I was bored so I thought I’d share with you the websites that are in my feed reader (which is Google Reader). They are:
Anna’s Blog
Caleb Was Here
Give Away of the Day (hat tip Mark)
Homeland Stupidity
All in the Cards
Photomatt
Qn5 Blog
Ryan.Connect
Simply Complex
Sporadic Nonsense
What Makes You Happy?
StL Today Cardinals
Yahoo Sports- Cardinals
I also have on my Google Homepage Wired Top Stories, Slashdot, BBC, and New York Times. All good reads. What’s in your feed reader?
Because of the increasing number of complaints about inadequate service, suggestions for improvements, and general unhappiness of Site5 customers, Site5 decided to remove the service forums from their message board. The other forums are still there, but if you were posting because your server was down, not responding, adding domains, and other service related questions, you no longer have a place to go. Of course, their official reasoning was because it was creating a problem for support.
Today, in their open discussion forum, a post was made asking what others thought about them closing these forums. Many people responded during the post’s short lifespan, including Site5 staff itself. Obviously, once management (I’m talking about you, Mr. Lightner) found this out, it was deleted. Luckily, another forum member posted a pdf on his site of what was said. You can read it here. Now, call me crazy, but having support forums where the community can support seems like it should reduce trouble tickets for support. I can probably come up with 5 occasions off the top of my head in which I didn’t have to open a ticket because I found the information in the forums. If anything, this new policy will only increase support’s already busy workload. Don’t be fooled by the response times on Site5’s homepage. At one time (when I signed up) they were this low, but they neglect their customers in order to oversell their hosting and try new products to entice people, none of which are actually implemented (think RapifReflex, Webmail 2.0, Flashback). They say they respond in an average of 25 minutes, let’s take a look at some of mine:
Avg. Site5 Resp. Time: 211.5 minutes
Avg. Site5 Resp. Time: 354.6 minutes
Avg. Site5 Resp. Time: 84.5 minutes
And most of the time, they don’t even answer your question, so you have to wait another 100+ minutes for another response.
The thread also stated that management will respond to each and every one of the emails that people send regarding this issue. I find this to be a joke as well. I put in a management review ticket months ago with no response. I emailed Matt Lightner and never got a response. I even had a thread put into the Management Review hidden forum and got no response. And like another customer said, site5 webhosting…the only way to deal with bad pr is to delete it. (by the way, this site is hosted on A Small Orange now.)
EDIT: It seems they have added some forums for “customer-to-customer” support. My faith has still not been restored though. Unless they start listening to their customers, stop overselling, and quit with software promises that never get implamented, they are a sinking ship.
The host search continues. I’ve literally signed up with a few hosts and quickly aborted. I’m not going to say their names because I’m sure they are great hosts. Their back-end just wasn’t for me. I’ve got to hand it to Site5 for their design and ability to make an intuitive back-end. Since Site5 has yet to do something catastrophic, like lose my entire site or rip me off in some way, like I’ve heard other hosting companies have done, I will continue hosting with them for the time being. That’s not to say I’ve given up the hunt for a great host. I’m waiting for one that suites me in terms of cost and resources. Hopefully, before I leave Site5, I will get some sort of response from their management. It’s not like I’m looking for a free year of hosting, though that would be nice. I’m looking for acknowledgement of their mistakes and an apology. That is all. Is it really that hard?
It appears that I will be searching for a new host and leaving Site5, the host that no less than 6 months ago was recommended by many in the blogging world. A lot has changed since then. I’ve voiced my concerns to management of Site5, and have not heard a thing back. After going months without hearing anything back from management, I emailed Matt Lightner, the founder of the company. Again, I did not receive a response. Last night, I left my thoughts in the Open Forum on their website. They used to have a customer feedback forum, but for some reason they took it down. I’d be willing to bet that it is because of the situation that has plagued me over the past few months. I know I’m not alone. Here is what I posted last night. I would post the exact link, but it’s in a place that can only be seen by management. Am I expecting to get anywhere with the post, absolutely not, because I knew their increased censorship would only allow it to be displayed for a short period. My hunches were right, and I was notified via private message that it had been moved. I’m just glad it was up for a couple hours so other people can see what has been going on. Without further ado, here is the post in its entirety.
Site5 is really starting to worry me. Over the past several months, I’ve seen their level of customer service drop dramatically. It seems they are too focused on building their next big thing that they are forgetting about what brought most of us here to begin with, their customer service. RapidReflex, FlashBack, and other things, have seemed to push all thoughts of actually helping people out of their minds. And where have these great new services gotten them (and us)? I’ve had troubles for months with the peony server, and have had numerous tickets submitted, and one with a management review flag on. No response from management. After going more than a month with no response, I emailed Matt Lightner directly. No response again. Not even a “go away, quit bothering us.” Should have I requested to move servers back when I was having problems? Maybe, but just as this was happening, new plans were rolled out and sales and support were getting tickets thrown at them left and right. Also at the same time these upgrades were going through, there were numerous complaints and concerns about the time it was taking support to move the accounts to a new server. Weeks were literally going by for these users. Peony still has problems at least once a week.
Two days ago, I submitted a simple billing question. This was the day before the new billing system went live. Of course, I didn’t get a response until a day later. This response was about them not being able to look up my account because the new billing system was being pushed through. The support person did say however, that they could answer my question without seeing my records because it was just a simple legacy plan vs new plan question. So I replied, and do you know what? I’ve still not heard anything back. I’d like to see you guys put 2+ day response time on your home page.
Yes, i do realize that you implemented a “once in a company’s lifetime” update and that you had troubles with it, but a responsible company would make sure that the customers are taken care of when all is fixed. What could you have done? More testing before implementing jumps to mind. Or, the more obvious, keep the billing team on past 6 to help make up for the day or so they were down because of this.
What is becoming of Site5? Where has the company that I came to love and suggested to everyone gone? They are dangerously close to becoming another Dreamhost. Anyway, . I just hope this doesn’t fall on deaf ears and site5 really does try and get their act together. By the way, whatever happened to the suggestions and improvements forum? It would seem now, more than ever, that forum is needed.
Here is a response that was left, and his prediction came true:
This thread will probably get moved to the “hidden” – management and staff only forum the minute it’s spotted by a member of staff… It’s against the forum TOS to give Site5 “Advice” and feedback – Oh; that should just be “negative feedback” – I got the drill now ;)
But before it does… I hear ya – And you’re not the only one. Site5 is growing; they’ve got their fingers in a lot of pies and are launching products too fast… Products are becoming unstable and are getting withdrawn almost immediately – RapidReflex and what seems to be the now FlashBack are just a couple of examples.
Guarantee’s are being “altered” to suit Site5’s pocket and their not playing by their own terms or service and marketing campaigns – If management would like to contact me regarding this; I’ll be happy to explain more than 1 loophole :D especially when your some of your staff are so un-knowledged about the service being offered; they are even quoting wrong.
So my friends, do not use Site5. If you are unable to get to my blog, it may be because they shut down my site, for no reason other than to prevent people from reading about how crappy their company has become. Does anyone have a host they can recommend?
I bought blogitforward.com a while back. After not doing anything with it for a long time, I decided to do something. People in #wordpress suggested I make a mock web 2.0 site and have it link back to blogitback.com (which I also own) and have that link back to blogitforward.com. I was trying to think of something cool to do this but came up a blank. I moved on with no ideas and was looking for a cool sand game that Podz suggested. I couldn’t find the link anywhere and Podz was nowhere to be found. Finally, I remembered I took a screenshot to show Podz. It was when Podz finally came back around that he recommended I run scuttle for all the bookmarks that I don’t want clogging up Firefox or my links on my blog. So, in about 10 minutes, I had Scuttle up and running on blogitforward.com. Anyone can register and dump those cool links that they can always have access to. Sign up and start linking! I’ve listed a few already.