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Disappointed
Reviewer: Dave S., 31 January 2008 |
I had one fairly complex personal site up for 23 months. I have no complaints, and had only a
couple of brief needs for customer support, and it was great.
My new site, hosted separately and under a different domain name, was intended to represent my
(infant) business. It began winking off and on over a period of several months.
I thought that maybe it was my internet service provider.
I finally contacted customer support with details when it got really bad and was told only to get
back to them when it happened again. What I mean when I say winking off and on is that I
would check it, and it wouldn't be available. Usually it would be up within 20 to 30 minutes.
Once this happened (it was down, then came back up), and then it went down again five minutes
later, and was down 20 minutes.
Then the whole server disappeared twice in one week, and my site's contact form just stopped
working though I hadn't touched it in months. When I say that the whole server disappeared I mean
that not only was my site, but I also could not access anything having to do with my account
through the back end (CPanel stuff).
Technical support has basically told me they don't really care. (I.e., they said that if for some
reason I suspect a fundamental problem, like in the hardware, the operating system, or the web
server, then it's my job to find, diagnose, and document the problems.
And then it's also my job to tell them how to fix any such problems.
And I've been specifically warned never ever to ask about anything that even gets close to a
question about application programming or about configuration within my account. Even though I
haven't.
And that was from a technical support supervisor. Cool. Am I happy yet? Let me count the ways.
To be explicit here, that means that I was told by a technical support supervisor that I
could not ask any technical support question at all and expect any kind of answer at all.
I found an answer to the contact form problem on another host's wiki. That company's CEO also does
technical support and was kind enough to reply to a pre-sales, semi-technical and slightly unfair
query of mine. Promptly. With intelligence. I now have an account with them.
For a while, messing around with this form, I'd thought I really was an idiot, or just nuts, but
the problem I fixed on Site5 turned out to involve only a tiny alternate configuration option.
But they wouldn't have worked with me to fix it even if I'd asked.
So I switched my first site over and then began on the second. I had to reset my second domain,
which I had purchased through Site5 to point to the new nameservers. But when I went to the
right page on the Site5 system, there was no option to do so. So I asked customer support.
Here's what they said:
"Hello Dave,
"You could change the domain nameservers via BackStage >> Domains >> [redacted].com, click on the
"Edit" button on the left and then you will be able to do that. Hope this helps.
"Please let us know if you have further questions."
Right. He didn't notice that I had contacted him because there was no such option, so I sent
him a screen capture, with this reply:
"Hi,
"On Domains tab: [redacted].com Site5 May 18, 2009 Edit
"click on that "Edit" to change nameservers."
Great. I eventually discovered myself that they had the option on the wrong account.
I am no longer their customer and recommend that if you work with Ruby on Rails you do not even
give them a thought.
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