As bloggers we live and die by way of two things - our readers and to a lesser acknowledged extent the hosting company that we choose to host our burgeoning empire of words. It is especially hard in regards to the second when everything you do has to be run on a frayed shoestring budget so picking the right host can be a tricky proposition; additionally so if you are restricted by how you can pay for their services.
The reason I had gone with Lunarpages in the beginning was because that had a good package; which got better over time, and I could cover all my transactions with them using PayPal. While more hosting companies are starting to accept PayPal as an additional method of payment when I first went looking the choices were few and far between. So I settled with Lunarpages and for quite some time everything went well and then I had my first run in with their server overload clause which resulted in my site being moved to a non-production server until I figured out what the problem was and I fixed it before they decided to suspend my account.
Needless to say I finally solved the problem; which basically involved updating all the blogs to the newest release of Wordpress, and I was moved back to my regular server. For some time after that everything ran nicely and I was looking forward to this new year and the improvements I was seeing in my traffic. WinExtra was doing well, braincell soup had been revamped and starting to pick up and Hodson Report was settling in with a new direction. The new year was looking good.
Heck I even had a nice run with a post that got on digg’s main page and even Techmeme was being nice to me and then I got an email from Lunarpages support that put the brakes on full tilt. Apparently I had hit that old server overload again; but this time instead of moving me to a non production server or even giving me a grace period to sort the problem out they just notified me that my site had been shutdown. Wham Bam Thank You Madam - yer toast.
As their notification said that until I disabled the scripts causing the problem my site would be suspended - which means I couldn’t access it. Now anyone see the stupidity of this situation? … How am I suppose to disable any scripts if I can’t access the site?
This was at 3AM on the 4th to which I immediately fired off a reply to the support ticket stating this rather obvious fact and that until they let me back in to my site there was no way I could even try and fix the problem. And then I waited for a response; which by that time meant finally getting some sleep and seeing what the morning would bring.
Which as it turns out was nothing as I couldn’t do much at that point since it was time to head out for our monthly trek to see our doctor. By the time we got back later that afternoon I quickly checked my email hoping for a response of some sort of which there was none. Now I was starting to get pissed and my cranky level was climbing as I tried to figure out what to do next. Which as it turns out was to go looking for a 1-800 # and start bending someone’s ear. the only problem with that - the 1-800# they had at one point had disappeared from all of their pages; as had their Live Chat link. This meant a direct long distance call from Ontario to California during prime business hours - Bell would love me then.
Rather than doing that I took a chance and Googled to see if they still had such a beast as a 1-800#. As it turns out they did but it wasn’t on one of the Lunarpages web pages that I found it but rather on a site that had reviewed the company. So number in hand I dialed away ending up in a holding pattern as per usual. And then I got a real person - well at least I assume it was a real person. You ever talk to someone that sounded like a insipid dishrag? .. well this is what this person sounded like.
The end result of that conversation - you’ll have to wait until they answer the support ticket … and no I don’t know of the status of your ticket. Thank you for using Lunarpages….<click>
And my blog was still offline.
The only thing left as far as I could see was to start looking for another hosting solution which is when I remembered doing a review a while back of a company called VistaPages (non affliate link - affiliate link) and the one fact in my mind in their favor was that they accepted PayPal. So I dug up the email I had gotten from Kaumil Patel that thanked me for the review and if there was anything he could do in the future to help out to email him. With nothing to lose at this point I put together an email outlining the problems I was having and requesting facts and figures of what it would take to move to VistaPages. This was at 2:44PM on the 4th.
By 3:27PM he had replied and over the next hour or so he gladly answered all my questions via email to the point I felt very comfortable and confident that this would a good move. During all this my friends in IRC were following along and once the total costs were arrived at the money was deposited into my PayPal account - for which I am thankful for without their help (thanks Arni and everyone else for the moral support) I would still be stuck in Lunarpages hell.
The end result of this is that with the great help of Peter Wakefield their Customer Service Manager working through a Saturday has got everything moved over to WinExtra’s new home at VistaPages with no extra gray hairs being added to my head. So a big thank you to both Kaumil and Peter and if you ever find yourself in need of a new hosting service I can without any hesitate recommend VistaPages and their team that does give a shit about their customers.
Oh and by the way almost 36 hours later I got a notification from Lunarpages that my account had been unsuspended … too late guys - I’m gone and the only email you will be getting from me is the one to close my account.
Disclaimer: I have not been compensated in any fashion for this post. This post was written as a reflection of a real life customer service experience.
Listening to: The Crystal Method - Community Service - CeaseFire-TrickShot
Conversation Tags: customer service, Lunarpages, VistaPages
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It's the most impolite and inappropriate support I've ever met.
They just playing fools, no real help.
You will pay for service, you never used, and you will not receive a service, that you have paid for!!!
It's just a bunch of mafia men.
Keep your credit card away, and to the god's sake, do not think I have any particular interest to put them down, I just was extremely f..cked by them and I suggest you stay away from that experience.
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Yes, moving to VistaPages is very smooth. VistaPages optimized the process to acquire new customers so extremely good. They optimized their website to persuade new customers. They are probably amongst the top hosting companies paying affiliates like you very much money for each new customer (I guess it's more than 100USD). They seem to increase bandwidth, file storage and other features each month. They seem to reduce the prices several times a year. They seem to give huge discounts when you subscribe for a longer period. But WHY?
Because they are constant need for new customers. Leaving VistaPages is hard: whereas it takes only a few hours to get a VistaPages account, it takes *months* (I'm not kidding! :-( ) to leave them. They will suspend your account without giving sufficient details and force you to upgrade to their more expensive VPS. It's really "pay the money if you want to see your data back". You will spends days to communicate with them. Your new registrar and new hosting company will have a very hard time to negotiate with VistaPages.
My advices:
* Make regular backups of your website at your home computer or at another hosting space (this can be free hosting space). If you do this, at least they can't blackmail you.
* When you switch to another registrar and registered a domain name through VistaPages, make sure your new registrar is also an Enom reseller (which VistaPages is). Emails to VistaPages to get your EPP AuthInfo code and to unlock your domain will not be answered until you you ask your new registrar to send a complaint to Enom. If you do this, Enom will send you the EPP code and VistaPages will unlock your domain name in a few days...amazingly how motivating it can be for a hosting company to lose its partnership with its upstream registrar.
Please do not hesitate to contact me in case VistaPages service shows it real face after a few months (I hope for you not): from my 4 months experience with "dealing" with VistaPages I maybe can be of help. Also note that I am willing to provide a linkback to your bad word of mouth story on this blog if you feel the need to write something like that (see victims section on my blog post).
You can read my VistaPages review at my blog and also the following thread at the Drupal forums is very interesting:
http://drupal.org/node/135080
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Here's a question -- I back up my Wordpress database and site religiously and back it up to my hard drive. If I had a similar situation or just wanted to make a switch to a new host, wouldn't the switch be a matter of setting up the new account and then uploading the database and template files?
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What VistaPages did though that made it even more painless was because they use cPanel they could log into my Lunarpages cPanel backup **everything** into a single file .. mail, web mail , databases, forums ... anything at all related to my domain - including add-on domain settings ..
once backed up it was a simple matter of transferring to their servers and extracting it all where it had to go.
I basically just had to sit back and let some very capable folks do the work and once the DNS changes propagated I was good to go.
No muss .. no fuss
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Let's all hope VistaPages contuinues the way they started, so far I'm impressed.
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Thanks so VERY much for "giving a shit" about WinExtra and Steven. Without him, we all would be less than we are now, and would miss him even more.
Should anyone ever ask me.. I will tell them "Vista Pages".
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