Tag Archives: Rants

bong, bong, bong…

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Well the bell has sounded. I’m done with ixwebhosting.com as my webhost. Frankly, their customer support is awful. It puzzles me that they are marketing themselves as the “business choice” for web hosting and yet their service is definitely not of business caliber. I guess if you’re a business that is just looking for a simple html page to give basic info on your business you’ll be okay but if you’ve got dynamic content running on your website – ixwebhosting is definitely not a good choice.

Over the past year and a half I put up with slowdowns, outages, and email problems as the normal “costs” of a cheap shared hosting plan. But the last straw for me was my experience in the past week. Here’s the breakdown.

1. Over the weekend (March 27-30, 2008), ixwebhosting.com moved all their servers (and customers) to a new data farm. I was warned well in advance of this move via email and also warned that this would mean downtime of about 48hours. There was nothing wrong with that – and they did their customers right by communicating what was about to happen. The move was done to put us on new servers and make things run faster and better – or so we were told.  

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What Customer Support Should be…

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Customer ServiceMy experiences with my webhost (ixwebhosting.com) the last year (and especially the last few days) have been abysmal. Really the only reason why I’ve stuck with them is because I haven’t had the time to research and switch hosts. Now I do. Probably next week I’m going to be taking the plunge and transferring all my sites.

In my opinion, what makes or breaks a company (or any organization for that matter) is customer support. Probably more than ever – word of mouth matters – if you have crappy front line customer support it doesn’t matter how stellar the rest of your business is – your business/organization will suffer.

So, here’s my list of what customer support should be:

1. Don’t keep me waiting.
Whatever way you offer support, long delays mean I get unhappy. Don’t have an answer for the question I’ve asked – write, “we don’t have an answer yet but we’re looking into it” but DON’T say/write nothing. In today’s world more than ever, time = currency. I’m not just paying money for your product/service but I’m also paying time because there was a problem. You better balance out that time in coming up with a solution!  

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Making some noise: HP Printer problems…

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All right – here’s another rant post. Our church bought an HP7410 All in One printer at the beginning of 2007 and prior to the purchase I wanted to make sure that any printer we got would be Vista compatible knowing that eventually the church would start using the new OS. Research indicated that this model would be Vista compatible. When we originally bought it the printer worked great and I never had any problems getting it working and working well (aside from the HP bloatware anyway their famous for…who designed their install program?).

Enter in my recent laptop purchase in August of this year which runs on Vista. I installed the correct Vista drivers as posted on the HP site and seemed to have no problems – but alas that was an illusion. For the past couple of months I’ve been experiencing the following problems:  

  1. Duplex printing doesn’t work properly: The printer has an automatic duplexer but portrait printouts have the reverse side printing opposite to what it should be (landscape duplexes print correctly). Thanks to some help from an HP customer who discovered a unofficial patch (from Microsoft!) that “fixed” the problem I’m able to resolve this. But…
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Choosing Blasphemy?

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I recently came across this article in Newsweek (January 8, 2007, Jerry Adler) – here’s an excerpt,

‘Hi my name is Lindy and I deny the existence of the Holy Spirit and you should too.’

With that five-second submission to YouTube, a 24-year-old who uses the name “menotsimple” has either condemned herself to an eternity of punishment in the afterlife or struck a courageous blow against superstition. She’s one of more than 400 mostly young people who have joined a campaign by the Web site BlasphemyChallenge.com to stake their souls against the existence of God. That, of course, is the ultimate no-win wager, as the 17th-century French mathematician Blaise Pascal calculated?it can’t be settled until you’re dead, and if you lose, you go to hell.

I went and visited the site and discovered that the “blasphemy challenge” offers an incentive for those who would do what Lindy did. Guess what the incentive is? People who take up the challenge and follow the instructions (which include the requirement to explicitly say, “I deny the existence of the Holy Spirit” in their video) will receive a free copy of “The God Who Wasn’t There”.  

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Sometimes it just makes me sick…

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Call it getting up on the wrong side of the bed – or maybe I am just a little bit grouchy this morning – but there are times when the Christian Marketing machine just makes me sick! I’m reading through my copy of Outreach magazine (great magazine by the way) and I came across one of the many ads found in there for various Christian ministries etc. This ad has this tagline:

Ever wonder if your sermons are connecting? Try the translation that speaks to the heart.

and goes on to say:

As a pastor, you want your messages to connect on the deepest possible level. Thankfully, the New Living Translation delivers living language that hits the target every time. Scripture comes to life. People pay attention. The message gets through. It’s the translation you can count on to connect, and that you can depend on for precise scholarship. Speak God’s Word to your congregation in language that they understand – and watch them wrap their hearts around God’s message.

And finally at the bottom of the ad they advertise that Pastor’s can get a free 4-week sermon series at pastorport.com – when I clicked to check it out I couldn’t find it.  

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