I haven’t written about Hosting365‘s customer service before now as I have no direct experience of it. I don’t host with Hosting365. However their reputation for customer service has been far from stellar. Almost as bad as Irish Broadband’s, I’m told.
Recently appointed marketing director of Hosting365, Ed Byrne is determined to change that.
In a comment on a recent post on this site, Paul Walsh of Segala said
Hosting 365 probably have the worst customer services I’ve come across. Not only are they ignorant, they’re technically crap.
Now, instead of attacking Paul, or throwing him off their servers, Ed contacted Paul privately by email and said:
I read your comment on Tom Raftery’s blog about Hosting365’s service.
First of all I am very sorry you have that opinion of us. 2005 was a tough year for Hosting365 – we’ll be putting up a long blog post about that soon – we went from 16 to over 30 staff and built 2 new support teams. I hope that customers now start seeing positive results from this.
I’m not going to try and pretend we had a perfect customer experience in 2005 – we didn’t – and we’re working to build back customer trust and deliver BETTER support – as we see it as our core driver of growth…
I would like to extend an invitation for you to come in and have a quick chat – show you around the facility. For our business – any business – reputation is absolutely key, so I’d really like to show you the investment we’ve made and get feedback as a customer, on what we should be focussing on.
When I spoke to Ed after my falling out with Blacknight, Ed very generously offered to help move all my sites and host them until I got sorted with a more permanent host, free of charge.
I told Ed that I really appreciated his offer but that if I did ask for his help I would insist on paying.
Now that is customer service – keep it up Ed.
UPDATE: – Just to clarify, I have no intention of moving to Hosting365, I just thought Ed’s attitude to customer service should be highlighted.
I’ll wait to see how long it takes them to mess up and have you blog about it in the midst of the issue.
Anyone want makes some bets on this? id say 3-4 months. Who else has a guess?
I hope Ed can make a difference. How long is he with 365? I’ve had some absolutely horrendous experiences with them. Most support mails are ignored. Those that are answered take 2 days. The only time I had any positive outcome from a support issue (in the past year or so) came from a friend of mine calling his friend, a manager in the company, and passing on the ticket number.
http://www.eoghanmccabe.com/naive-by-design/whatever-happened-to-hosting365-support/
Tom,
Steve is no moron, he see’s a great oppourtunity to take a customer from BKS which over the last few years he’s lost many to BKS.
Steve cracks his whip and instrcuts Ed to step in.
Ed like a good boy offers to help you in your “time of need”
You decide to blog on how good Hosting365’s customer service is.
You truly truly are a moron, and after many years of reading your blog and having a lot of respect for you this disapoints me.
One of our only “A-list” tech bloggers is nothing but a spoilt child.
Disgusted.
(Eoghan how do you get your shirts so white?)
If Tom has something negative to say you complain, if Tom has something positive to say, you complain.
Tom, why don’t you setup a Web 1.0 blog, but instead of you being the only one with write permission, allow commentators to write enlightening posts.
The fact that this debate is even happening in the open is an indication of how things have progressed.
Not that long ago mentioning anything negative about Hosting 365 support was effectively banned on Boards and Creative Ireland (both sites are in sponsorship deals with Hosting 365).
When I saw this post recently ( Extract from http://www.irishwebmasterforum.com 02-12-2006 “I have my own dedicated server with Hosting365 and, while I’ve found the service is great when it’s up-and-running, their support is seriously making me consider switching to someone else. Regularly fobbing me off the phone with the promise of callbacks that never arrive, mis-information from support staff, semi-resolved support queries… and, even on a dedicated package, support queries generally take 24-72 hours. That doesn’t include any follow-up correspondence that might be required. Not good. It’s difficult to leave as I’ll need to set-up everything on another server and I’ll need away out of the contract… but as everything’s going okay now, I’m happy to sit it out. I just hope the support improves. #The Menace�)
and this current thread it became clear to me that we are now in a much more open environment where consumers can comment about their experiences without posts being censored or getting nasty PM’s.
All to the good! Eoin
Couldn’t agree more Eoin.
Not only is response to this tread proof, Ed’s response was outstanding and demonstrates Hosting 365’s change to keep up with the times. As I said to Ed, I hope his colleagues in support improve also.
Yes, they can, however, have their hosting contracts terminated!
Here’s to the power of independent blogs:
Novara Matches Hosting365, beats them on customer service
http://www.novara.ie/news.php?id=33
Where are they today
Their website, and FAR MORE IMPORTANTLY, their customer websites have been down all morning today, they are experiencing “network problems”
So on Monday Register365 announce that they are withdrawing their free phone support from those on shared hosting in 7 days. We’re told we can still call – just at a euro per minute rate. We of course have other options like free live chat with someone in Krakow or we can enter the email ticketing system. Neither of which will provide very meaningful immediate feedback. Hosting/Register365 say it is to increase the efficiency of support but I am left wondering who this new efficiency really benefits.
Having had a plethora of support issues, some of which remain ongoing with little sign of resoluiton, I took exception to this move and decided to start a petition at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/h365 in order to try and get Register/Hosting365 to reverse this.
Not wishing to be underhand in any way I posted a comment to their blog informing them of same with a link to the petition. Amazing as it may seem, they actually removed the petition link from the comment without informing me despite the fact that Aidan McCarron finally engaged on one of the ongoing issues I am having exchanging several emails with me throughout the course of the day.
The issue in question was one I had brought to the attention of Stephen McCarron back last June just after the big outage having gotten no resolution from normal support channels. At that time he undertook to follow up the issue – he never did.
If the management can’t follow up on issues how are we to believe that those they manage will?
What is the value of providing a comments section on a blog if you censor the comments to your liking and then reply to them without actually engaging with the poster?
There is a very interesting discussion on this going on on Enterprise Ireland’s e-Business mailing list at the moment. I would recommend anyone interested in this area to have a read.
It seems to me that in the last year there has been a move in Hosting365 to shove all the shared hosting cutomers over to Register365 with no free phone support while keeping the more valuable co-located and dedicated hosting customers with Hosting365.
When I brought my clients to Hosting365 (and yes, it was ‘Hosting365’ I brought them to despite the fact most are on shared hosting plans) there was no such distinction. Now those shared hosting clients are being treated like second class citizens.
Hosting in Ireland is a problem.
I have had several issues with H365 that forced us to move to BK, now I’m having trouble with BK, it’s hosting tennis.
I had a shared server in the states years back and I never had a single problem!