Mostly Bollogs, I'm afraid

But occasionally, a glimmer of truth.
If you find one, please let me know.



Tuesday 3 April 2012

ISP

Cool. I pay a lot of money every month for a service, whereby I can use, and resell, internet services.

I don't use it much but when I do I just expect it to work.

So, today I uploaded a crock of stuff to demonstrate some HTML5/CSS3/AJAX etc, with a Perl backend. And because I'm looking for a new contract I touted it around some agents and suchlike. Then I looked and it didn't work. My homepage wouldn't even load.

I rang the ISP who "fixed" it. When I say "fixed" it, I mean moved it to another server which didn't have Perl installed correctly, or at all, so instead of executing a script it just dumped the source on to the user's screen, so all my code, passwords etc. were there for all to see. So now not only do all my contacts have all my passwords, but also I look a complete idiot.

An hour and a few phone calls later all was again well, assuming it's still working. Actually, I've just had a look. It isn't.

The response was more like "Oh" than "Hell, we'd better credit your account with a few months of service charges.

My question is this: should I say who the company is? Or is this abysmal level of service acceptable these days. Do leave a comment, please.

3 comments:

Woodsy42 said...

If you are certain it was their fault then course you should. It would be nice if they sent a letter to your contacts to confirm it was their fault too.

Super Sam said...

I understand your earlier twitter question now. They have definitely misconfigured or not installed perl.

Acceptable service these days? No.
Typical service? Yes.

I run a couple servers and frankly I've given up on getting any decent support. One lot setup a dedicated server with the swap partition starting at sector 0, omitting the freebsd 64k boot space and over time that space got wiped and the system was rendered unbootable.

Pete said...

Personally, I would bin them asap. The biggest issue for me would not have been the display of all code and passwords but the damage done to my reputation. how the hell can you retain clints after something like that happens?

We are now with our fourth dedicated server company in 5 years. Whilst they promise you the earth, excellent customer support etc they rarely avhieve this.

We are now with a company called Hivelocity running two unmanaged heavy duty servers and I cannot fault these guys.