I was chatting with my Mom on IM this evening about 7:00 when she told me that my websites were down (this one and www.missionarytalks.com). I thought that it was just a glitch and would be worked out soon. I waited an hour before calling 1&1 customer support.
I sat on hold for 40 minutes with some of the awfullest hold music. I finally spoke with a rep who told me that they would strive to have my site back up within 30 minutes. I waited 2 hours before calling them back. While sitting on hold with the second call, I got an email from them telling me that there were greater problems and that someone else higher up would be taking a look. But I did not see this message until after I got off the phone with the second rep.
The second customer support rep told me that my problem was being escalated up to the next level. I thanked him and asked what kind of time frame I might have to wait. I was prepared for him to say that it should be back up within a couple of hours. But was shocked to hear him say that they would “try” to have me back on-line within 24 hours!
Well, as it turned out, my site was back up within just a few minutes. Probably less than 10. But the frustration of thinking that I would have to wait potentially 24 hours before I was going again was irritating. When they tell you something like that they are really saying, “Don’t call us again for 24 hours.” Well, they would have gotten another phone call in the morning if it was not fixed.
I went to their site where they give a 99.99% uptime guarantee. If you click on the link at the top of the page for the guarantee, they go into detail telling how they are going to make this happen, but there is nothing that says what the guarantee entails.
I will be trolling through their site trying to find it. Does that mean 99.99% of a month? Of the total time I am with them? What does it mean?
If it is a month, then on a long month like March it would mean that if my site is down 45 minutes, then they failed. I was down over 4 hours. And do I get my money back? Or will they upgrade me to the better service which has SSH access? I am a bit embittered about the SSH thing. When I was looking at the different packages I sent an email to customer support asking them about SSH. I was assured that I would have SSH access with the package I was purchasing. After I signed up, I did not have it. I wrote back. Their reply, “sorry, that package does not have SSH access, you will have to upgrade.”
When I asked the rep on the phone about the 99.99% guarantee he told me, “We are sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you.” So do they guarantee that they will say “Sorry” if your site goes down.
Stay tuned for exciting details…
