Some while ago I sought the list's advice on good commercial hosting services (full root access, with as few restrictions as possible). I had a few recommendations and eventually settled on a VPS from bytemark as offering just what I needed. (As an aside, I also now have a VPS from rapidswitch which is also excellent value - and gives a bigger monthly bandwidth allowance that bytemark).
I also had some feedback from MJ Ray that 1and1 (my main provider of DNS management, mail and blog) could be difficult. I'd never had much problem with them, except for their habit of "forgetting" to tell me that they had improved their packages when prices changed, so thought no more.
But, I have recently had cause to complain, and loudly. I have tried to move one of my domains (I have several with them) to bytemark so that I can have greater control. The process is unnecessarily complex (and for a naive customer would probably be impossible) but the worst part is that having unlocked the domain at their end and posted it as "pending transfer", they now refuse to answer any DNS queries despite still being authoritative for that domain. That domain has fallen off the edge of a cliff and may as well not exist. Their reponse to my complaint so far is "thank you for your patience".
Guess who loses my business.
Mick
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The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------
mick wrote:
having unlocked the domain at their end and posted it as "pending transfer", they now refuse to answer any DNS queries despite still being authoritative for that domain. That domain has fallen off the edge of a cliff and may as well not exist. Their reponse to my complaint so far is "thank you for your patience".
If you really want the domain back and you are a contact on the domain record then I think you can contact the registrar and get it sorted.
We had a slightly worse problem with a customer who had a domain with Hostlogical but with it all in Hostlogical's name. Hostlogical were purchased and promptly went tits up, nobody was responding to the domain contacts and it was left pointing where their hosting used to be. In this case the only way we could settle was via the domain mitigation route which is expensive and time consuming...a pity since this domain was printed as a web and email address on marketing literature and business cards etc.
Not fun
Guess who loses my business.
Mick
The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt
main@lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!
On 21/07/2009 22:16:40, mick wrote:
I also had some feedback from MJ Ray that 1and1 (my main provider of DNS management, mail and blog) could be difficult. I'd never had much problem with them, except for their habit of "forgetting" to tell me that they had improved their packages when prices changed, so thought no more.
Do I take it you mean they have reduced the price of the package to new customers but forget to tell you and continue to charge the higher price?
But, I have recently had cause to complain, and loudly. I have tried to move one of my domains (I have several with them) to bytemark so that I can have greater control. The process is unnecessarily complex (and for a naive customer would probably be impossible) but the worst part is that having unlocked the domain at their end and posted it as "pending transfer", they now refuse to answer any DNS queries despite still being authoritative for that domain. That domain has fallen off the edge of a cliff and may as well not exist. Their reponse to my complaint so far is "thank you for your patience".
Unfortunately my experience is that many organisations do not have an effective process for making sure a customer's experience of moving some of their business elsewhere goes smoothly. In particular one sometimes finds that upon asking for service to be ceased at the end of the period you have paid for, even giving them the relevant date, service gets ceased immediately instead.
Perhaps the people who design their business processes only think about the case where you are taking the whole of your business elsewhere in which case why would they care if it goes smoothly; if you are going to stop paying them why would they want to help?
Of course this is naive and short-sighted. As in your case the customer may be taking only some business elsewhere but may chose to move the rest if the company is awkward. A customer may find the competition to be attractive on paper and unsuitable in practice and may come back to a company that provided good service. Furthermore there is what the leaving customer says to others.
Guess who loses my business.
Mick
The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt
------quoted attachment------
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On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 03:45:59PM +0100, Steve Fosdick wrote:
Of course this is naive and short-sighted. As in your case the customer may be taking only some business elsewhere but may chose to move the rest if the company is awkward. A customer may find the competition to be attractive on paper and unsuitable in practice and may come back to a company that provided good service. Furthermore there is what the leaving customer says to others.
Dunno, I used to work somewhere and we made it very easy for customers to leave, the problem was that too many of them came back to us when they were unhappy with the new provider ;)
Adam
On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:45:59 +0100 Steve Fosdick lists@pelvoux.nildram.co.uk allegedly wrote:
On 21/07/2009 22:16:40, mick wrote:
I also had some feedback from MJ Ray that 1and1 (my main provider of DNS management, mail and blog) could be difficult. I'd never had much problem with them, except for their habit of "forgetting" to tell me that they had improved their packages when prices changed, so thought no more.
Do I take it you mean they have reduced the price of the package to new customers but forget to tell you and continue to charge the higher price?
Yes - but slightly more subtle than that. They introduced a "new" package which offered better services (more mailboxes, more webspace, more traffic) at a slightly lower charge. I was not offered the new service. When I noticed the new services (from a magazine ad as I recall) I contacted them and was the told that I had to cancel my existing package and move to the new one.
Mick ---------------------------------------------------------------------
The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Adam Bower -
mick -
Steve Fosdick -
Wayne Stallwood