Cochinoman tech, sushi, poker
Always up – probably true
fast – not the customer service
easy – certainly not the customer service
What a nightmare.
Currently, I use 3 different hosting companies. Each has their pros and cons. One that I use is a local company called globat.com. I pay by the year so I don’t have to deal with them very often.
First some background info. When I first signed up, they were supposed to send me a refund, but I found out after the fact that you only get a refund if you use your credit card, and not if you use paypal. Funny how they forgot to mention that. Anyway, in my second year, Globat changed their programs around and offered a cheaper plan than what I had, with more features, including 1,000 Gigs of disk space (instead of the 5 gigs I had).
So I called them and the catch was, I had to pay $40 setup fee. But after doing the math, it turned out to still be cheaper anyway, AND I got more features. So I decided to go ahead with it. When I was signing up, I found out that even though their front page says, “$6.95 / month,” what they don’t tell you is that you have to sign up for 2 years to get that price. Oh well. Even at the 1 year price of $7.95, it was still cheaper than my old plan.
So everything seemed to be good.
But today, I tried to login and got a message that I didn’t pay my invoice. The invoice was for the $40 setup fee that I had paid back in May and thought it was taken care of. Obviously, it wasn’t.
So I called customer service and everything seemed okay. They confirmed that indeed I had paid and they would credit it towards the invoice. Next, they had a new invoice for the following 12 months.
But there were 2 charges on the invoice that I needed removed. The first was for unlimited sub-domains, which was included free with the new plan, and the second was the yearly domain registration. Since I had moved my domain to godaddy.com, I should not have to pay. All this seemed obvious to me, but not to them apparently. In any case, the customer service guy told me that he could not remove these extra charges, and that he would transfer me to sales.
Sales?
You and I know damn well the sales department can’t help me but before I can say, “WTF?”, on I go to sales. The guy in sales sounded like a true car salesman. Anywoo, as expected, he sends me right back to customer service. Luckily, I got a lady that knew a little more about how to help me, and indeed managed to take the charges off. Yes!
But this is after being on with them for 57 minutes. Yes, I know the exact time in minutes because I have Vonage which tells me the exact length for each and every call.
After hanging up, I try again to pay the invoice. When I tried to pay by my prefered method of using paypal, I get an error message saying that my credit card was refused. Interesting, since I wasn’t using a credit card. So I call customer service again. This time, only for 5 minutes. She told me I have to use a credit card now because apparently, it turns out they no longer accept paypal. Strange how the screen showed paypal as my prefered method of payment anyway.
Okay, I’m getting tired of this bullshit so I decide to pay by credit card to get it over with. I enter my number and press “pay.” Another error message. I call back customer service, this time it’s just 1 minute. They tell me that my mailing address doesn’t match my credit card address. I tell them that it’s my personal credit card so the addresses are different. She tells me that in order to process my request, I have to temporarily change my address, submit the payment, then change the address back.
WTF?! What year is this again? Let’s take Amazon.com, for example. They allow you to have a billing address, a shipping address, and a separate credit card address. Yes, 3 addresses. Globat has one. Are these guys just learning to use the Internet or something?
As you may have surmised, this experience didn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about globat.com. In fact, I think I’ll start figuring out my plans on moving to another host.
More rants: Globat nightmare part 2
