Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Who is Screwing me and WHERE IS MY WEBSITE!?

Web site still missing.

Got a message back from Domain Direct / ItsYourDomain / Netidentity Customer Service.
Hello,
Unfortunately, I do not have the ability to assist you with your issue because we no longer provide hosting services for domains. You will need to contact Domain Direct Hosting at 1-888-390-1240, support@domaindirecthosting.com or access your account through domaindirecthosting.com.

Scott
Domain Direct / ItsYourDomain / Netidentity Customer Service
This reminded me that I did get some email about hosting changes. I dig back through my email inbox and found a letter from Ross Rader, General Manager of Tucows Retail services on May 7th saying Hostopia is taking over all their web hosting, that our accounts were being transfered, and Hostopia would contact us. I haven't heard anything since.

What really gets me is that Scott there in Customer Service should damn well know about the hosting changes, but his email comes off with a "not our problem dude" tone to it. Guess I should just be happy he actually answered the question I asked and didn't just copy/paste a completely unrelated answer into his reply like what happens with all the other customer support emails I've gotten in the last few years.

Reading several announcements and press releases I can't help but notice the lack of any helpful information. Nothing about if my account is now split? What about the money I paid NetIdentity, again in May, for a years email, website, and extra storage space? I guess that was supposed to be in the transition package I never received from Hostopia. And I will admit that it is entirely possible I received the transition package email from Hostopia and deleted it thinking it was spam. I get a lot of spam and useless game industry recruiter mail at that address that I just delete in bulk.

Now, you'll notice there is some name confusion. It appears from Scott's email from no-reply@domaindirect.com that Domain Direct does not equal Domain Direct Hosting? But Domain Direct Hosting does equal Hostopia? Except that www.domaindirecthosting.com has a logo that just says Domain Direct. But nothing else I have read apart from Ross's email makes any mention of Hostopia at all.

I did manage to login to www.domaindirecthosting.com which has logins for the different services dumped by Tucows, but it shows 0 of 50 megs up and no sign of my website. There was a FAQ link that took me to http://domaindirecthosting.com/support/ which comes up as 404 File Not Found Page. I also notice some of the URLs inside the site are still associated with Netidentity. What is really going on?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Joseph -

I'm sorry about the hassle we've caused you.

We sold our hosting business to Hostopia earlier this year, and licensed them the use of our trademarks to make it easier on our clients. Unfortunately, this seems to have made things less clear for our former customers than it did to clear things up.

Generally speaking, it will always be much easier to work with Hostopia to resolve hosting-related issues, but I will definitely see what I can do in this case to help you out.

If there's anything else you need help with, feel free to drop me a note to ross@tucows.com and I'll make sure it gets into the right hands.

Joseph B. Hewitt IV said...

So now I'm going back and reading my post, just hoping I didn't come off sounding like a jerk. You know, one of those people who repeat the phrase "company name sucks" over and over so it will get picked up by web crawlers and appear high in search results.

I did appreciate your postings and updates during the Net Identity mail system change over last year. It was particularly nerve wracking for me, because I was changing jobs and used that email address to send off resumes.

I'll see what happens with the customer service email I sent last night goes, and if I still have problems getting my web site back, I'll drop you a line.

Thanks for your help.

Anonymous said...

They are terrible and Ross is counting his money while typing this

Unknown said...

Our account was purchased sold by Aplus.net to Hostopia without our knowledge. Since then, we have faced so many problems and issues trying to keep our website up and running. Hostopia's customer service center is staffed with generic call screeners who will issue you a work number, then never get back to you. Occasionally your issues get resolved, but they don't bother to check back with you to see. No idea how many hours we have wasted on the phone trying to fix the problems Hostopia and Aplus.net created. Now we are trying to get an explanation on a bill they sent us, but no one there seems to know what it is for.

I would recommend you avoid them both.