DogAndPony
01-20-2005, 04:05 AM
One of the reasons I left my previous host was their serious lack of communication skills (or lack of willingness to communicate).
Due to to the fact that they provide very cheap domain forwarding services, I still maintain an account there -- although not for long, since I'm moving my domains to a registrar that will provide the service for free.
Anyway, I still get service notices... like this one that I just received a few minutes ago:
Dear xxxxxx Customer,
We are currently having problems with the server that your website is hosted on. You may experience short outages due to maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience and we hope to have service restored as soon as possible.Okay... They're letting their customers know of a server outage.
Unfortunately, they fail to mention which server or domain/site is affected.
I complained about this very practice -- in addition to the times when they sent no emails about outages -- time after time, and their reaction was, "We can spend our time fixing the problem, or we can spend our time writing emails."
I guess they think that the 2 seconds it would take to include the name of the server in a message would somehow bring about the failure of the company -- or perhaps tear them away from their pastrami on rye.
You'll never see this problem at Futurequest. FQ personnel know that many of their clients have domains on several servers. Knowing which server is affected by a planned or unplanned outage is vital. FQ admins seem to be able to fix a problem blindingly fast... and still tell their clients all about it. Futurequest communicates immediately and frequently.
At my old host, the head admin would occasionally show up in the forums, and staff would constantly remind users that staff "does not officially provide support through the forums". Translation: "You're lucky we're here at all."
At FQ? The head admin / CTO and the CEO of the company are constantly in the forums, helping people in great detail.
The other company has co-located servers at dispersed third-party data centers. And those servers go down or slow down much much more frequently than those at FQ.
The servers at FQ's private, owner's-hands-on DC are rarely down, and repeated problems with any one server are attacked vigorously. No such luck at the old host; one cluster there had chronic capacity problems with a mail server, and the host took, IIRC, about two months to replace or upgrade it. This would never happen at FQ, where staff stays ahead of capacity-related issues like those.
Those users who are still at my previous host call the place "the best anywhere". They rave about it. In fact, some talk about it in glowing terms much like those used to describe FQ (or at least they did the last time I was in the forums there).
Makes me want to go back into the forums at the old place and tell the people there that they really have no idea what a great host is like.
But I do.
I have my hosting packages at Futurequest.
'Nuff said.
...Bob
Bob West
Due to to the fact that they provide very cheap domain forwarding services, I still maintain an account there -- although not for long, since I'm moving my domains to a registrar that will provide the service for free.
Anyway, I still get service notices... like this one that I just received a few minutes ago:
Dear xxxxxx Customer,
We are currently having problems with the server that your website is hosted on. You may experience short outages due to maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience and we hope to have service restored as soon as possible.Okay... They're letting their customers know of a server outage.
Unfortunately, they fail to mention which server or domain/site is affected.
I complained about this very practice -- in addition to the times when they sent no emails about outages -- time after time, and their reaction was, "We can spend our time fixing the problem, or we can spend our time writing emails."
I guess they think that the 2 seconds it would take to include the name of the server in a message would somehow bring about the failure of the company -- or perhaps tear them away from their pastrami on rye.
You'll never see this problem at Futurequest. FQ personnel know that many of their clients have domains on several servers. Knowing which server is affected by a planned or unplanned outage is vital. FQ admins seem to be able to fix a problem blindingly fast... and still tell their clients all about it. Futurequest communicates immediately and frequently.
At my old host, the head admin would occasionally show up in the forums, and staff would constantly remind users that staff "does not officially provide support through the forums". Translation: "You're lucky we're here at all."
At FQ? The head admin / CTO and the CEO of the company are constantly in the forums, helping people in great detail.
The other company has co-located servers at dispersed third-party data centers. And those servers go down or slow down much much more frequently than those at FQ.
The servers at FQ's private, owner's-hands-on DC are rarely down, and repeated problems with any one server are attacked vigorously. No such luck at the old host; one cluster there had chronic capacity problems with a mail server, and the host took, IIRC, about two months to replace or upgrade it. This would never happen at FQ, where staff stays ahead of capacity-related issues like those.
Those users who are still at my previous host call the place "the best anywhere". They rave about it. In fact, some talk about it in glowing terms much like those used to describe FQ (or at least they did the last time I was in the forums there).
Makes me want to go back into the forums at the old place and tell the people there that they really have no idea what a great host is like.
But I do.
I have my hosting packages at Futurequest.
'Nuff said.
...Bob
Bob West