Chiriquí Chatter

I am not very pleased with my Web Host right now. If you are a daily follower of Chiriquí Chatter, then you are aware that the last week has not been the best for uptime. The first problem resulted in me creating a different website to allow me to communicate the current status of the Chiriquí Chatter website.

Since I use my domain for my email as well, I had a major annoyance with this latest outage. Being without email for over 24 hours, drove me up a wall. I have now moved all my critical notifications over to gmail. I know that gmail can also have problems, but at least there are big bucks backing gmail.

I wrote my web host and told them that I thought they could do a better job of notifying their clients of expected outages such as this. Understand, I don’t expect perfect service from a low cost cost provider. I have realistic expectations. However it doesn’t take much to have good communications and that would eliminate a lot of upset clients, that may also have a lot of upset users of their website.

Here was the response I received from my web host.

Greetings,

Sorry for the inconveniences caused. We wanted to notify the customers about the network move but couldn’t due to the situation and time frame we had to complete the migration. Your website now resolving to the new network.

“THE CULTURAMA WEEKLY EDUCATIONAL DIGEST
AND
THE GALLEGOS CULTURAL FOUNDATION”

Thank you very much for your continued patience and understanding which is appreciated.

Regards,
Mike

Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: PDI-359308
Department: Level 1 Support
Priority: Critical
Status: Awaiting Reply

Note that they included a header to a recent post, to let me know that they knew that I was up and posting again..

Well I will just post my thoughts to their reply here. It should be just as effective as sending it to them. Apparently, giving them suggestions, it just like peeing through a screen. They don’t seem to retain much.

My thought relative to the reply from Mike is this.

This web host, VistaPages, has something they call Community Support Forums. Even if the most unexpected thing happens at the host’s location, they should be able to post their status and expected time of solution on the forum. They have a category called “Network & Server Issues”. You can see that they haven’t posted on it since May of this year. I can assure you that they needed to be posting other problems since then.

I went to the forum and signed in and tried to post a question on the forum. I received a notification that I wasn’t authorized to post on the forum. So what is the forum for? To make it look like you are providing a complete support facility? Maybe I am just confused. The forums must have created for some reason, but may they were making the operation less fun for the technicians so they disabled them. I don’t know what to think.

I guess think the technicians must be young and inexperienced or old and just don’t give a shit. Whatever, the situation, a hobby is only fun if there is more fun than aggravation. At this point, I am finding the aggravation level climbing. Something needs to improve to keep this hobby fun. Maybe VistaPages’ staff will get the hint and look for ways to improve their service. It could happen.

UPDATE OCTOBER 24: I guess this explains the problems that I had earlier in the month. Now I can understand their problem and see why they didn’t give prior notice for the interruptions.