Tom Raftery's - Things to Come

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 Iâ€™ve come across. Not only are they ignorant, theyâ€™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 Rafteryâ€™s blog about Hosting365â€™s service.

First of all I am very sorry you have that opinion of us. 2005 was a tough year for Hosting365 – weâ€™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.

Iâ€™m not going to try and pretend we had a perfect customer experience in 2005 – we didnâ€™t – and weâ€™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 Iâ€™d really like to show you the investment weâ€™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.

Blacknight Solutions contacted me this afternoon and asked me to move all my sites off their servers. They no longer want my business. Why? Because I criticised their customer service after they lost all my podcasts, didn’t tell me about it until I discovered it a couple of weeks later, and when I did report it to them, they blamed me for asking for a temporary home for my podcasts (untrue).

In the comments of that post, Blacknight MD Michele Neylon admitted:

our handling of the â€œpodcast situationâ€? could have been better

I decided to do a quick search through all my posts relating to Blacknight on this blog. I found fifteen posts referencing Blacknight. Of those fifteen posts (below) ten were positive or at worst neutral about Blacknight (mentioning them as my hoster in passing). In many cases I linked to them using the word “host” or “hoster” which can only have been good for their SEO.

Recently I have noted a decline in the standards of their customer service and my most recent five posts were negative about them.

I will always highlight good service when I receive it and poor service too.

It appears that Blacknight are incapable of taking criticism. If you criticise them, they ask you to take your business elsewhere.

Way to build a customer base guys.

For anyone thinking of hosting with Blacknight, beware what you say about them or you may find yourself out on your ear too.

Here are all the posts I found on this blog referencing Blacknight:

Tom Raftery's – Things to Come

Category: hosting

Hosting 365 and customer service

Blacknight Solutions don't tolerate criticism

Tom Raftery – Technology Evangelist, Podcast Host, & Influencer – Sustainability, Supply Chain, Energy, EVs