green tea ROCKS

Switched hosts today - because the one I switched FROM is CRAPTASTIC

I forgot to mention that I switched green tea ROCKS over to a different host… because the host it was on (netfirms, cough) totally sucks butt.  At Netfirms, customer service is pretty much NON-EXISTENT, but you’re in luck as long as you’re looking for a SALESPERSON (so you can buy hosting services and not get the advertised 24/7 support when you need it!) and you’re definitely in luck if you’re NOT looking for help from tech support, or any sort of support for that matter!

.. Maybe you’ll be luckier than I was today, but don’t expect even the sales rep to be nice to you.. I mean, I hope the sales rep you get is friendly, but I’m just saying, don’t count on it- the one salesperson I finally got through to via live-chat was super-not-nice-or-helpful, and apparently it’s his job to TYPE LIKE THIS TO CUSTOMERS WHO ARE SIMPLY ASKING WHEN THE DATABASES WILL BE FUNCTIONING NORMALLY AGAIN AND IF HE COULD POSSIBLY LET YOU KNOW BECAUSE NOBODY IS PICKING UP THE PHONES, AND THERE’S NO NOTICE OF SUCH AN OUTAGE ON THE SITE, NOR WAS AN EMAIL SENT OUT REGARDING IT!  Well excuse the shit out of me if I’m just trying to get an answer out of SOMEONE from the company about the issue.  Yes, Yonathon (if that is your real name, seriously), I’m talking to you. 

Jeez I wasn’t even mad, or rude, for that matter, at least not until he yelled at me in the TEXT chat.  I just wanted an answer as to when the database issues would be fixed.  A simple, “I’m sorry, but we really don’t know” would have been better than simply ignoring my question and then proceeding to USE CAPS TO YELL AT ME VIA LIVE CUSTOMER SERVICE CHAT THAT THIS WAS SALES .  Yelling at current customer in the sales chat?  Not the best thing for you to do.  Paying customers like me don’t like to be treated like boils on your bottom, especially because I didn’t start the chat with some rude smart-alecky remark about how much you must hate your life because your company sucks.  Besides, I think I have a right to get a straight and honest reason for WHY the damn databases aren’t working.

I still have one site hosted with this craptastically crappy host Netfirms, but I’ll be moving that one very, very soon.  It experienced the same problems that green tea ROCKS did, but I didn’t move it yet.  It’s fine right now, but this isn’t an issue of just uptime or just databases or just whatever.  This is about the whole package-> and halfway decent customer service is part of that package.  I know I’m just one single blogger in the humongous world wide web, and I’m not asking you to kiss my ass, but you could at least instruct your amazingly rude salespeople to be nice to customers.  Oh, and answer the damn customer service phone lines once in a while.  With all the money you make ripping customers off, Netfirms, you’d think you’d at least be able to keep the customer service lines manned, 24/7, as is stated on your website.  Why is it that the few times I have tried to call, I ended up waiting forever and not talking to anyone at all?

I know you’re not so expensive, and that’s mo-fo-ing great, but you know what?  The other host I use offers cheap plans too, and sometimes I get irritated with disruptions in service, but at least every time I have a problem the customer service reps are NICE to me.  They don’t type in ALL CAPS TO SHOW ME WHAT BIG STRONG MORE-IMPORTANT-THAN-YOU MEN THEY ARE.  Niceness goes a long way.  It really does.  I bet you never heard the saying, “You’ll catch more bees with honey than vinegar.”  Well, either you never heard it, or you must think it doesn’t apply here.

..Well, it serves me right for succumbing to their lure without doing a little bit of research first.  You’d think they’d work hard show you how GREAT it would be to stay with them and pay the regular prices after that deal expires.  The deal actually ended for me months ago, and in retrospect, I guess that’s why I never really  let the little issues bother me before: because it was practically free.  It’s a whole different ball game once you’re paying monthly, and when it’s free or close to it you tend to ignore the fact that you can never get straight answers from anyone in the company, or the fact that the databases will randomly go down, or that your sites will randomly go offline, and then magically reappear.  If they were nice and apologetic about it, and maybe acted like I was at least somewhat valuable as a customer, I would have overlooked those, and well, I wouldn’t be writing this entry.  So if you caught a deal and you were using them practically free, Netfirms is fine, but if you have to pay their regular rates, they’re NOT a good company to work with.

I didn’t check around for feedback before I was pulled in by the $10 for a year sale, and when I did go looking for other customers’ experiences, I felt so stupid for not doing so beforehand; but I didn’t cancel my account, because I decided to simply make the best of the situation.

I’ve had itty bitty problems before, but I did not throw myself a pity party over them.  Do you want to know why?  In addition to the fact that for the first year it was only $10, I also didn’t bother calling in, ever, figuring that these issues (random downtime, databases not connecting, pockets of ultra-slow connection speeds, mod-rewrite in Wordpress NON-existent) would work themselves out.  And whatever, because, it was practically free.  Not calling in is probably part of the reason why I stayed with this host that I do not recommend (cough netfirms) for so long, because if I had actually gotten through to a customer service rep every time I tried to call, I probably would have been treated incredibly shabbily at least 50% of the time, and I probably would have canceled my practically gratis account anyway.

Netfirms is not the biggest hellhole of a company that you can deal with, but they definitely need to improve their customer service, and pronto, or else it won’t just be my piddly little account they’ll be losing.  I’m not saying that the customer always has to be right, but you should at least treat them with a little bit of respect when they call in regarding the quality of the product they are currently paying for… all those horrible testimonials aren’t exactly helping to increase my confidence in this company, either.

Moral of the story?  Do your homework before buying hosting.  Oh, and if you plan on using Wordpress on your host, make sure you can use clean urls on that host (if you want those, and who doesn’t!  They’re search engine friendly!), because you sure as hell can’t do that on Netfirms unless you mess with the .htaccess file and you add /index.php/ into the permalink structure, which really is not a big deal, but I know that many bloggers out there don’t even know what an .htaccess file is, let alone what would go in it. 

Netfirms gets a big thumbs down from me and, apparently, a lot of other people (check out the links I added above to read everything from tiny complaints to complete HORROR stories about them.. and it’s all pretty much related to horrible customer service). 

If not for their inability to provide even a semblance of quality customer service, then I wouldn’t have switched.  Seriously, sometimes it’s as simple as being nice and at least pretending like you want to help a (paying) customer who wasn’t being rude or argumentative in the first place.

Maybe Yonathon the rude sales rep was on the rag, or maybe he got kicked in the balls earlier in the day, I don’t know, but as I told him/her at the end of the conversation when he/she got rude, right before I Xed out the window: “You shouldn’t get a blogger angry,”   (yeah, I know, SUPER FREAKING corny) because what happens is, that blogger will post all about how much Netfirms sucks, using such keywords as SUCKS and BAD CUSTOMER SERVICE and CRAPTASTIC, and that post is just bound to show up in someone’s search for feedback about Netfirms, and you know what?  This post just may make that person think twice before buying anything from your company, just to save himself from the potential aggravation of dealing with you and the headaches that go with it.

Here’s a list of the sites I linked to from this post that show feedback regarding Netfirms:

• http://www.flashdev.ca/article/netfirms-sucks/
• http://www.sandyofftopic.com/category/netfirms/
• http://www.vistainter.com/reviews/N/netfirms.com/
• http://www.oshawapilot.ca/?s=netfirms
• http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/270/RipOff0270323.htm
• http://drupal.org/node/131507
• http://www.free-webhosts.com/reviews/NetFirms.php

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