finally got access to our server and took all data and moved it! Bye!
Good luck
Hi Robert!
The time it takes up front to check everything once could have saved days of answering support tickets by what has now been 7 people or so. Small thinking and fences don’t make good relationships.
You DO know how I feel about all of this.
I do wonder sometimes if hosts think that we bloggers don’t talk about these sorts of things.
I can tell you what hosts I’ve never had problems with – but then some of my friends HAVE had problems with the same ones… so I don’t wholeheartedly recommend any of them.
The day that someone gets that they need to really provide customer service when there’s issues? That host will get most of us… weird, huh?
Hi Liz! Your current host sounds like my previous host Surpass. They actually took 2 months of cat and mousing with me to solve a simple issue as replacing a harddrive. Then another month. It was a horrible experience and I ended up contacting the BBB.
I wish you better luck with the hosting. I honestly felt for you when you asked for a moment of silence for your site at WordCamp….despite that I was chuckling from the fact of having past experience in hosting issues as well.
I hope you either move from them or something miraculous occurs. Best case scenario would be they finally just got things fixed and stopped making excuses for the money they were paid.
Hi Liz
For years me and my business (and most of my blogs when domain mapped) are with the same ‘hosting’ company. We found them through worth of mouth.
And yes, sometimes our site is down. No matter what time or what day (we work 7 days a week most of the time) we are informed of the going ones, the problems and the actions taken – Facebook direct messages or wall notices are used for this
We frequently get raised eyebrows from others when we recommend this company to them too – but there are so many other companies around you can host everything for way less money. Sure…….. until they hit a problem, then for no money in the whole world do they know what’s going on, whose on the case and how they are going to prevent a repeat for the error.
Value for money?
Karin H (Keep It Simple Sweetheart, specially in business)
Dear Liz ~ I commend you on your ability to stay calm throughout this challenge and loss of information and activity. Some times these things happen and we learn some kind of lesson. I recently deleted 1000 old emails due to computer overload.
Am I the only one who feels that we need to release some old clutter and step into a new space in order to move forward? Of course, it is wise to back up important information and papers as a security measure.
Wishing you the best as you improve hosting services,
Debby, CHOM
I wonder if the fastservers.net team that is hosting your blog realizes how loud their silence is, or how far the echo has traveled.
Liz,
Well that is a business impacting issue and sounds like your hosting site is not Customer Service oriented, rather they are more worried about, as you noted, making sure they aren’t to blame and I’m sure they are making sure that their billing is on time too.
I can’t see a company with that type of mentality staying in business, or at minimum maintaining revenue and retaining customers, with that type of customer service attitude.
As a Customer Service advocate (or nut), I would definitely be pushing them for an answer and resolution time frame that they can actually commit to or pulling the business if they can’t fulfill their commitment.
Good Luck in getting this resolved.
John