Subject Matter Archive for ‘customer service gone right’

It’s been a few long months owing to me having to take care of emergency familial issues, but remember that post I made back in March about Web Hosting Gone Wrong?

Shortly after I wrote that post, I spoke with Andrew from Media Temple about this matter and where he obviously was not allowed to go into situation specifics aside from what was publicly posted by Kyle, we were able to talk more in-depth about Media Temple’s policies and about specifics regarding theoretical situations which could result in the scenario that Kyle experienced. I aired my concerns – elaborated where necessary – and Andrew addressed them all quite thoroughly and we spoke at length about the various topics I had addressed in my previous blog posts.

At this point (actually, much earlier, but I have been unable to really sit down to write until now – sorry, Andrew!), I have to say that where I still have mild concerns about the potential ‘ease’ of going over resource allotment, I am satisfied with the results of the conversation and no longer have that sour taste in my mouth or the same misgivings I once had.

In case it wasn’t evident in previous posts or in case anyone needs a reminder, I will reiterate that my concerns were NOT regarding MT charging for overages (in other words, I wasn’t saying that MT shouldn’t charge for overages, period).

My greatest concern was how unexpectedly the overage-causing situation had happened (it was a total and complete accident and there was no prior indication that such a problem would happen), what the ramifications were (triggering the overage as the situation caused resource over-usage), what the implications might be (how easy would it be to go over resource allotment?), and then how MT INITIALLY handled the situation.

As a courtesy to Andrew and Media Temple, I will address the issues one more time and then close this particular ‘chapter’ of blog posts regarding Web Hosting Gone Wrong.

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So that post I made a while ago about the $1000 a month shared webhosting?

EDIT: A follow-up post has been made to this. Please READ THIS for the final update and the resolution.

To refresh your memory (or simply read if you never caught it in the first place), click HERE.

Apparently, according to Kyle Matthews whom this incident happened to, there has been a resolution offered by Media Temple – namely, $6XX amount of overage fees are being/will be/were waived.

Click HERE to read his update!

According to Kyle’s post, Media Temple sent him an email shortly after his blog post appeared asking him to call them back in regards to the “unfortunate circumstance of the issue”.

Funny, that (in my opinion anyways), when the original customer support emails had stated that nothing could be done when Kyle had first asked.

But.

Media Temple DID get back in touch and did acknowledge at least part of the gaffe on their part – good for them! That’s called customer service gone right. At least… part way.

But.

Like Kyle’s blog post states, it still leaves a sour taste in my mouth, too, and mostly because of what I had explained in my earlier post.

A company trumpeting the robustness of their service and backing it up with percentages and statistics and saying that only 0.3% and 0.03% of users (basically, VERY VERY FEW for the first and out of a random 10,000 for the second!) ever experience overage problems ONLY to be keeled over by the 2 million 404 Apache errors from one website which generated a crapload of overage charges just…

It just doesn’t sit well with me at all in any way, shape, or form ESPECIALLY knowing that once upon a not very long time ago at all, the same site had done just fine on DreamHost’s shared web hosting service.

DreamHost talks about what they offer in their services, sure, and you can go poke at their fine print if you want to, and you can read up on their thoughts regarding ‘unlimited’ this, that, and the other, and they even regularly post status updates on their servers and all but nowhere have I seen the sort of reputation/credibility-building (more like hyping, really!) that Media Temple posted on their FAQs page.

And DH managed to host the site just fine.

Blegh.

So yeah.

Resolution posted!

… But the sour aftertaste is still there and I still can’t help but wonder just what kinds of sites those 10,000 were that MT randomly picked out which generated a grand total of 0.03% of sites going over their resources.

I guess trust (or something like it) once broken is hard to fix and I guess after all the hype, I’m not sure what’s ‘realistic’ to expect from MT or not after seeing something like this happen.

… We’ll see.

~ EMG