One of the giants in the blogging world, Jeremy Schoemaker, in a recent post announced his dissatisfaction with “The Planet” Webhosting services. The Planet is the number one provider of dedicated server hosting in the world, providing servers to some of the big hosting companies like Hostgator.
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“We have had many servers with The Planet over the years. I think at one time we had over 15 boxes there and when we were starting AuctionAds we were going to use them which would have been several more servers/load balencers all that. That was a total fiasco and they dropped the ball but to us it turned out awesome because we purchased all our own servers and got hosting with iphouse which turned out to be about 1/10th the cost per month.
Now of course we have to do our own support/reboots but honestly we did all that at the planet anyway. The monkey ass admins they have working there are the biggest pricks….. and they must get paid by how fast they can close tickets.
So ive held on to 1 machine there thats costed me $99 a month. Ive had that box for almost 5 years. I IRC from it and also use it as a proxy for other things which is nice when I go on the road.
Today I canceled this box. After about 2 weeks of playing ticket tag with there support system its just not worth it.
Ive been meaning to do it for a long time but just it was more of a hassle to cancel it then keep it running.”
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It is clear that The Planet is going to have some damage control to do after this public criticism, despite a their good reputation and strong rating at the Better Business Bureau. This issue highlights the importance of good service/support for all hosting companies, no matter how large the company - none of them can afford to alienate their customers as in the example above. In our research, customer satisfaction is based as much on good service/support, as it is on the reliability and functionality of the service itself. So when shopping around for a host, don’t underestimate the need for good support and do some research and check out some customer reviews.
For those of you who are now left wondering about your Hostgator service, it is worth mentioning that although Hostgator does use their servers - Hostgator has their own support staff for their customers. Hostgator has also scored quite high in terms of customer satisfaction and is our #4 pick in our Top 10 Budget Hosts list.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s definitely unfortunate that Jeremy had such a negative experience as he was working with our support group on his legacy server, especially since so many of us at The Planet read ShoeMoney and would have loved to jump in and help, had we known about the issues he was seeing. Often, if a ticket falls through the cracks, a customer can feel hopeless, so we do our best to follow up and escalate concerns that aren’t addressed appropriately as soon as possible. We’ve got a twitter account (@theplanetdotcom) available for that specific purpose, and our open company forums are also a great resource to get a few extra eyes on a given concern.
If neither of those avenues produce results (or if you want to contact me directly first), my email address is khazard AT theplanet.com, and I’ll be happy to help.
Hi Kevin,
Thank you for your response. I applaud your effort to address this issue on behalf of The Planet. I would be doing the exact same thing in your position. I have often said that the measure of a company does not hinge on whether or not issues arise (they always do), the real test is what a company DOES when issues are brought to their attention.
In this case, the customer in question is a titan in the blogging community with a great deal of influence so it makes sense that every effort will be made to ensure that the issue addressed. What should one of the “regular Joes” expect in terms of resolution if one of their tickets fall through the cracks? What steps would you suggest for someone in a similar situation?
After looking at your Better Business Bureau rating and other customer reviews, it seems that this is a rare occurrence. Is this something, in your opinion, that is a rising challenge due to the growing size of your organization?
I wouldn’t call it a rising challenge … rather an unfortunate side-effect of volume. If you head into our forums or you look through our twitter updates, you can see several cases where we go through the same escalation process to address any negative experience, whether the customer has a $100 server with us or spends $10k/mo. Those venues (and my email address) don’t have any minimum balance requirements nor restrictions … they are all designed to help us resolve any issues that aren’t handled correctly immediately. Sometimes, it’s as simple as a ticket being flagged for the wrong ticket queue and not getting an update quickly and sometimes it involves several different departments in our organization working together to communicate a clear resolution to a complex problem.
We run detailed metrics on our tickets and customer support satisfaction, and with that information we’ve been able to maintain quick ticket response times and a high customer satisfaction percentage (as collected by ticket follow-up surveys) … unfortunately, Jeremy’s experience was one of the small minority of tickets that didn’t get addressed immediately or effectively enough to satisfy him, and we can’t be anything but sorry about that.
-Kevin