Bad to worse customer support

[bigbuzzbelfast]

I still have two accounts with a certain hosting company that gets mentioned in here all the time and has been bought out by godaddy.

Last week I sent a support ticket about the site loading slowly I get emails saying we are looking into it etc etc. One week on and I hear nothing so I log in to support and the ticket had been closed.

I sent them a strongly worded email and this is what I get back.

Hi Philip,

Apologies for the incontinence caused. (Did I just read that right incontinence caused seems I did)

We completely understand how important hosting is when running a business. This was closed due to a human error, instead of marking the ticket on hold this was posted as Replied/resolved so the ticket disappeared from my queue. This was not on purpose please accept my deepest apologies. I can offer you 1 month compensation and add one additional month to your hosting for free.


I did run an strace on yoru index php file and it seems to be running fine there. (they ran a what?)

I replied to them telling them I give up this is their reply

Hi Philip,

In simple words, 'strace' traces all system calls issued by a program along with their return codes. What my colleague tried to explain in his previous reply is that he straced the index.php file of your website via SSH and couldn't find any issues with the system calls/processes of the website.

In regards to the 'inconvenience' typing mistake, please accept our apologies. I will have a word with ***** to be more careful.

Best Regards,
Technical Support Team Leader

I have now told them I am moving my sites.

 

[ryedale]

Apologies for the incontinence caused....

That's brilliant - they really are taking the piss now

I'll get my coat

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

Hi @bigbuzzbelfast

Sorry to read about your issues, although it's not surprising given the new ownership and how they have declined over the years.

The sort of response you're getting is typical when support is outsourced; poor spelling/grammar, second language English, and little detail followed by overly technical responses.

Imagine an overworked low level technician at the end of a terminal dealing with hundreds of requests an hour. That's who you end up dealing with when web hosts get bought out by the likes of HEG, EIG or GoDaddy.

I feel sorry for all involved to be honest, other than GoDaddy and management of course.

Best of luck moving your websites, it's really pretty straightforward, any decent web host will make it a smooth process with no downtime, and shouldn't charge for it.

Dan

 

[bigbuzzbelfast]

My problem is I had paid the hosting right up to October 2018 as I got a deal (or what I thought was a deal on the hosting) not sure if they would refund me or not.

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

Always worth asking, perhaps they will.

 

[jblz]

Hahaha. That is godlike customer service. The first response you could perhaps let slip, but his colleague (manager?) is backing it up with gems like

"he straced the index.php file of your website via SSH and couldn't find any issues with the system calls/processes of the website."

It makes literally no sense, and even if that close to what strace could be used for (perhaps using against the web server process?) it would still be a pitiful attempt at diagnosing a speed this issue. Wheres the log sifting, resource, process, and network investigation, or generally even doing a bare minimum suggestion of requesting authorisation for restarting a process, or the server itself. I'm not surprised GoDaddy is involved.

Best of luck with getting this matter resolved without much further pain.

 

[Xtm_Mike]

I actually lol'd at their responses.

Which hosting company are you talking about? Name them so others don't go with them.

 

[bigbuzzbelfast]

No I won't go as far as mentioning the company

 

[webhostuk]

Probably you should try contacting there billing team and ask for refund for unused period .

 

[bigbuzzbelfast]

I told them I was moving host and could I have a refund the answer was No because of their terms and conditions. I have paid up to October 2018. But as my partner also has some sites with them they said they would add the outstanding credit to her account which I suppose is fair enough.

But the particular site I need the speed for is an e-commerce site that takes in orders every day. It will cause me some pain moving it but I have to look at the bigger picture.

 

[Edith@TerraNetwork]

Hope you can solve it! For page speed, I recommend to look at the following 4 areas:

1. Hardware - often the easiest to fix but bear in mind costs. SSD drives can really help, as do extra CPU and RAM

2. PHP7 - if you're not already on the latest PHP version, I highly recommend to give it a go as the newer PHP versions are much more efficient

3. Page caching - caching of full pages gives very good results and some applications like WordPress have ready to install plugins that take care of this

4. Site optimisation - the usual minifying & image optimising to further bring down page load time

Look out for hosts that can give you a guarantee on CPU & RAM (even on shared hosting this is possible by using eg CloudLinux), but bear in mind that page speed will always be a mix of site coding & server hardware, so both need looking at for best results.