kentkingery.com

Dear FatCow.com,

I switched to your hosting service from 1and1.com last January.  Continued problems with service interruptions, poor support, and pricing caused me to look for another place to put my various domains.  I found your ad in the back of a magazine, visited your site, and was quite impressed by what I saw.  I spoke to sales person on the phone and felt assured that FatCow.com was being run by people who a) knew what they were doing and b) cared about their customers.  But today I feel betrayed, and I have made the decision to move from your service to BlueHost. 

And the simple reason is that your customer interaction is quite awful.

On the morning of January 27th, I noticed that I was no longer receiving email at my primary account (an address based on this domain).  I contacted your technical support staff, and a trouble ticket was opened.  When I checked later that afternoon, I noticed that no one had bothered to update the ticket.  Yet I was still not receiving my email.  I contacted support again via chat and was told that someone was looking into it. 

I checked late in the evening and found the ticket still had not been updated.  I noted that my web site was still working, but no email was coming.  I updated the ticket myself with this information in an attempt to be helpful and contacted technical support via chat once again.  And once again I was told that the problem was being looked at and was told…

Our records show that there is open ticket regarding your issue. One of our specialists is working on the issue. I have updated the information in the ticket and given higher priority to resolve your issue at the earliest. One of our specialists will resolve your issue and send you the resolution in the Support Console

I went to bed, still confident that FatCow technical support would resolve the issue.

This morning?  No email.  No update on the trouble ticket.  I contacted chat again.  I was told it would take another 24-48 hours to resolve the problem.  And that’s when I realized that, for all your talk and all your promises, you are still just like every other hosting company out there.  Better than some, worse than some, but really no different.  I told the chat person that I would be switching my main domain to BlueHost in order to get email, and they were very polite and sent me a pre-programmed response from their console…

I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.  One of our specialists will contact you as soon as possible.

…which we both know now is a lie.  No one has contacted me directly.  There was an update to the trouble ticket to say that you had noticed that the domain had been updated.  And it had been — because I switched it to BlueHost.  And here’s the interesting point…

It took me less time and less aggravation to switch to a new provider and start receiving email than it did for you to fix my problem. 

For lack of communication, you ruined the trust bond that I had with FatCow.com and have now caused me to no longer consider FatCow.com an option for anyone who asks about hosting.  I never write these sorts of open letters to anyone because I always assume a resolution can be found to any problem.  But apparently my $88/year plus other fees per month for additional services isn’t that important.

Luckily there are many other hosting services out there who are happy to have me as a customer.  Will BlueHost ever let me down?  Undoubtedly.  Will they treat me as you have?  I don’t know.  But if they do, the next open letter I write will be to BlueHost, comparing them to you.

I remember seeing the following quote during my early training as a sales rep with IBM:

The Bible tells us that Samson slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass.  Shamefully, ten times that many customers are slewn every day by the same instrument.

I try to find the bright side of every situation.  For me, it’s that my new provider is giving me unlimited storage and transfer bandwidth in my plan for not much more than I was paying you.  For you, perhaps it’s the warning bell this letter sounds, that treating your customers poorly in these trying economic times has very real consequences.

Thanks for the service from January to December of 2008.  I wish you the best.  But I can’t recommend you any longer.  To anyone.  And that’s sad.