Archive for the 'customerservice' Tag

A Lesson in Brevity

I recently sent Comcast an inquiry which said “I just signed up for service. What is my account number?” Their response, which follows, is so incredibly verbose that I feel compelled to share it with the world.

I must say, though, that my experience with Comcast in Atlanta has been nothing short of stellar. They installed service at my new apartment within a day, gave me a great deal, and I’m getting far more bandwidth than I was promised. No complaints so far, though I might have to send them a bill for the time it took me to read the email below.

August 29, 2010 | no comments | tags: ,

Blame it on Dreamhost.

Wondering what happened to this website and many others? Here’s an excerpt from an email that Dreamhost just sent me:

Unfortunately, because of the file server problems, in order to get your
sites back up, you will now need to REUPLOAD all your content. We are
still trying to recover the data from peeler, but at this point it looks
like that process may take a few days, if it is even possible at all.

So, while I’m somewhat at fault for not doing my own offsite backups, Dreamhost has tremendously failed by:

  1. not maintaining their servers appropriately
  2. not having redundant backups
  3. not communicating with their customers in a timely manner (it took over 30 hours of downtime before I was sent an email)
  4. expecting customers to keep local backups of all of their content
  5. spending their energy promoting unlimited bandwidth and disk space to new customers instead of fixing the above issues

I can only hope that they will redeem themselves with some extraordinary customer support over the next few days. I can still say that Dreamhost has provided excellent service for the most part, but it’s the times like these that can make us forget about all of that in an instant.

For more information about this particular issue, see this post at the Dreamhost Status Blog.

December 15, 2008 | 1 comment | tags: , , ,