Non-caring attitude toward YOUR customers

[w3it]

I recently started the following thread, and at the time of writing, 40% of Dathorn account members were not satisfied with the account suspension policy Dathorn has. Still Dathorn will not act, thats how much they listen to their customers.

http://forums.dathorn.com/showthread.php?t=1893&page=1&pp=10

Now I want to highlite yet another incident (there have been a few) of Dathorns (Andrews) non-caring attitutde toward YOUR customers. There has recently been an upgrade to software involving Horde, a web based e-mail client which is VERY useful to those that travel a lot.

One of my clients has a team of professionals in the IT industry that do travel globally and utilise the Horde solution amongst others. I created a trouble ticket explaining that they could no longer login to Horde and that there were no error messages, as others also having Horde problems were displaying in the forum.

Even though I felt that to be clear, here is the response I received:
"For us to be able to assist you you must provide us with the error messages."

I replied again there are no error messages and to be short, got a similar answer. So do I go back to my customer as Dathorn does crying for error messages? No, as I value my customers. Eventually, I found the fault and it was due to the upgrade.

The next issue is that all the accounts seem to have lost their contacts etc, which I just passed on not really thinking to much of as I expected a simple fix. What do I get...
"Horde address books were apparently lost in the upgrade, it certainly wasn't something that was supposed to occur. We recommend using software on your local computer to manage contacts."

Laughable! I went hot when I read this.

Dathorn expects me to go back to them and say that!!! Imagine the reaction I am going to get. This is what I replied:
""We recommend using software on your local computer to manage contacts" - so you're trying to put me out of business? You REALLY expect me to say that to a customer!?"

And this was Andrews form of an apology:
"What you say to your customers is up to you, I was just informing you."


Nice guy - a real charmer.


So this is what I am dealing with. I have lost a customer due to the thread mentioned above and now I am faced with probably losing another one.

Don't get me wrong, there are other support technicians that I have no problem with, but they seem to be from another company, some kind of third party support? Anyway, a totally different attitude than what Andrew has. However anything that requires Admin access is down to Andrew... and then you know you're in for a bumpy ride.

This is a side of Dathorn you have to live with if you host here. Personally I cannot afford to. No matter how cheap Dathorn may be, in the long run... its too damned expensive!

So now I have to explain to my client that they were utter idiots for using Horde in the way it was supposed to be used!? At least, reading between the lines, that seems to be Dathorns response.


Regards

[openbox]

Did you ever back up your account or have you purchased Dathorn's back up service? If so, that may be a viable option to retreive your missing info.

[w3it]

Did you ever back up your account or have you purchased Dathorn's back up service? If so, that may be a viable option to retreive your missing info.

Its a cPanel issue to do with the upgrade of Horde apparently. At this juncture, the data seems irretrievable, backup or not.

[openbox]

Its a cPanel issue to do with the upgrade of Horde apparently. At this juncture, the data seems irretrievable, backup or not.

I understand your problem, my point was that if you had the data somewhere besides in the cPanel config or on the server, you might be able to extract the data you are missing.

[Frank Hagan]

I recently started the following thread, and at the time of writing, 40% of Dathorn account members were not satisfied with the account suspension policy Dathorn has. Still Dathorn will not act, thats how much they listen to their customers.

Well, there's certainly no law keeping anyone here. Do you really think 40% of Dathorn's customers are unhappy based on a forum poll? I don't think that many of Dathorn's customers are masochists.

The hosting business is very competitive. If you find a better fit for you and your customers, then you should take advantage of it. There are certainly plenty of hosts out there that can sell you shared reseller accounts.

My experience has been that Dathorn does indeed listen and react to their customers. But they won't hold your hand. If you don't have a back up of important data, they won't shed a tear or say something to make you feel better. If you didn't really read and understand the TOS, they won't give you a lot of time to sooth you and explain things to you.

If your TOS doesn't include all the terms Dathorn has in their TOS, then I would say you have made some bad business decisions. If your intro letter didn't tell your customers to make sure they back up their own data ... or pay you to do it ... then you have a lot more faith in computers than most of us here.

Listen, its OK if you go somewhere else to get hosting. It might feel better to try and start an insurrection, but even if you succeed in getting everyone else to agree with you and leave Dathorn, you still have to find a new host, change your TOS to match that host's TOS, and refine your business practices. So your time might be better spent finding a better host.

[Monolith]

You expect far too much for what you're paying at DIS. If you want that kind of hold-your-hand service, you're going to have to pay for it. Stop complaining.

[w3it]

Well, there's certainly no law keeping anyone here.

Ok...

Do you really think 40% of Dathorn's customers are unhappy based on a forum poll? I don't think that many of Dathorn's customers are masochists.

No, thats not what I said or what the poll is about.

As for the rest of your comment, you seem to have missed the point and not grasped what has happened.

Thanks anyway.

[w3it]

You expect far too much for what you're paying at DIS. If you want that kind of hold-your-hand service, you're going to have to pay for it. Stop complaining.

Do I really. If a client uses software as it is supposed to be used and the host service upgrades that software, I expect it to work as before only hopefully enhanced due to the upgrade.

Are you saying its fine that Dathorn upgrade and lose data in the process...

>Stop complaining.
Steady on old chap. I choose to write in the forum as I am interested in other view points and that is what the forum is for. I recognise that this is a license for the Dathorn Die Hards to attack, none the less, other more defined comments are actually worth the time to read.


Regards

[sfoma]

You expect far too much for what you're paying at DIS. If you want that kind of hold-your-hand service, you're going to have to pay for it. Stop complaining.

Expecting a Dathorn provided software to operate properly after an upgrade is asking too much? Interesting thought process.

[ChrisTech]

Expecting a Dathorn provided software to operate properly after an upgrade is asking too much? Interesting thought process.

And expecting the customer to backup his account ???

He sure doesn't seem interested in it, though he bashes for it. Wonder what happens when a hard drive fails. Wonder what the blame will be then?

Honestly, if the customer isn't happy with the service provided here, he should find a new host, that can meet his needs. I know I sure wouldn't be wasting time bitching, when I could be moving if it required it.

[sdjl]

If a client uses software as it is supposed to be used and the host service upgrades that software, I expect it to work as before only hopefully enhanced due to the upgrade.

Oh if it were only that simple. Lets look at the material world. Essentially you're saying that if you buy a product off the shelf and the author of that software then makes a change, you want it to be updated in your copy of the software instantaneously.
Name a product that does that without some kind of user interaction in the process?

Lets see.. windows... You have to tell the product to do automatic updates, it won't do it by itself and even if it does, it tells you what's happening.
Antivirus... Whilst it may update the definitions automatically, normally it will tell you new updates are available, which you then have to trigger.
Mac OS X... My updater runs once week, telling me when it finds new software to install.
Firefox... You have to click a button to get it to check for new updates.
The list runs on..

What i'm trying to point out is that whilst it's nice to think that things will update themselves when someone in authority makes a change, it isn't always the case. This is why most of the scripts provided for installation under cPanel have a simple "Upgrade previous installation" option to run. It only takes a few minutes if everything goes correctly and i personally don't think it's unreasonable, as a host running a business, to occasionally check that your users scripts are up to date.

I just thought i'd point out to you the following few extracts from the DIS AUP and TOS documents that you agreed to when you signed up to an account:

You are responsible for any misuse of your account, even if the inappropriate activity was committed by a friend, family member, guest or employee. Therefore, you must take steps to ensure that others do not gain unauthorized access to your account. In addition, you may not use your account to breach security of another account or attempt to gain unauthorized access to another network or server.

Suspension of Service or Cancellation: DIS reserves the right to suspend network access to any customer if in the judgment of the DIS network administrators the customer's account is the source or target of the violation of any of the other terms of the AUP or for any other reason which DIS chooses.

I wish you every luck with your new host.

David

[sfoma]

What i'm trying to point out is that whilst it's nice to think that things will update themselves when someone in authority makes a change, it isn't always the case.

You are confused. Dathorn upgraded the server and it broke the webmail software. This point is not in dispute by Dathorn.

[AndrewT]

I normally don't like to get involved in topics that are in this particular forum, but I do want to clarify something that some may not quite understand without having read other related threads.

We have acknowledged the issue with the Horde address books. This was caused by the cPanel upgrades that were done this past week along with the MySQL, PHP, and cPanel Pro upgrades. However, only a limited number of people have reported having this problem (currently 4 to be exact, out of well over 2000). Which would explain why we did not have any problems during our testing phases of this upgrade. Only one of these users has submitted a ticket on it (the thread starter here), which we are still trying to work with to see if we can retreive these address book entries.

I am sorry that this occured. We obviously did not intend for it to happen and wouldn't have proceeded with these upgrades had any problem even existed prior to this. We tested the process on our own servers first, then cpanel04 was upgraded and tested for a couple of days and finally cpanel05 and cpanel09b were upgraded and tested for a few more days. We did not experience a single problem during these tests.

Once again, I apologize.

[thewave]

I normally don't like to get involved in topics that are in this particular forum, but I do want to clarify something that some may not quite understand without having read other related threads.

We have acknowledged the issue with the Horde address books. This was caused by the cPanel upgrades that were done this past week along with the MySQL, PHP, and cPanel Pro upgrades. However, only a limited number of people have reported having this problem (currently 4 to be exact, out of well over 2000). Which would explain why we did not have any problems during our testing phases of this upgrade. Only one of these users has submitted a ticket on it (the thread starter here), which we are still trying to work with to see if we can retreive these address book entries.

I am sorry that this occured. We obviously did not intend for it to happen and wouldn't have proceeded with these upgrades had any problem even existed prior to this. We tested the process on our own servers first, then cpanel04 was upgraded and tested for a couple of days and finally cpanel05 and cpanel09b were upgraded and tested for a few more days. We did not experience a single problem during these tests.

Once again, I apologize.

I think its admirable to have posted the above explanation and apology. However, if you had sent those last two paragraphs to the person who submitted the ticket, instead of whats below, this topic may not even be here.

"Horde address books were apparently lost in the upgrade, it certainly wasn't something that was supposed to occur. We recommend using software on your local computer to manage contacts."
and
What you say to your customers is up to you, I was just informing you

Originally Posted by ChrisTech
And expecting the customer to backup his account ???

He sure doesn't seem interested in it, though he bashes for it. Wonder what happens when a hard drive fails. Wonder what the blame will be then?

Please, lets not be too hard on the person(s) about backups. I remember what happened to the original forum here.

[AndrewT]

Another customer finally did submit a trouble ticket regarding these address books, these were not recoverable and will likely be the same for any other account that is missing their address book. I do apologize for this once again, we've never had a cPanel upgrade actually delete data like this nor would we have proceeded to upgrade all servers had any problems occurred during our testing.