The Good The Bad and The Downright Ugly (18 February)

 

My website had been hosted with IPOWER for a numbers of years and all was well until last May when the shared server that my account was on had a melt down. The communication was handled badly; indeed it was unprofessional considering it took about a week to get my site back up and running normally. Hot excrement happens and as they had been good up until that time I decided to stick with them.

 

Then disaster struck, and the process was managed by those three monkeys; see no evil, hear no evil and shut up and say stuff all. The monkeys were managed on the ostridge principle; shove your head in the sand, expose your backside and hope that no one will shaft you, and that the problem will go away.

 

My woes started many weeks ago. I could not log onto the online support function so sent an email asking for it to be fixed. They responded telling me to log onto my VDeck and add my credit card details as they were not on file. Hello! How could my card details not be on file when they had regularly been charging it for my account? And how does one log onto VDeck when you are not a VDeck customer?

 

The email responses from IPOWER were at a speed of a startled turtle. Eventually, after my questions had been totally ignored, I asked for my email to be sent to a supervisor. After a further few days delay, they answered and said that in order to send it to a supervisor, they needed me to set my credit card details on the VDeck account. Now where is that wall I can bang my head against?

 

I rang their billing line and found out that they had smashed, and the operative word is “smashed” the billing systems together when another company merged with IPOWER. They tried to update my billing details but the system would not accept the changes. In the process, it screwed up my account and I could no longer make any changes to my site. That took over two hours to achieve; quite a feat in itself.

 

Two days later when it had not been fixed, I rang again and spent another two hours in the phone. When I was getting nowhere with the tech person I asked to speak to a supervisor. That conversation went well, apologies were forthcoming and I was informed she needed to escalate it to second level, although that should have been done two days previously. I was told it would be fixed within 24 hours.

 

After 48 hours as it was still not working, I rang again and was told by yet another supervisor much the same thing as before, and even more galling, the problem had still not been escalated although it was above the competence of even the supervisors. Further promises were made. After another twelve hours things were even worse, my site was completely down and defaulting to ipwsupport.com/suspended.page/ I think the Three Stooges had just been employed to join those three monkeys and the management ostridge.

 

Despite contact with the Live Chat people and phone calls, it remained off the air for over 48 hours.

 

After twelve days I was pretty convinced that the Keystone Kops were the guys at the top of the pecking order in IPOWER.

 

By the eighteen day when IPOWER actually managed to get my account back to where I could make changes to the site, I thought that I must have been wrong thinking that the Keystone Kops were running the joint, the lunatics must have taken over the asylum. I had spent well over 10 hours on the phone. There was also a similar amount of time spent with Live Chat, and then there was the wasted time on numerous emails. A “quick” response to my emails from IPOWER was 48 hours and it could take up to four days to get a response from support.

 

As soon as the site was back up it was time to run to a new hosting company as fast as humanly possible, preferably before IPOWER screwed something else up. I had done my homework and was looking for support and reliability above all else. Cost was not a major consideration as saving a few dollars is not worth it if your site does not work properly, and you have to waste a lot of time trying to get it fixed. I had decided on Hostgator. They had all the bells and whistles that IPOWER had (plus some) and when I had logged onto their Live Chat to ask presales questions, the response had been relatively quick. They have a range of plans and as my requirements are reasonably modest, Hostgator’s cost for was actually lower than IPOWER. And their parent provider offered a free migration service for IPOWER customers. Good stuff!

 

So how did the switch over go?

 

I signed up late on Friday afternoon and within 10 minutes my account had been created. I fired off an email to ask for the free migration service to be activated and when I woke up the next morning all my files had been transferred. I started mucking around on the site to make sure it was all working. There were a few minor issues so I got onto the Live Chat. It took less than three minutes for the guy to come to my aid - and he apologised for the delay! Now that’s impressive after waiting for over an hour at IPOWER. He told me he could not fix it and asked me to create support a ticket. Within four hours the original minor problems had been resolved and the emails flowed thick and fast as I found a few more minor things that needed to be tweaked. I also had a couple of more secessions to ask (dumb) questions of the Live Chat people. The wait was so short they were there before I had a chance to finish typing the question.

 

And then that bastard Murphy decided to make his presence felt. On Monday morning at 5.30 am my site was down. Caput! The Live Chat person told me there was an unscheduled issue that required a major fix and that my site would be down for 3 – 4 hours. Within the allotted time span it was back up and running. Whilst I was not happy that it was down for that time, the Live Chat response was fast and they met their committed timeframe. So in a way I am glad. I now know if there is a problem Hostgator has the support to manage the situation and get it fixed in a timely fashion, and without wasting loads of my time. All my interaction with them shows them to be 100% professional and they go the extra mile to help…. And I am a small customer.

 

The conversion was complete and running seamlessly in just two and a half days. I am a happy little vegemite now. As they say in the classics, “Goodonya Hostgator!”

 

 

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Copyright © Ric Einstein 2008