The Screaming Viking

My…lord…these people are horrible.

I posted on here about moving to a different host.  I hadn’t gotten around to posting how I finished up with surpass yet…and maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t because as it turned out, I wasn’t actually finished with them.  At this point, I’m not sure if they will continue to harass me or what.

I found a new host for a reasonable price and moved everything over.  The move went smooth, the only hitch was I needed a peardb module installed.  It took me a second to understand how to actually install it, but looking through their cpanel interface I found that I was making it far more complicated than it needed to be.  The module was installed fine and things were rolling smoothly.  After I was satisfied that things had been migrated and email was being delivered correctly, I contacted surpass to discontinue my service.  I was not looking for money or anything other than them taking me out of their system and not having to see an email from them ever again.  Much to my surprise, their accounting department refunded me my prorated per month charges until the end of my commitment.  I had signed up for 3 years at 140 or so, I had till Jan 2k12 left with them…so they refunded me the balance, 36 bucks, via paypal.  Wait…now that I’m thinking about that…how could they have known my paypal information?  I’d paid them with a credit card up to the last month, the last month I didn’t want to put CC info in so I did a one time paypal transaction.  It’s associated with my gmail account…which is not the account associated with the surpass account (remember that problem?) yet they pushed the money into the pay pal associated with my gmail account.  This could have been a random buddy’s paypal…jfc.  I just thought of that while typing this out.  Granted, it worked out so it’s not such a huge deal, but it really illustrates just how half assed these people were about business and customer service.  Why wouldn’t you confirm the paypal account to refund the money to?

So now I have a few bucks back, I’m rocking out a decent service with another company and I’m golden.  About a week passes and I get this email from surpass:

Good day,

We are reopening this ticket for you today as we had been awaiting a reply from your
end regarding the previous issue(s) at hand. We simply want to know if you are still
having issues, and if so, if you could please provide us with an update to the
problems we will be more than happy to trouble shoot the problems for you.

If the problems documented in this ticket have been corrected, and you are
satisfied, then there is no need to reply to this ticket. We hope that you have a
great day.

Huh? What the hell are they talking about?  What freekin ticket do I have open with them?

I respond:

The incompetence of your company is nothing short of mind boggling.

I discontinued my service with you earlier this month.  My account was
cancelled and you issued me a refund for the unused time.  For the love of
Christ, is there no way to get away from you people?  Even when I have had
my service terminated you still harass me with emails.

Your company far and away provides the worst customer service experience I
have ever seen from the I.T. industry.  Please stop sending me emails.

thanks

Pretty straight forward, and I have no interest in being “decent” to these people. I’m sooooo tired of hearing from them.
They respond:

Hello,

Your account is canceled and the invoice has been settled so you should no longer
receive any e-mails from us.

Have a great day!

Regards,

Golly, now you check this out?  In all fairness I do not fault the tech that emailed me about the problem.  I’m sure they have some metric where they have to verify open incidents, make sure things are resolved…etc…etc.  I also don’t really expect that he should check account status before sending an email…what I do blame is whatever software package they have chosen to use that does not provide this information for them?  There should be some box that has big red letters “account cancelled”, maybe the tool should take all my helpdesk tickets out of the system or deactivate them when the account is cancelled…something.  Maybe those red letters are in place and the help desk monkey didn’t see them…but after working with this company I think it’s far more likely they have no way to verify that information.

My last email to them:

I "shouldn't" have received the first email today.

I hope one day every individual in your company has the pleasure of
dealing with an organization and miserable as your company is to deal with
on the whole.

Soooo tired of these people.  It appears I’m done dealing with them…for now.

A few years ago I made the decision to move techno from my home server to a hosted server.  I did this because of various service outages beyond my control (internet and power).  A guy I worked with at the time recommended surpasshosting.  He used them and they had been solid.  I checked them out, the price agreed with me…so I signed up.  I got things moved over very easily.  The only drawback imo was that I wasn’t able to use the same email system I had implemented on my server.  I really liked the way I got it setup to handle quarantining messages and so forth.  It was a small price to pay for increased stability.  Over all I was alright with their service, it was up…didn’t cause me too many problems and things rolled along quite smoothly.  Surprisingly enough I was able to function fine without root access…which is something I was concerned about.  For the price they were charging per month, you couldn’t hardly build a machine to do it (about 8 bucks a month with an ssl cert and dedicated IP).

Things were pretty good up until about 9 months ago now.  Out of no where their service just went to crap.  The connection was slow, IMAP connections were being dropped, I got an email because they figured I was using too much space outside of my public_html directory.  I used a couple gigs for pix which I kept outside of this directory, and I had a scripted backup system.  They got all kinds of pissed about this.  I moved the pix into the html dir, and had to stop using the backups…for whatever reason they were flipping out about it.  I was using about 500 meg.  Now I didn’t think of it at the time…but I expect they got all pissy about space because they were oversold and started to get concerned.  Unlimited space!!! doesn’t really mean unlimited.  I got all these problems “solved”…then I ran into an accounting/billing problem that pissed me off pretty severely.

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It looks like techno made the move alright.  Moving the website was a breeze.  I’m currently moving email messages that were stored on the server…I’m hoping there is no issue with this.  I tested with my own uid and there were no problems…we’ll see!

God these guys are irritating me.  If you look at each individual incident of downtime or “slowness” on it’s own they don’t look like a big deal…but it seems like there have been problems fairly regularly over the past 6ish months.  I thought it was just my head making the problems seem worse than they are…but a buddy at work that hipped me to these guys said the same thing.  He got a notice about “space usage” about the same time I did…and has noticed slowness…more downtime…ect.   When I first started up with these guys I thought their service was really good…there was no downtime that I can remember and the speed was pretty good.  It’s been a steady decline for the past little bit though.

I think I’m locked in to a 3 year agreement with these guys…I’m not sure.  It’s a pain to switch hosts, and outside of the blog…I don’t much care about email anymore.  I’m getting use to how gmail works and it seems to get through spam filters a little better than technohillbilly.