For the last 24 hours I haven't done much other than try to fix the damage Purehost has done to my email service and website.
My (and about 12 other people's) email stopped working yesterday afternoon. Thinking it was one of Purehost's email servers I didn't worry about it at first. Then, I tried checking mail from the web and was denied, and logging into the admin account it said I didn't have an account. Whaaaa?
I sat en-queue for about 30 minutes, waiting for a "live chat" tech support person. They explained to me (with about five minutes between every exchange, he must have been talking with 10 other people) that my account had been deleted that afternoon due to non-payment. Non payment? How can I pay for something I never received an invoice for??
After several more exchanges (i.e. 15 minutes) the rep gave me the contact email address. It was a bogus combination of two existing email addresses and some extra characters - nothing I'd ever created or supplied. So, the billing requests went to that account. No response was received. In fact, ever message should have hard bounced. Yet Purehost never tried to look beyond that address. Can't they look at addresses that are being used for the account or something? Have they ever heard of a phone number? Instead, they wiped the account, about 20 email addresses, the mail that may have been queued for deuby.com in its email server, and my entire website.
Is that how you treat a customer that has been with you for four years??? The only way they could put me back together again was to sign up fresh, and pay for them to restore my data from backups. At that point I decided that walking over hot coals was a little more desirable than signing up with them again.
The day has been spending finding a new provider (WEBster Computer Services, so far so good), signing up, spending 45 minutes on hold with Purehost to get a live technician to repoint the nameservers for deuby.com to webcs.com's DNS servers, recreating all the email addresses, mailboxes and passwords, aliases, and forwarders, and then coaching email users through the reconfiguration necessary to make the new email config work.
The website was out of date, but it's a total writeoff. I'd rather lose it and rebuild it than pay Purehost another dime.
An entire day wasted of the one week I took off between 10 years of work - due to sloppy account procedures and no flexibility in customer service. I hope that this company sinks to where it belongs.
1 comment:
Well, that explains why the e-mails I tried to send yesterday bounced... =)
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