AdverTERRIBLE

GG Studio. They decided to screw sidestep the whole under construction page thing and just put their half-finished website right out there for public ridicule.

Click on their all-Flash (we’ll get to that later) website to see level after hideous level of failure.

This rant is a little departure from my usually fodder of bad ads. Today let’s talk about how poor customer support from your vendors affects you ability to perform for clients.

Case Study Subject: GoDaddy.com

This survey I filled out after one support call and two chats really sums it up.

I contact customer support because a large number of emails started generating from my dedicated server last night. As there are no mailing list programs in use on the server, that usually means a hacker has got into the site.

All I wanted to know was which domain the emails were coming from so I could get the issue resolved.

The phone customer support rep was not knowledgeable about my dedicated server. He told me he did not know anything about it.

He referred me to the chat help.

Waited for a while on chat, then got John D. and felt like I was pulling teeth to get any sort of useful information out of him.

He directed me to my mail logs, which I downloaded and asked for help interpreting. Just wanted to know how to tell which email address the messages were coming from.

Turns out, my server started generating system emails last night and I reached my daily limit at about 3AM. Apparently Apache was stuck in a loop of some sort. The cause of this is still unknown.

Keep in mind that I had not made any changes to the server and it had been online for 200 days. I did nothing to generate the emails. They just started sending.

Just when it looked like I might get something I could use, there was a technical issue on his end and we got disconnected.

I had to wait another 5-6 minutes before getting another rep who had to read through the transcript to get up to speed on the conversation. Shouldn’t I have been given priority since I had already waited once before?

He was less than helpful and just wanted to refer me to Google or paid support for an issue that I did not cause.

He tried to send me to the help page that I had already been reading. It told me how to find the logs I had already found, but included no information on how to fix a problem (ie: stop the messages from generating). The rep said that if I couldn’t figure it out from there, I should Google it.

I asked him why I had not received any of these system-generated emails. He directed me to the page to change the email address system messages go to. My regular email address was already there.

Again I asked him why I had not received any of these system-generated emails. He said the system only sends emails if there is an error.

Why, then, were 1,000 emails messages generated by Apache that caused my daily relay limit to max out and who did they go to and why did I not receive any of them?

-No answer.

Will restarting my server interrupt the loop?

-Maybe. Not sure.

Can we lift the SMTP suspension because I’m obviously not spamming?

-I can’t do that.

When will it be lifted?

-In about an hour or so. I don’t have an exact time.

My clients who use this server will be coming to work within the hour and expect to have email. Can we help them?

-Nothing I can do.

I understand that occasionally things happen with web servers. I’ve been a web developer for 14 years. It’s extremely disturbing though, that my server can just start going bonkers when I haven’t touched it and your reps won’t lift a finger to help me at least identify a solution without me paying you an hourly rate.

They made me feel like they just did not care.

I’ve been a customer for four years with a dedicated server account and several domain registrations. This experience has seriously got me thinking of moving all my business to another company.

Very Disappointed,

[my name here]

Dude. Pretty girls in tight t-shirts aren’t the only thing I’m looking for in a dedicated server. You gotta have some brains, too.